Nexcerpt

<Boris_Karloff>
   It’s ALIVE!!
</Boris_Karloff>

Twenty hours after my Adsense Nonsense post, the following surprisingly humble bit of contrition arrived (I’ll give it the same conversational treatment I gave original notice):

Hello Mr Stock,

Please accept out apologies for an erroneous notification that was sent
out to you on January 28th in regards to your site http://googlewhack.com.

I love getting “out” apologies. That is way out, man!

Seriously, nice to see a typo in there. It’s a relief to realize that some human is involved in this process.

When the domain http://googlewhack.com came up for the review, the
disclaimer (stating "Neither this site nor its contents are affiliated
with the popular search engine Google - but 'Googlewhacking' sure is fun
to say!") that can be found at the bottom of your pages was unfortunately
overlooked during the review process.

OK, great — that’s why I added it!

I must admit, though, the presence of a written disclaimer alone does not sound quite ideal from a legal standpoint, going forward. I honestly don’t know how you would go about classifying a “legitimate” (or acknowledging a longstanding humorous) use of a term you’ve sought to trademark. Perhaps some nuance similar to copyright “Fair Use” for parody? IANAL.

Please rest assured that the ad-serving will not be disabled on your site.

Excellent. Now I can get to back to effortlessly raking in seven-tenths of a cent per day!

Once again please accept our sincere apologies for the erroneous
notification.

I do. I really do. I’ll post your apology everywhere I posted the original notice.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Hmm… I still wonder who’s behind the curtain over there…

Thanks,
Gary Stock, The Googlewhack Guy

# # #

I’m very curious to know the path this took… to understand how a blog post reached Google’s attention in less than 24 hours. I did tweet some folks at Google who could have moved it along quickly… though there was quite a bit of traffic to the blog, too.

Aha! I had tweeted Matt Cutts the blog link on Friday, saying: “Matt, FYI, since I both venerate ~and~ invoke your name slightly in vain.” Reply from @mattcutts late Friday: “@nexcerpt let me ask some people here about this. It’s Friday night, so it might take a bit before I can reach the right person.” Thanks, Matt.

As another point of reference, my Adsense Nonsense original post had eight Facebook “Share,” eight Facebook “Like,” six Tweets, and a Google Buzz at the time the apology arrived.

Also, through some equitable perversity of the universe, yesterday this blog had the highest clickthrough rate and highest Page eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand impressions) of any of the sites I manage!

Well… let’s not get too excited: in practical terms, that means I made about one dollar per hour for blogging this… but it was worth it.