O.K., you decided to become an affiliate of Commission Junction, Link Share, or any of the other affiliate marketing companies. You carefully choose which ads to place on your site to target your audience. Everything’s going along fine, until you start micromanaging your site, and see that Google has an ad for the same company in their block of ads. What do you do?

I just ran into this situation on my observationmountain.com site. It’s a blog that covers an array of subjects, so my affiliate ads are targeted to whom I believe my audience is. I also do product reviews. I hand pick my ads, so I didn’t appreciate seeing that I was also competing with Google ads.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so went to the Goolge Adsense site and researched. They’re aware of this problem, and have installed a program named, “Competitive Ad Filter”.

I followed their instructions and listed the URL’s that I hoped to have “blocked”. Did it work for me? No!

I still have competing ads, but decided to just leave them as is. Hopefully my readers will believe what I have to say in my product reviews, and follow the links I have provided. If I feel strongly about a product or an advertiser, I decided not to stop writing about what I believe, to avoid Google’s competitive ads.