When AdWords Gets Sex Wrong

Mar 15, 2007 at 12:33pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Via Marketing Shift, Don’t Be Evil (Or A Dyke, Or Trans) at SFGate.com from Violet Blue shows how AdSense ads can totally go against the message of the sex content you may have published and covers concerns that Google may be banning some sexual orientation terms as offensive, even though those using them may think they’re fine.

Violet explains how Google ads on some of her pages might say “porn addiction — get help” when the message of those pages is the opposite, that porn is good.

Her story also explains that Google won’t allow some terms to be used, considering them offensive, even through many in the gay, lesbian and transgender community may disagree. Meanwhile, it may disallow use of some terms the community does use:

Bay Area transgender, sex-positive queer-porn site Red Handed Porn (redhandedporn.com) signed up as a client of the AdWords service, only to discover that finding AdWords-approved words to describe their brand (and potential clients’ brand identity) meant choosing terminology deeply offensive to most transgender individuals. At the same time, they found that terms chosen as respectful self-labels by the trans culture were rejected by AdWords as — shockingly — “teen porn concepts.” What’s more, Red Handed found that even the term “dyke” is considered a four-letter word by the service, while terms that deeply offend trans women are accepted.

The story concludes with frustration over getting Google to discuss changes to some of the issues.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle, can be found on Facebook, Google Buzz and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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