Doctor Who killed my Adsense

A lot of you, dear readers, probably don’t know that one of my side projects is a little web site called pdfy.me

As the name imply (at least that’s my hope), it is meant to convert a web page to a pdf file for archival / latter or offline reading. It works through a bookmarklet, a Chrome extension or a simple api. This project comes from a client of mine who needed to be able to convert the pages of its wordpress site to pdf. Rather than running the code from his shared hosting I decided to turn it in a webservice and host it myself on a spare server I had.

Most of the users come from the Chrome extension so I decided to add an adsense baner for them in order to recoup their bandwith costs. To help adsense target their ads, I created a special page that would open when a pdf conversion was done and would use the title of the converted page to give adsense a little context.

The whole thing was more to experiment with adsense targetting than for money … I only made a few bucks out of the whole experiment.

But really, that’s not my problem with adsense. At all.

My problem is that a few weeks latter my account was suspended. And why would you ask ? Well because one of the user of my site converted to pdf a bittorent tracker page that (probably) linked to an episode of the “Doctor Who” show. Not that Google may know which url was converted, that information is never disclosed to anybody of course.

But the simple fact to have on a page of your site the words “Doctor Who” close to “DVDRip” is enough for Google to ban you.

Seriously, fellow bloggers, watch out for what you write on your site. The big Mountain View Eye That Never Sleeps is watching you.

Suffice to say that I’m personally done with Adsense for my more serious projects. As a publisher and as a client.

Well played Google.