random irrelevant ads?

[brokenbricks]

A month or 2 ago, I decided to try the AdSense Section targetting feature to bring a little more relevant ads to the front page of my site. I targetted an area with messages left by users, thinking it would bring targetted ads to whatever their topics were.

Big mistake. As soon as the Mediabot crawled and activated the targetting I was served ads that were totally irrelevant, like IQ tests and "end procrastination". It also removed my adlink block. I immediately removed it and it took a few days to go back to normal.

Now for no reason it is doing the same thing, only on the main page. Has it reverted back to some kind of old cache? I can't explain it. It has been over a few days already and I am losing money every minute it stays up. Am I overlooking something?

[MikeNoLastName]

1. Make sure you didn't accidently leave behind any section defining metatags on the targeted page (especially open ended ones - i.e. a start without an end).
2. Are the ads in any way relevent to another part of your site? I've often noticed Adsense testing out terms from other pages on the site to see if they produce revenue. This usually doesn't last more than a day, if they don't produce.
3. Are there any stray relevent terms on the page that may have ANYTHING to do with the ads coming up.
4. Those ads appearing may have been targeted by some high paying bidder. Is the PPC on them high enough to justify a very low CTR?
5. Try the GAdsense preview tool to see if the same ads come up. Perhaps there simply AREN'T any ads currently available for your topic. If they aren't even close you might want to send a note to Adsense Support to look into it. Using the tool often times snaps the algorithm back into compliance since I guess it forces them to respider the page.

As far as the section targeting code, I have always had excellent success with it as long as you give it at least a few sentences to work with. Were you trying to target quickly changing text like forums? This often does not work well, since it appears they only spider maybe once or twice a week. Therefore the current topic might not match what they last spidered. Or maybe, if it is dynamic content or in a frame, the way you set it up they were unabke to grab the content at all and thus just sent you generic ads because to the spider it looked like you had NO content between the tags.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

brokenbricks -

Feel free to sticky mail me your URL and I can try to troubleshoot this problem for you.

-ASA

[brokenbricks]

4 days later this is still happening. I don't see why 'conference calls' should be showing up in my main ad block on a sports related site.

I also don't see why my link unit should not appear at all.