Forum Moderators: martinibuster
YIKES! Talk about discouraging.
I looked at 5 pages.
Overall 2 out of every 3 of the ads showing as available were trash, and got blocked.
Most of those appeared to be PPC directories. A couple were loosely related to my topic, but not close enough. And a couple of the seemingly reasonably targeted ads went to landing pages that never opened.
That's downright scary, and can't be good for threputation of my site. Now I'm wondering what's showing on the other nearly 1,500 pages.... sigh.
Most of those appeared to be PPC directories. A couple were loosely related to my topic, but not close enough. And a couple of the seemingly reasonably targeted ads went to landing pages that never opened.
You too! I've spent most of the day also blocking just these types of ads. Adsense seems to be having an off-week as far as well-targetted ads goes :)
I have also pages where the theme employment is mentioned. This leads to MLM ads appearing.
I have now around 100 MLMs in the filter.
The rest are CPC ad pages and strange companies
selling everything from the Vatican to used dog cake.
I'm a huge advocate of blocking, as getting rid of the crap sites has upped my income a great deat. BUT you have to do it intelligently!
First thing to know is that the adsense preview tool DOES NOT show the ads that are being placed on your site. Be wary of this. Google actually say this in their help file:-
The ads displayed in the AdSense preview tool are sample ads, based on standard AdSense targeting and filtering. As all AdSense publishers have the option of filtering ads to fine-tune the selection of advertisements on their page, you may find that the ads in the preview tool do not exactly correspond to the ads on the page.
[google.com...]
So the ads that you see in the tool are NOT NECESSARILY ones that have ever, or will ever be seen on your site.
DO NOT make a block list based on the tool. I've seen ads appear in the tool that have been blocked for months!
Use the tool to locate the URL of an ad you want to check and possibly block, but don't use it to see what ads show. The only way to know what ads show is to look at your site, and base your block list on ads actually shown.
My rules for blocking are:-
Ebay / amazon affilliates
All MFA sites such as scrapers, directories or sites with a large proportion of ads on them, and low content.
I don't block ads from competitors or moderately mistargetted ads. Targetting varies from time of day, and is at it's best during peak hours. I will block persistant ads that are completely off target.
So if you have made a block list based on the tool, I'd advise you to scrap it and start again by making a list of ads you've actually seen. It will be a lot smaller, a lot easier to manage and you aren't wasting the list by blocking ads you'd never see anyway.
All the ones I blocked were of the type described by the OP. I don't mind losing a visitor to a site that's going to possibly be useful to them, but not to a site that doesn't open, or has no content!
The only way to know what ads show is to look at your site
Which is also a very blunt tool, since it shows only the ads targetted to whatever country you are in. Not much use for a lot of sites.
Whether those are the actual ads or not when I block them my numbers go up.
The problem now is that I'm up to 175 URLs which doesn't leave much room for new ones.
With the problem growing exponentially and AS not seeming to care they need to give us more than 200.
Aside from that, we really do need to be able to filter by channel or by site - for everyone's benefit, for better targeting.
Equally, there is a part of the Google Adsense help area which talks about "section targeting" which allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site's content.
Does that make any sense?
It's worth remembering that off-theme ads can be very good earners.
I don't think the general intent here is off-theme ads. It's all the other garbage - mostly MFAs and MFO/Ys.
if google is serving up the irrelevant, garbage ads that it sometimes does, get rid of 'em asap... junk ads won't be clicked on anyway.
