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One thing I've noticed about many, many, many blogs that are running Adsense is the tendency for the ads to be about blogs, not the subject matter of the blog page.
Why is this?
Having just read Brett's initial post about threads I'm a bit antsy that the very first post herein might be "over the line" - but I think at worst it's not more than toeing up to the line. Hopefully this post will help clarify just what type of questions might be asked and answered.
Oh the joy of being the first person to have a post in the forum nuked, if that's to be my fate. :-P
People get round it by cloaking for mediabot.
arran.
Then put terms all over the site like "Blog Roll" this and "Link to my Blog" that and you see where it's heading.
Cloaking doesn't fix the problem either as AdSense and Google both think you're site is about blogs so the only way to fix it is de-blog the blog.
The other approach, which is just a bandage for AdSense as well, is section targeting, which still doesn't fix how a search engine sees your blog:
[google.com...]
You can either section target to exclude the word BLOG or include everthing else, your pick.
FYI, the word BLOG only appears in my template ONE TIME and it's not prominent.
When you call it something like "Bob's Blog" what do you expect?
Much more subtle than I was going to be, Bill.
I was thinking along the lines of "Sheesh! Even a lawyer should be able to figure this one out." ;-)
Cloaking doesn't fix the problem either as AdSense and Google both think you're site is about blogs so the only way to fix it is de-blog the blog.
Cloaking does "de-blog the blog".
arran.
As long as it is incontext and nonspammy, I have *never* heard of a search engine booting someone for cloaking. Stick to agent delivery and they won't touch you for cloaking.
So you don't need to cloak or anything, just use Adsense section targetting to make the contextual engine either ignore the template part or to select just the content part. You would probably want to use the former strategy so that your navigation links would help determine context, but I suppose that depends. In any case, you could get rid of the blog roll part, the "powered by Wordpress" or whatever credits there are and stuff like that.
As Google details on their section targetting page [google.com]
The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --><!-- google_ad_section_end -->
You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
Blog home pages must be particularly tricky for Google et al - you may have a series of 10 posts on varying themes. It's much easier for them to nail an individual post or a category page.
