A quick note to point out something odd. The following screen shot is of this site yesterday evening. You will note the rather strange Google provided advert on the right hand side. It is not a public service adverts, nor does it seem to be an advert for an actual product or a service (much less one targeted at the content of the site). It would seem to be a botched attempt at creating an advert, or possibly a template.

Strange Google Adverts

I wonder if anyone else has seen anything similar (I was consider blocking the domain www.yoururlgoeshere.com in the Adsense configuration – which appears to be a link spam page in any case) and whether anyone had any idea what was going on. A message to Google has, so far at least, not generated a reply.

Well I guess it highlights one of the issues that people who maintain sites, whether it be a personal blog or a larger site, if you include adverts you are exposing your user base, the community that you have managed to build, to content that is not really directly under your control. Worse you are doing it for profit (or in my case an attempt to offset hosting costs, but the end result is the same). I suppose the only real upside is that most of the readers I would expect to see on the site will have adblock enabled…

Well thanks for reading.