Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Some of my pages aren't showing any Adsense ads. I have emailed the Google team some days ago about this issue and I received a response from them saying they are looking into it. That was last week though and I haven't received an update since then.
Have you ever experienced this issue and is there perhaps something I can do about it myself?
Spend 15 minutes checking the threads in SE results of the following searches using Google will help get you up to speed if you haven't.
site:webmasterworld.com forum89 stop word
site:webmasterworld.com forum89 stopword
site:webmasterworld.com forum89 "negative content"
*site:webmasterworld.com forum89 mediapartners robots.txt
* Note that many people here *insist* on calling the Mediapartners bot "mediabot" though that is not its name, so you may want to also try the above search with "mediabot" instead of mediapartners as well.
I read some of the Google results that your searches yielded and I must say it is pretty interesting stuff that I was not yet aware of. However, I am not sure stopwords or negative content are the cause of my pages not showing ads. I scanned some of the problem pages for words or phrases that could be marked as stopwords or negative content, do you think "spam" and "spammer" could be stopwords?
- The problem pages were showing ads before.
- Similar pages from the same article do show ads.
- My robots.txt only contains one line for the media bot but imposes no restrictions to the bot.
- The problem pages are not showing PSAs either.
- I pasted the Adsense code straight into the body, there's no scripting that could prevent the normal operation of the Adsense code.
- The problem pages are full of written content
- My pages apply to the TOS
I should have access to my weblogs (I gather my own stats right from the page and have never looked for server logs yet), so I will look for the Mediapartners bot. I wonder though if the words "spam" or "spammer" could be stop words?
I did two tests
1. I renamed several of the pages on which no ads appear. Ads immediatelly appear on all of them when I publish them with a
different name. Ads are very untargeted though.
2. When I completely alter the content of a problem page this has no effect at all. I dit get some PSAs but still no ads.
It seems as if Google has some kind of thingie in place that blocks these specific URLs from displaying ads. Further, I am
under the impression that Google keeps a record of "main keywords" for my site that it applies when pages are not (yet)
scanned by the Media partners bot.
Can you confirm this and has anyone else perhaps experienced pages not showing ads? Any help is welcome..
do you think "spam" and "spammer" could be stopwords?
I don't. None of my sites' pages contain those words, but I've seen plenty of news articles and anti-spam software affiliate sites containing those words more than once which showed targeted AdSense ads.
Based on the answers to my questions, I don't see any red flags, but it's possible that the Mediapartners-Google bot hasn't visited those URLs, which would result in the pages either showing PSAs (or AAs if you have them implemented) or ads themed to your site instead of specific to the context of the page.
Hm, I don't have access to my logs.
Unless your host isn't doing logging, they should be able to easily grant you access. I find that it's tough to do testing and troubleshooting of AdSense without raw log access. I host my sites on servers I administer which means I don't run into such obstacles (though I'm not advising you or anyone administer your own server).
1. I renamed several of the pages on which no ads appear. Ads immediatelly appear on all of them when I publish them with a
different name. Ads are very untargeted though.
It sounds as though the ads are based on the site's theme as determined by Google. If the ads are appearing before Mediapartners even visits them that's strong evidence to confirm it.
2. When I completely alter the content of a problem page this has no effect at all. I dit get some PSAs but still no ads.
I'm a little confused. Is it correct to say that you had some pages showing poorly paying ads, changed their content and some of them continued to show poorly targeted paying ads, while some started showing PSAs? If you'd like feel free to sticky me some URLs and I'll be glad to look at them and give you private feedback. If you're not comfortable doing so I underrstand completely. If it's your homepage though, I can't read Dutch, but could very well be related to a language factor.
Based on the answers to my questions, I don't see any red flags, but it's possible that the Mediapartners-Google bot hasn't visited those URLs, which would result in the pages either showing PSAs (or AAs if you have them implemented) or ads themed to your site instead of specific to the context of the page.
The initial problem was that no ads were showing and no PSAs/AAs. On one of the problem pages I modified the content a little (no real keyword changes though, more layout), created new Adsense code and uploaded the page with the same file name. All of a sudden, PSAs would show. That was two days ago and there are are still only PSAs, so it probably hasn't been visited by Mediapartners OR there is some kind of block in place on Googles side.
Unless your host isn't doing logging, they should be able to easily grant you access.
Email sent to host :-)
I'm a little confused. Is it correct to say that you had some pages showing poorly paying ads, changed their content and some of them continued to show poorly targeted paying ads, while some started showing PSAs?
Let me clarify my 2nd point: My pages were initially not hsowing any ads, not even PSAs/AAs. When I changed the content of one page that page started showing PSAs, which it still does..(renaming the page without changing it works too, that is why I suspect a block or someting).
If you'd like feel free to sticky me some URLs and I'll be glad to look at them and give you private feedback. If you're not comfortable doing so I underrstand completely. If it's your homepage though, I can't read Dutch, but could very well be related to a language factor.
Thanks. I will sticky you in a moment.
do you think "spam" and "spammer" could be stopwords?
No, they aren't. I have a page that discusses spam and how to deal with it. The page has the words spam, spamming, and spammers all over it and it shows perfectly targeted ads.
Could you possibly be doing something else to cause PSA's? Some phrases that consist entirely of words that aren't stop words will cause PSA's.
Also, could you be accidentally tripping a filter? A super high keyword density maybe? Sometimes you have to read between the lines.
Then again there is always going to be a page here and there that is permanently stuck with PSAs for no apparent reason. I have perhaps a dozen or so of these. I've tried renaming the page, rewording phrases, etc. Nothing seems to help. I just monetize these pages a different way. I guess a dozen "dud" pages out of 1700+ isn't that bad though.
For experiment i have copied some of the pages from this site to another not related site. The relevent ads strated to show almost instantly. Did anybody else experienced this? Any cure?
Also, don't underestimate the significance of minor changes in the text of a page. Google's algorithm is mathematical - it doesn't read the words on a page in a conventional manner. I had a consumer information page that doesn't display ads when it is titled, "Subject - Buyer Beware", but will for exactly the same content when the page title is changed to "Subject - Caveat Emptor". (The bot, apparently, doesn't understand Latin.) I do not, from my experience, believe that "spam" or "spammer" are stop words - although they may be at a certain density, or in conjunction with specific other words or phrases.
