www.domainname/ versus just domainname/ - eh?

Plus a couple other AdSense issues.

[frostman]

Hi.

I'm trying out AdSense to try to help cover hosting costs on a little site that's getting about 20K page views a day. So I'm an AdSense newbie looking for help on the following points.

1) WWW versus plain domain name
After some investigation, I discovered that Google is serving proper targeted ads if I load the page as [site_name.com...] -- but is just giving public-service ads if I load it as [site_name.com...] (Placeholder links here obviously.)

As I learn more about AdSense and how unsophisticated their algorithms are I'm not really shocked to find something like this, but is there a way to fix it in the AdSense settings?

Much of my site's popularity is due to word of mouth, so it's not reasonable to expect people to either type "www" or not type it.

There is an obvious technical solution - redirect anybody coming from [sitename.com...] to the same with the www, but that's not very elegant.

So far my dealings with G don't give me any faith that they would have a solution or even necessarily recognize that they have a problem, so I'm hoping you folks can give me some pointers here.

2) PSAs override ad type settings?

My default setting is text ads only, but on the pages with PSA's it serves an *image* PSA. Always. I even redundantly put the ad_type="text" bit in the code, and it didn't help.

Has anyone experienced this themselves? Might I be doing something wrong here, or is Google really ignoring my settings for PSA's?

3) Alternative ad server output format

OK, so given the above problems I want to have an alternative ad server that would feed in ads in place of the PSA's. Longer-term I will probably have some secondary ad server do that.

In the short term, I just want to put up some funny animated gif's pointing to friends' sites, rotating off a simple little CGI. But from the FAQ I can't figure out *exactly* what format that needs to take. HTML page? HTML snippet? Just the link and its image?

Info on this or a pointer to same would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[tamen]

Im having, sort of, the opposite problem. When putting in www I get far less ads than without www. No PSA´s though.
The ads though are a couple of days out of sync, as my site changes content every day. TV-listings.

[FromRocky]

My main site had both problems. Some of the pages had the Frostman's #1 and others had the Tamen's problem. So, I did decided to redirect all to "without www" since 75% of the pages which gave the targetted ads have no WWW.

Result: All pages now have the targetted ads.

This means some pages used to have PSA's now show the targetted ads after a couple of weeks.

[my2cents]

A little off target, but collapsing ads work for www.___.com but not ___.com. Am I missing something or is this just the way it is?

Tried /collapsingad.htm but no luck, seemed it needed the full URL.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[trader]

".....little site that's getting about 20K page views a day...."

Is that a joke or what? Since when is 20K/day a "little" site? I am sure many here wish they also had some little sites like that! I always thought of only 2/day (not 2K but just plain 2) as being small. You sure must be a big player with your other sites.

[robho]

There is an obvious technical solution - redirect anybody coming from [sitename.com...] to the same with the www, but that's not very elegant.

It might not be elegant, but it's standard practice (e.g. try just google.com...). Has all sorts of other benefits (less risk of duplicate search results, Google PR isn't split, log files are cleaner, etc). Make sure it is a 301 (permanent) redirect.

For the replacement ads, you specify a page name (can be a script name, eg myads.php). The script/page should output a text block or image in the exact size of the ad it is replacing.

[werty]

We noticed the same thing a while back and went with the redirection method... from domain.com to www.domain.com. Our adsense earning increased.

If you think of the mediabot as a standard spider you may understand what is happening.

Lets say mediabot has crawled your entire www.domain.com site and has found relevant ads for every single page, well that is perfect. Now a user comes through and types in domain.com ends up on domain.com/subject/title.html. This page has never existed to the mediabot and it does not know what ad to display.

[mike schmitz]

I think for the most part you just want to be consistent. Either always have the www or never have it. Inconsistency can lead to the Google Bot having not looked at some of your pages and thus not displayed quality ads. Anytime a page with Adsense coded on it has yet to be called can lead to a number of things from PSAs to site summary ads - both typically don't perform well.

In my experience the WWW doesn't matter if you are consistent across your entire site.

M

[frostman]

Is that a joke or what? Since when is 20K/day a "little" site?

Actually it's not a joke, trader.

