One thing that’s become apparent from the recent attack on Darren is that contextual ads, and others close to content, can be interpreted as being endorsed by the web site owner.

One of Hannah’s criticisms of ProBlogger is that it contains ads with titles like “Easiest Money Ever”. In fact, that is true — that particular ad is for TextLinkAds.com, a link-selling service.

When Hannah visited this blog, she noted that there were “adult links” in the header. Since I don’t explicitly accept or link to “adult” themed web sites, I can only assume that this is something that slipped through the net with Google AdSense, should the accusation in fact be true.

The fact is, choosing to carry nearly any type of advertising on a web site is a risky business. If you use contextual links, there’s a chance it’ll throw up something undesirable to you or your readers. If you accept paid advertising for banner or other graphical ads, but do so through a third-party agency, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get exactly the sort of content you or your readers find acceptable. Even large media organisations have been caught out on this one, when they’ve pushed out the placement of adverts to external agencies.

Even if you do deals with individuals on a case-by-case basis, you have no guarantee that their products, services, or sites are always going to sit comfortably with you or your audience.

The fact is, if you generate revenue through most kinds of advertising, you will at times have products, services, images, headlines, deals and promises sitting right next to your content that you might not agree with. Worse still, it’s very hard to catch what contextual ads will be shown, because they do vary based on advertising stock, day, geographical location of the visitor, and so on.

Unfortunately, some visitors to your web site will believe that, because something is advertised on your site, you in some way agree with it, or the messages that advertising portrays have exactly the same ethics as you.

I wonder if they do the same when they look at adverts in newspapers, magazines and on TV, or listen to radio commercials?

Of course, you can take steps to safeguard your content from completely opposing advertising, though there’s still no guarantee, by choosing to approve ads (where that option is available), blocking competitors and other sites you don’t want to link to, and keeping an eye on paid links to ensure they still lead to the site that they did when you first accepted them.

The only way to guarantee complete control over what appears on, and gets linked from, your site, is not to accept any types of advertising. Some would argue that this is what blogging was originally about, and that things are far too commercial now, but that’s a different debate.

Ultimately, perhaps formally through a disclaimer, or (hopefully) through how your character shines through the content you write, visitors will be able to differentiate between your own values and viewpoints, and the occasional ad which doesn’t quite match.