Determining Which Advertisers Match Content

[Blue Gravity]

I'm kind of curious about how Google's Adsense knows what type of content should go with which advertisers. I'm wondering, because I recently launched a content site, that doesn't sell anything on it whatsoever, so I put Adsense onto it, and they have the weirdest most unrelated advertisers listed on there. If you went to my site, within the first half second you can clearly determine what the site is about, you don't even need pictures, it's pretty much all in the domain. So if Adsense is so smart, why can't it determine that my site has nothing to do with the advertisers it's posting?

Anyone know what part of the page particularly Adsense gets triggered on to determine which advertisers to list?

I'm really curious about this..

[europeforvisitors]

Google's AdSense algorithm is proprietary, so nobody here can tell you how ads are matched (though there may be so nhortage of off-the-cuff hypotheses). Also, it's likely that the algorithm is being fine-tuned on a regular basis.

For what it's worth, I don't see as many goofy mismatches on my pages as I did a few months ago. AdSense makes some mistakes, but I'd say that at least 99% of the ads on my pages are relevant to either my pages' topics or the overall topic of my site.

If your site is new, you're likely to find that the quality of ad matching will improve over time as AdSense figures out what the overall topic oor theme of your site is.

Also, you might want to take a look at your page titles, headlines, subheads, etc. and see if they're descriptive. Let's say you've got a page about dating. Call it "Dating," and AdSense will probably figure out that it's about guys meeting girls. Call it "Cruising," and AdSense will probably associate it with cruise vacations instead of cruising in bars. Call it "Cruisin'," and AdSense may not derive any information from the title at all.

On my own pages, I'll typically use descriptive titles, headlines, etc. and put anything clever, cute, or subtle in the subheads. That makes it easier for search engines to figure out what my pages are about--and if a search crawler can identify my pages' topics, AdSense's bot probably can, too.