Just how important is Tumblr? Take a look at this picture. Click it to see the page it takes you to. See anything disturbing?
See how the Google Adsense advertisements are missing from one of the two pages we’re showing, and also on the page you get to when you click the picture? Can you guess why?
Google seems to be in the censorship business.
I have no rant on this topic. While I believe that Microsoft crosses a line with their terms of service regarding certain content, I also see the wisdom of protecting your servers and other assets, especially when the nature of the Internet is that unless you take steps to limit your markets—steps which can be easily circumnavigated, by the way—it’s very easy to break laws without intending to.
The problem here has to do with artificial intelligence. A.I. still isn’t reliable enough, and Google’s making “what people do the new SEO” is clearly not well enough designed as a content construct. The knowledge graph, so far, is broken. And, hey, Facebook? Nice try, but … not yet. You too, Twitter.
What this means is that it’s time to get past fighting the Google fight. Search Engine Optimization can still be done, and still matters; it will remain part of the Influency equation for a long time, thanks. But the world has shifted; every minute you put off thinking about content marketing reduces the chances that you’ll still have a business to market a couple of years from now.
Yahoo!’s acquisition of Tumblr underscores this in ways that are becoming more and more clear as time passes. Ignore what you think of porn, and believe, if you can—until they demonstrate otherwise—that Yahoo! really does intend to let Tumblr keep working as it does today. The issue at hand is how everything effects everything.
Bringing us back to the question I asked above. Why are the Google Adsense ads we run on individual pages at Answer Guy Central missing from the two pages I mentioned? Not rocket science, friends; even though there’s no porn in the stories on those pages, because Google’s guessed there’s pornography on those pages, Adsense kicks them out.
Oddly, this page, which dares you to find the embedded pornography behind it, suffers no such fate:
Actually, it probably isn’t all that odd; H1 Tags and Titles Matter, and it looks like some parts of Google still see them as more important than others (note that there are no Adsense Ads on this page, either). No Problem, then, right? Just make your on-line presence about content. People will find it, right?
Maybe.
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In most regards I’d prefer to see you keep control of your content, but if you haven’t done so already, please, take a look at this Tumblr thing.
Hmm. Looks like there was a rant there, after all. Just not the one you thought you saw coming.
Jeff Yablon: Thank you very much for sharing your views on this controversial topic. I hope that Yahoo! will keep the freedom of speech-torch high and let Tumblr be true to its origin. It is a bit “funny” that you don’t see any Google ads around your post! 😉 Have you you looked into alternatives like Blogads and Influads?
Hi, Martin. I’m guessing you don’t mean ‘funny’ as in “ha ha”.
I don’t believe that Google blocked the ads because of competition, if that’s what you were shooting at. As I said in the piece, there are several articles here on which our Adsense ads don’t run, all of which have the work ‘Porn’ in their titles. I believe this is a content filtering issue, but that Adsense is not nearly as sophisticated in its editorial view as the broader Google index.vIn other words, I believe that the simple filter being applied is that Adsense believes that a page with a particular word in its title much be about the subject that word speaks to. And also as I explained, the filter is simply too elementary.
As for other ad networks: sure, we’re given that some thought, not because of this but in general. And we continue to work toward implementing that. But the loss of revenue from something as small as this? Not enough to make a change just because of it, you know?