Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I did a quick search on this but couldn't find anything relevant.
I just modified my website (other than the phpBB forum) to make my URLs more search engine friendly.
Basically, I changed the URLs from [[domain].com.au...] to read [[domain].com.au...] I guess you could call it cloaking, but I'm not actually hiding anything. There is no redirect sent by the server, and the URL always shows the exact content of that page - whether with a spider or an end user. If the page is okay, the user gets a 200 OK, and if there's no page, the user gets a 404 File not found.
It's a change that's relatively easy to make, and it certainly has potential to make a big difference to me with search engines that don't like dynamic URLs.
However, AdSense has not as yet begun to display ads for the pages which it sees as "new" because of this reformat.
My only consolation in this is that, having posted a new message in my forum - which has not changed URL format - no ads display for that new message here.
Just wondering what people think - is it just a case of Google being slow to spider? I've known the Mediabot to check my pages very quickly in the past, but perhaps this is more luck or timing?
Other people are also having PSA problems, so it could be an issue related to that somehow, on a domain or an account level.
There are plenty of threads here about making phpbb AdSense-friendly. If you are using session IDs (which is phpbb's default), you will only ever see PSA ads, and not targeted ones.
<added> If it is the site in your profile you are referring to, I am getting HTTP 500 - Internal server error " on all pages within the site, except the forums, where I didn't see AdSense at all (perhaps using Alternate Ads?) An internal server error would definitely explain why you are getting PSAs, if the mediabot is getting the same response.</added>
AdSense will only display ads on pages that people have visited, and called the javascript for. It is not a bot that will follow links to all your pages. It will only visit a page after someone else has visited it. It may take a couple of hours for ads to start appearing after mediabot has visited. How long has it been since you made the URL switch?
I'm aware that it's not automatic, but have been browsing my own site to try to get it to fire off. Naturally Javascript is enabled :-)
I finished making the changes only about 2 hours ago, so I'm probably just being a bit overanxious. Nonetheless, I've had a lot of changes lately (including moving to a different host) so perhaps there's something new that Mediabot will choke on.
I've added new pages since moving to the new host though - and had Mediabot crawl them - so I'm pretty sure it's not that.
There are plenty of threads here about making phpbb AdSense-friendly. If you are using session IDs (which is phpbb's default), you will only ever see PSA ads, and not targeted ones.<added> If it is the site in your profile you are referring to, I am getting HTTP 500 - Internal server error " on all pages within the site, except the forums, where I didn't see AdSense at all (perhaps using Alternate Ads?) An internal server error would definitely explain why you are getting PSAs, if the mediabot is getting the same response.</added>
I have not really had problems with phpBB. Even before I added the Googlebot code to permit (hopefully) my site to be spidered, it seemed to be okay. Most of my forums are public, and I think that MediaBot is picking it up from URLs which do not contain the SID (eg. www.[domain].com.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1).
The HTTP 500 was probably me tinkering. Naughty on a live website, but there was a couple of reasons. Feel free to give it another try (I certainly hope you don't get any now!).
Thanks very much for your thoughts in any case!
Matt
I've sent an email to Google to see what they think.
I think my robots.txt is okay, but I did have one or two crawlers hiccup at the size of it - so I took it back to basics.
Grr. The only pages showing ads is my default home page (which of course has not changed) and my forum pages. But new topics don't appear to update either.
Pain in the neck, 'tis :-(
The reason for this thinking was that my root page's ads had actually changed altogether in the nature of ads they were displaying. This indicated that Mediabot had probably revisited recently, since the ads were much more relevant to the text of my home page than originally. So I thought that perhaps Mediabot was only ever seeing the home page for any page it connected to.
Google responded saying that the change of hosts should have resulted in only a short "down-time" before I recieved targeted ads again. They're still looking into it.
Wish I could convince them to dump the Javascript code and supply an IFRAME SRC= style ad. But I really prefer to wait until they have a solution for me :-)
Just in time for my new articles to go up too :-D
