Originally Posted by NetRodent

Initially we didn't really care. The only filtering we did was to remove obviously child-related words from the list. When we started none of the ppc's checked for relevancy, which was how we ended up with such gems as "Gaza Strip" (strip club related) and "Legal Briefs" (underwear related). The philosophy of the time was that irrelevant listings wouldn't be cost effective and would fall out on their own accord. Most of the PPCs would take and list anything we gave them. Overture would do a cursory review but I think the size of our keyword lists intimdated the editors. I don't know for a fact but I'm pretty sure Overture's authorized adult keyword list was in response to some of our shenanegans.

Eventually the ppcs figured out that relevancy couldn't be achieved by bid alone, and started setting various guidelines. Overture in particularly got quite harsh with us and if they found more than a few inappropriate words would just reject the whole submission. It was tedious and time consuming but cleaning the keyword lists really wasn't that bad. We had various people in our company do it, sometimes even having all office categorization parties. Usually it fell to the new person to do this since nobody else wanted to do it, and we figured it was a good way to increase their vocabulary. Getting to explain the word 'bukkake' was always a treat.

These days we're a bit more cooperative with the search engines so the relevancy checking is sort of shared between our campaign managers and the search engine's people. We also don't harvest keywords in the same way we once did so there isn't too much garbage in our lists.