New Tags for Google AdSense

A proposal to help with keyword targetting

[RickW]

This is my proposal. I'm hoping that GoogleGuy stops by and can relay this to headquarters. ;)

I just recently signed up with AdSense, and right away it was working well for me. I have been carefully watching what kind of ads show up based on each article. But I did notice a problem that with my proposal can fix.

I have an article that has to do with the cisco pix IOS. But when I view the article, the ads aren't targetting that content. It's still pulling up words from my header, menu, footer, etc. Since the visitor most likely found this page by searching for "cisco pix ios", the ads are not reflecting their interest. Instead they're getting ads about antiviruses or spyware scanners.

Google could create new tags that googlebot will read. <adsense>My targetted content here</adsense>.

Does anybody see issues with this? Any way to improve upon this idea? Would this be useful to you?

[topr8]

yes, google already has a method of deciding what a page is about, they don't need extra head tags - and in any case it would be totally abused.

[RickW]

How could it be abused? The adsense ads automatically determine what keywords to target, but, that isn't 100%. In some cases I can better determine what visitors will most likely click on, and that helps both of us. The only "abuse" I can foresee, is a spammer setting up a page to get it up in the results, then using absolute positioning or super tiny font with some other content that the visitor can't see, in order to generate different ads. But I can't see how that could be to their benefit at all. Maybe you can give an example?

[asp4bunnies]

Google has something similar to what you are discussing called keyword hints, which only premium members may use at the moment.

[RickW]

Hmm... I just checked over the description of their Premium program, but it looks like the ability to customize is more of a back-end solution. The site I run uses a cms, and the content is dynamically driven, and I write several articles a week. I don't think the Premium service would help me any more than the standard service I'm using. If I can tell googlebot, hey just consider this article content for adsense, then that would help out tremendously with the ad target. More people click on the ads, and both Google and I are making more money, and even the Advertisers are happier because the visitor found what he/she is looking for.

As far as what would go between <adsense></adsense> - they could even set adsense to ignore them if the content is less than 50 words to prevent people from just wrapping phrases. Or at the least, have AdSense treat <adsense></adsense> as googlebot treats <h1></h1>. Not a complete exclusion of the rest of the site content, but more of a way to set ranking.

[asp4bunnies]

To see what I mean, view the source code on the Google ads that appear at Topix.net.