How to tailor the ads more effectively

[Flibble]

I run a fairly large gaming site, the site traffic is about 20% on portals and 80% in forums.

I've run adsense for over a year now and it works pretty well. However, I get ads for "SQL database" stuff ALL THE TIME...

I want ads for the latest games, computer hardware (e.g. things which appeal to my average user who is 16-30 and male) who are not hardcore software people for their company and certainly don't need the latest and greatest SQL tools...

The strange thing is that I don't have any links/text which have 'SQL' in it... Sure I run a mysql database to power the forums, but this seems a tenuous link!

Any ideas?

How do you guys tend to tailor the contextual part of adsense? Is it as simple as the number of times a word is present on a page, or do links count more etc etc?

[Hubbard]

Repeat a few important keywords on the page.

Give the file a name like these-are-nice-keywords.html

Google likes keywords in file names. Use dashes/hyphens, not underscores.

[Flibble]

I don't think this will help.

I'm getting SQL ads everywhere, there is no 'sql' in text/links/anywhere...

This is my major issue.

[Hubbard]

I had it as well. Read my second post in this thread

[webmasterworld.com...]

That's why I'm saying to fix the title, url and keywords.

[davidyin]

You can ban it by url filter

[Flibble]

You can't really. There are literally 1000 more SQL URLs which pop up.

I can't imagine this is the best solution.

I've banned 50 URLs already and they still come...

[Hobbs]

Possibly the AdSense mediapartners bot is receiving an sql error whin it visits some of your pages, which it interprets as your page content, check your site error logs.

[carguy84]

^ Smart

[Hobbs]

not at all carguy84, just been here long enough and saw this problem before.

[youfoundjake]

Here is something that works well with a phpBB forum.
1: Open up viewtopic_body.tpl
(hint: you can find it here: templates > subSilver)

2: Locate this section and add the Google Section Targeting Code:

<tr> <!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<td colspan="2"><span class="postbody">{postrow.MESSAGE}{postrow.SIGNATURE}</span><span class="gensmall">{postrow.EDITED_MESSAGE}</span></td>
</tr><!-- google_ad_section_end -->

The section targeting will wrap around every post. In the forum I implemented this on, the ads snapped into focus much better. It helped alleviate the phenomenom in which ads from other topics were invading unrelated ones.

I found this on another forum here and thought it might apply to you. I did it myself and still checking results but since there aren't alot of postings on my site yet, its hard to tell.