On: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023...

[bogwog]

I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.

I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?

1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)

[dwallin → bogwog]

Ironically, by linking to it you’ve probably vastly boosted it’s rank on Google.

[avx56 → dwallin]

HN uses rel="nofollow" for links in comments, for this exact reason.

[utensil4778 → dwallin]

Huh. I wonder how much effort it would take to have a noticeable effect on the AdSense algorithm by sharing select ad links like this?