For a while I’ve been contemplating conservatively placing Google AdSense ads here on chrisshort.net.

The only problem is that there are more than 200 web sites I wouldn’t want to display here on chrisshort.net and there has to be a better way of filtering out what kind of ads are displayed on what kind of entries on a particular site.

So I fired off an e-mail to the Google AdSense program:

I started up a new blog (spun off of my current AdSense site) and it has been around for a while and now appears to be suitable to the AdSense program.There is one catch though. I don’t want ads (or I want PSAs) on certain categories. There is an easy way to accomplish the task of filtering ads on the categories by blocking off category pages with a robots.txt entry or two.

Here is where it gets somewhat tricky and tricking Google is something I’d rather not do (unless I have Google’s assistance). On my blogs home page there are entries from all categories. The entries include everything from specs on laptops, news of the Google IPO and news about my clients’ web sites. Anything involving my clients’ web sites I would not like it to be even considered as content for AdSense to spider and there is no simple way to do this.

So my question is, is there a way to filter out certain MovableType categories and their associated entries? URL filters aren’t quite good enough and filtering out content on an entry by entry basis creates a HUGE robots.txt file that has to be updated almost every time there is a new entry.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Chris Short

We’ll see what Google can come up with but I’m not expecting much if anything at all.

An article over at WebmasterWorld caught my interest and I’d like to point it out for those that are using URL filters for their AdSense accounts. Use your AdSense filter list with caution - How you could actually be blocking the best paying ads from appearing breaks down some (obvious to me) scenarios that could occur if you’re a little over zealous when it comes to filtering URLs. It’s a good read.

There will be more to come on this issue in the near future.