IF you’re a woman who would like to date younger men, you can find lots of articles about these relationships by doing a Google search.
But as a woman looking for a man, you might be a little confused by the advertisements that accompany these articles. One promises to help you find sexy Latin women, and another, hot Latvian ladies. But there are no links to the growing number of “cougar” dating sites, matching older women with younger men, on content sites that show up in a Google search. Google has recently deemed those dating sites “nonfamily safe,” and therefore its ads for such sites containing the word “cougar” will not be allowed on so-called content pages.
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Last week, CougarLife.com, which was paying Google $100,000 a month to manage its advertising and place it on content pages, was notified by the company that its ads, which had been appearing since October, would no longer be accepted.
Google confirmed that “cougar” would now automatically place a site into the adult category, but would not say which other words would do that.
“We can’t comment on specific advertisers, but our policy is that adult dating ads are classified as nonfamily-safe, meaning that they will not show on the Google Content Network,” the company said in an e-mail message.
When notified by Google of the decision, CougarLife proposed substituting a different ad for the ones that were running, picturing older women and younger men together. Cougarlife said it would use an image of the company’s president, Claudia Opdenkelder, 39, without a man in the picture (she lives with her 25-year-old boyfriend).
But the advertising department was told in an e-mail message from its Google representative that “the policy is focused particularly around the concept of ‘cougar dating’ as a whole,” and asked if the company would be open to changing “the ‘cougar’ theme/language specifically (including the domain if necessary).” CougarLife forwarded the e-mail messages to The New York Times. Google would not comment on the messages but did confirm that they were consistent with the new policy on cougar sites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/fashion/16cougar.html
