Interesting relevancy observation

Adsense uses Google index in serving relevant ads to a domain

[asp4bunnies]

I recently added adsense ads to a page on a new website without any content on it yet. Immediately Adsense began serving ads that were based around "riddles."

What's interesting about this is that this domain had no content on it at all, save for a single html page with an embedded image of a cryptography riddle. The page was linked around on the net by people trying to solve the riddle and Google indexed it and must have assumed that the page was about riddles from the inbound link text (as there was no text for them to look at on my page).

What this implies is that Adsense uses Google's index data on a site in choosing a theme for a site;s ads where no text content exists.

New to me at least.

[btas2]

You'd better remove the AdSense fast or put some content there, since posting it on a page with no content is a violation of the TOS and could get you suspended!

[asp4bunnies]

No, making that accessible to the public would be a violation of ToS. I am pretty sure we can put the ads on our template pages for layout purposes if it won't be seen by anyone else.

Sorry, in rereading my first post I did not make that clear.

[suidas]

I asked Google about that once, whether I could test my pages out before they went live. They said fine.

Still, there are obvious dangers. I have a JPEG of a typical Google ad. I use that until the moment I go live, then switch it out.

[mackandy]

I've noticed this too and it's annoying. I have a branded domain name i.e. not keyword spam, and many inbound quality links have my domain name as link text.

Today, Google adsense has started serving non relevant ads based on my inbound link text.

Call me a bad SEO or what you will, but there's definitely something wrong in the SE world when a brands success cannot be reflected to commercial success. I mean, you don't go into Virgin to buy a Virgin!

My internal pages are OK though.

Did anyone also note that Googles HTTPS certificate was flagging an error?

[Nikke]

asp4bunnies, I have to ask, was there really no indications that the page could be about riddles in the domain name, the url, any meta description or keyword tags. Wasn't there an alt attribute to the image? Was the image itself not named as riddle.gif or something like it?

I'm asking since I've noticed Google picking up all sorts of info for placing ads, aand it would be very interesting if we could rule out all these other reasons for targeted ads.

As for adding AdSense to pages in production, I too must confess of have committed the sin of using live AdSense code on production pages. It can be really unconvenient, since you get the wrong url spidered by the media bot.

However, when working on a live, orphaned URL it often comes in handy to refrain from adding links to it, and thus letting the public in, until the media bot has come by and AdSense has decided what ads are going to be published on it.

[Macro]

>>was there really no indications that the page could be about riddles in the domain name, the url, any meta description or keyword tags. Wasn't there an alt attribute to the image? Was the image itself not named as riddle.gif or something like it?

Was the word "riddle" or something similar somewhere in js? Was it used in a comment? Are image files you use in your template completely not riddle related?

Look hard and look hard again. It would be news if what you suspect turns out to be true. But, then, it's so easily tested others would have discovered it on their template pages by now.