Google Ads contribute some revenue to LDV; however, we only display them on public or free pages, never in our paid content areas. So we do want to keep using the Google AdSense service, but wish we could enter a list of keyword phrases we do NOT want to serve ads on our pages. Our only recourse now is to monitor the ads displayed and exclude those we find objectionable.
The real problem with Google AdSense is objectionable vendors (subjective, I know) that use inappropriate (in our opinion) keyword combinations to get their ads to appear on our LDS oriented web site. E.g., ‘lds garments’; this keyword combination is just wrong due to the sacred nature of the last word to us LDS folks, yet some vendors out there use it as their advertising heading. Someone just used the Shopzilla service to launch a linked search, which returns really just another page of Google ads, some populated by paid Google AdWords. In the ‘lds garments’ example, the shopzilla search page shows ads from Deseret Book online. I do not think that Deseret Book would knowingly sponsor an ad using that search keyword combination. But they sure do indirectly.
In the Shopzilla situation, we have to block all of shopzilla search pages by blocking their whole domain instead of being able to block just the shopzilla client targeting those phrases we would never use. Over the years, we have collected and entered many domains that use these objectionable keyword phrases to target lds sites like ours. There is a limit to the number of domains we can list. When we hit that limit, we will have to monitor the list and remove domains that no longer exist; work we really should not have to do.
Google, make this valuable marketing tool more what we want; let us filter through our own keyword list, not just a list of domains.
