After putting up Google ads on my blog, I noticed scrolling in Firefox seemed to get choppy when the text ads came into view, but when they weren’t scrolling was smooth as usual. Great, another bug I needed to hunt down. I can just forget about getting any sleep this week. Web design, @#$%! 
Fortunately though, I got lucky and found out a line in my stylesheet ( background-attachment: fixed; ) turned out to be the culprit. I removed it and presto, the scrolling problem cleared up. My background stayed exactly the same afterwards, so apparently I didn’t even need it there. One of these days I’m gonna get a book on CSS so I can finally figure out what in God’s name I’m putting in my stylesheets. Even now I still can’t get a handle on floats and how they work. But I mean really, float this people. Sheesh.
But anyways, happy to see this irritating bug had quickly been squashed, I surfed back to my blog to double check… and saw an ad for cosmetics staring me right in the face.
What the…? Hellooooo, what happened to relevant ads, Google dudes???
Then it got worse. After refreshing the page a few times, an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign showed up.
OMG get it off my blog, get it off get it off getitoff!!!! AHHHH!!!!!!!!
I furiously clicked as fast as I could to my Adsense account and read up on how I could filter out some of these ads. Let me tell ya, Google’s Competitive Ad Filter… sux… rocks. You can’t use keywords or even perform a search for ads you’d like to screen. Instead you basically have to check the link properties of a particular ad (since you can’t click on them), and then check out where it links to so you can add the originating site to the filter list. Unfortunately Google’s redirection script turns each link into a 300 mile long streak of cryptic nonsense, so you have to carefully scroll through it until you find the originating URL. This is what I have to go through to keep my blog from advertising lipstick. Good grief, I may as well start subscribing right now to Glamour and Vogue magazines.
Though now that I think about it, my fingernails could use a really good manicure… ohhhhh crap.
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Would you like a gift subscription? The headaches are part of the reason I try to limit my ads. Something like that would drive me batty.
Despite the headaches it’s actually quite fascinating to learn just how much is involved just to place an ad (things like clikthroughs, CPMs, optimal placement of ads, contextual advertising). That is until your brain explodes of course.
What’s a gift subscription by the way?
I’ve found that if you start to add a bunch of sites to the block list, the resulting ads get worse and worse. Yet I continue adding crappy ad sites to the list for a few more days and then after about a week, I’ll wipe the entire block list clean and make it empty again and VIOLA! I’ve got some decent ads showing up again.
I have no idea why this works or if it does for other people as well, but I’ve been successful with it a few times so far.
Thanks for the tip!
Fortunately I haven’t noticed that being the case here. My ads have been pretty relevant so far, but then again I’ve only filtered out a handful of sites. It’s good to know there’s a tip though for keeping the ads relevant, especially if you wind up blocking filtering too many out after a while.
It does make sense to clear the filter after a certain period of time regardless, since such ads are part of advertising campaigns shouldn’t last very long. A permanent block would actually seem counter productive then.
ROFLOL! I take it he’s not your fav.
Your reaction cracked me up. Thanks for the laugh.
Wouldn’t have been my first choice, no.
Glad I gave you a laugh.