Zugg Software :: View topic - Zuggsoft.com infiltrated by gold sellers?

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

I noticed Google advertisements has been added to the website. The ads don't look very trustworthy and I would personally not trust them. For example the "Cheap LOTRO gold online" on the frontpage raises questions. Questions I do not dare to ponder too much about Mr. Green

. Funny enough that advert was also the only one that seem related to the theme of the website. Makes you wonder how good Google AdSense is.

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:19 pm

I use the Firefox extension Adblock with the Filterset.G filter list - one of the things it gets rid of is google ads, which you may or may not find useful.

This has been a problem for other sites as well - worldofwar.net and allakhazam.com come to mind. You might find that they have tips for getting those ads off the rotation.

But in general, I don't know what's untrustworthy about google ads. They're generally very good.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:46 pm

We probably shouldn't get into a long discussion about Google Ads...that's more something to post over on the Google site. The problem I have seen with the "relevancy" of the Ads is that we have a *lot* of forum threads on this site, and some of them talk about a lot of different stuff. Just look at some of the stuff we have discussed in the Blog.

There have been several times when I've been doing a normal Google search for something and one of the hits that I get is for some obscure topic on our zuggsoft.com site. We have a very high Google ranking and have been a stable site for a long long time, and that seems to get us indexed well.

What that means for the Ads is that it's hard to determine what ad is really "relevant" to our site, because our site has so much data on it. So almost anything could be relevant to something we have talked about. So that's why we get project management ads on the Blob...because I once talked about project management software.

It's not that google ads are "untrustworthy". I am already using their "Safe Ads" mode to filter out adult sites. But Google certainly can't verify how safe each and every site is in their ad system. The best suggestion is to use FireFox instead of Internet Explorer so that you are less likely to get hit with any sort of browser spyware. Or, just don't click on the Ads.

It's just like with any other site. People should be very familiar with Google Ads by now. A large percentage of sites use them. I am trying them on our site to see how much additional income they provide. After a month or so I'll decide whether to leave them up or take them down.

The Firefox AdBlock extension definitely works well to filter them. I use it myself and for a while I thought the ads weren't working since nothing was being displayed. Then I remembered AdBlock and right-clicked on it in my Firefox status bar to tell it to WhiteList the zuggsoft site. Then the ads appears.

There is no way the actual appearance of the ads can mess you up or do anything bad. It's only if you click on an ad that you might be taken to a untrustworthy site. Since some ads produce revenue even if you don't click on them (impression based ads), it's better if you leave AdBlock turned off on zuggsoft.com and just refrain from clicking on Ads that you worried about.

There are definitely some ways to tweak the ad system to get rid of specific sites. But that's probably more work than I can handle at this point. All I can say is to just handle it like you do on any other site. Don't click any ads if you don't trust them. That's just general common-sense. Like I said, I think most people understand that the Google Ads come from Google and that I have very little control over their content.

And if you have ideas on how to make the ads more relevant to the site content, then feel free to contact Google...I'm sure they will have a good job for you! The reality is that such a relevance algorithm is quite complicated in practice and I'm sure Google has poured a lot of research into making it as good as they can.

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:50 pm

Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 11:18 pm

I'm not sure how the AdBlock works. But from the limited testing that I was doing, I don't think I saw my impression count on the Google report site going up when AdBlock was enabled. That would imply that the browser isn't even doing the javascript fetch, and so Google doesn't see any impressions at all. But I'll have to test this more to be sure now that the Ads are really working.

Apprentice Joined: 29 Jun 2001 Posts: 198 Location: USA

AdBlock filters the web page before the browser renders it. So, as Zugg said, it doesn't fetch the javascript needed to display the Google ads. So it doesn't count as a pageview.

There are other ways to block the ads that will count as a pageview, but those have to be done after the page has been rendered, or at least finished loading. You can get scripts for the GreaseMonkey FF extention to do this at http://userscripts.org/

Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:50 pm

After testing the Google AdSense ads for a few weeks, I've come to the conclusion that they are not worth it on this site. It was only bringing in about $10 a week, and I wasn't happy at all with the kinds of ads that were being shown (Truck Mud tires??). Also, I didn't like all of the gold sellers over on the Download page that were keyed off the LOTRO keywords. Even though people are mostly used to seeing Google ads these days, I just felt that they made this site less professional. And they certainly didn't bring in enough money to justify them.

I'm going to keep the Google Search box in the upper-right of the page for now. It's mostly working pretty well, at least for me.

So, everyone can cheer that this site is now ad-free again :)

GURU Joined: 24 Sep 2000 Posts: 1237 Location: USA

You might consider Text-Link-Ads.com as an alternative -- In my experience they pay better (sooner!) than Google Ads, and you have editorial control over the ads that appear on your site.

Apprentice Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 124

Speaking of Gold sellers, there's a guy posting in the forums about it now.
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Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 5:05 pm

BANG! And the dirt is gone!

I'm really shocked that these guys got through Zugg's CAPTCHA. I guess they paid someone to fill in the response.

Enchanter Joined: 09 Sep 2007 Posts: 605

Yes, it was not a robot. He wrote his posts for about 15 minutes.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269