The site has, let's see, less than ten pages. We put it up as a little experiment -- it's basically an online poll. We were hoping we might get something in the tens of thousands of responses over several months but word spread (no advertising or marketing really, the guy who did it with me had a friend put it in his obscure blog, i had my brother do the same, and i put it in my sig on a big forum... everything else has been organic).

Anyway so yeah, by the end of the week we'll be over 500K page views for September and on any given weekday if the server and the DSL line both cooperate we get around 20K pages / 40K hits (as calculated by awstats), and it seems to be increasing. Over 180K "votes" so far.

I wish I had that kind of traffic on any website I could properly monetize, even a blog! If the startup I work for had half that, I'd have a paycheck :-)

The subject matter of the poll though makes it difficult to post just any advertising... in fact I think advertising on the front page would discredit us to some degree (but it has crossed my mind, since that's where most of the traffic is).

Thanks to everyone about the WWW question, I guess I'll do that in Apache.

Meanwhile more AdSense weirdness...

Over the last couple days one of my pages, the content of which has not changed in that time, sometimes has perfectly targeted ads, sometimes has ridiculously off-base ads (because G utterly failed to figure out which were the relevant keywords on the front page, and seems to be using those "wrong" keywords for said off-base ads) -- and sometimes it just serves PSA.

This is based on randomly checking the link several times a day.

I know there are ads in circulation on the topic, since one of my other pages always (so far) shows properly targeted ads.

Anyone have similar experiences?

[Sunflux]

The solution is simple if you maintain your own server and are using Apache and virtual hosts.

Your httpd.conf would look something like:

<VirtualHost 000.000.000.000:80>
ServerName www.domain.com
YOUR MAIN DOMAIN CONFIG HERE
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 000.000.000.000:80>
ServerName domain.com
Redirect permanent / [domain.com...]
</VirtualHost>

Then, any time someone access [domain.com...] or [domain.com...] they'll automatically and smoothly be redirected to the www. version.

Normally the config file would have

<VirtualHost 000.000.000.000:80>
ServerName www.domain.com
ServerAlias domain.com
...

So that everything works both with and without www., but as you've noticed AdSense always prefers the www. version.

I suppose something like this MIGHT be done via the .htaccess file, but it's typically better to do this sort of thing in the httpd.conf file whenever possible.

[frostman]

Thanks Sunflux, you saved me a trip to the manual!

Now here's more weirdness...

Yesterday I noticed the opposite happening.

Now if I do [domain...] I get proper ads in the right context, whereas if I do [domain...] I get either the (wrong) default ads or PSA's.

(My entry page has a big data list in it (poll results) and G has taken that as keywords for some reason instead of taking the paragraph text... so it's pretty clear when they are serving ads that are the "default" for the site, since they are very specific to an utterly different context.)

So now it appears that G is *correctly* targeting ads based on what's on the page if it doesn't "know" the page, but using defaults when it knows the page (the www.domain version is what shows up on search).

I actually see the logic there, though I think it's pretty faulty.

So anyway my latest idea is to redir on that page to [some-random-string.domain...] since G is apparently parsing the page just fine ATM as long as it doesn't recognize the subdomain.

Does that make sense?

(Also I've seen a general rise in PSA's across others' AdSense sites, which I'm assuming has to do with their recent increase in publishers I read about elsewhere here; therefore if I get ads targeted to X sometimes and PSA's others I'm assuming that X is the perceived topic of the page and the PSA's are due to G's internal weirdness at the moment.)

[jdMorgan]

There is no particular advantage to a www- or non-www- domain, but as mike schmitz said above, pick one and be consistent. In order to prevent PageRank and link popularity dilution, PSAs on AdSense, and a host of other intermittent probllems, all internal and (to the extent possible) external links should point to the same domain. If they don't, install a 301 permanent redirect in httpd.conf or .htaccess on Apache, or use the control panel on IIS to set this up. Do not use meta-refresh or 302, and check your work with a server headers checker to be sure you get the expected 301 redirect.

If you have a new site, installing this kind of redirect can prevent many "wrong" external links, and save you a lot of hassle over the long term. The key thing to realize is that example.com and www.example.com are two differerent domains, need not lead to the same site or content, and search engines have to do extra work to figure out that they do lead to the same content in many cases. But since this is not always the case, they must assume that the two domains point to different sites until proven otherwise by duplicate content testing.

Jim