example.com gets irrelevant ads while www.example.com gets targeted ads

[Webb]

Hello,

Among others, I'm running AdSense on a web hosting related website. There is a big problem with ad relevancy. [example.com...] gets very well targeted ads while [example.com...] gets ads for travel and "foam parties" (whatever those are) -- once again, this happens on pages that are 100% web hosting related. Is there a reasonable explanation for this?

Oh, www.example.com has a lower PR than example.com

(I've replaced the actual domain name with "example.com".)

Any suggestions?

(err, there's a typo in the thread title :)

[edited by: Jenstar at 9:04 am (utc) on April 18, 2004]
[edit reason] examplified ;) [/edit]

[kyrkesmith]

I can just assume that it's to do with different times at which the bot visited each each of the examples - they must view them as different pages, as you can sometimes find on Google search results.

I get the same thing, btw.

[jomaxx]

The pages at "example.com" and "www.example.com" can be different, in theory, although in practice they virtually never are.

In my experience the Google search algo handles the pages separately until some point when it identifies them as "duplicate content". After that it merges the PR and the backlinks. AdSense probably starts out by treating them separately as well, but I dunno if they are ever merged in the same way.

A good practice is to always write absolute links the same way (i.e. either with or without the "www"), and to use absolute links instead of relative links for your primary navigational links. This helps spiders to index the correct URL format, and helps ensure that over the long run visitors will be using the correct URL format as well.

[winglian]

I think Adsense ALSO uses backlinks to determine the context of the site. I have a site www.example-one.com and it has been around for a while and has backlinks. I recently duuplicated the same site with a different domain name www.example-two.com and they both were introduced to adsense at the same time. The one with backlinks has MORE relevant ads, whereas the one without backlinks has LESS relevant ads. I don't know if anyone else is seeing this, but that is what I have noticed and will stand behind without any doubt.