Querystrings for more relevant ads?

[stormshield]

Hi,
Recently I've trying to make my google ads more relevant and I came up with an idea of putting some keywords querystring of htm or php, like this one:

-www.mysite.com/something.htm?adsense

And my question is: does it comply with TOS?

thx,

[stormshield]

Come on, somebody answer it :-)

[europeforvisitors]

Why not ask AdSense Support?

[stormshield]

OK, I'll do it... so how do you deal with irrelevant ads on web pages that have few keywords and content (and it won't change)?

[edited by: stormshield at 4:50 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2006]

[winglian]

I think I hashed over this before?

[webmasterworld.com...]

I didn't get too involved in the research, but it seems like MediaBot looks at the URL as part of the content to determine what ads to serve up. But I'm interested in any new light that anyone can shed on this.

[jetteroheller]

OK, I'll do it... but none of you have ever done it?

URL design is since many years usual.

site, folder and file names continaing a short desciption what will be on this site.

So a good URL like

[town-name.realtor-name-realtor.com...]

tells in the URL alone what is on the page.

[stormshield]

winglian : I know that query strings have effect on ads but I don't know if google approves of it, because I have never seen anybody do it.

[stormshield]

Yeah that's true but this URL loads a specific document while parameter on my pages wouldn't change anything ,like in this example:

-www.mysite.com/index.htm?jewlery

[jomaxx]

1. Obviously if the keyword isn't closely connected to your site's theme you'll have potential problems.

2. This could potentially play havoc with Google rankings. Re-indexing, pagerank passing, duplicate page problems, etc. Even though it's transparent to your web server, Google has to treat it as a separate URL which could potentially refer to a separate page.

By the way, it may not be directly relevant but I thought I'd mention that the Mediapartners bot has problems with page anchors - i.e. parameters following a "#" symbol. This has been happening for ages. It changes the # to the hex equivalent (%23) and then gets a 404 when it tries to retrieve the page.

[stormshield]

jomaxx

Thx a lot that's exactly what I meant!

[Sobriquet]

my system uses teh following it teh followign way

[thisismysite.abc...]

good results as compared to beign used without the topic parameter in qs

[stormshield]

Sobriquet : that was a good tip. Thanks as well!

[winglian]

My thought would be that if google doesn't approve of using query strings to "influence" the ads shown, then they simply wouldn't use it as a parameter to determine the page's content.

[ndaru]

URL matters, at least in my case. Especially when your page is new, and is not inside the Google index yet.

When I create a new page, www.mysite.com/about300.php, I got ads about PHP and web hosting. When I rename it into www.mysite.com/my_topic.php, the ads are related with my_topic.

And when the page finally enter the Google index, the ads began to reflect the actual page content.

Maybe my sample is too small. Anyone with different experiences?

[winglian]

I use keywords to help the MediaBot and for SERPs. As with everything, SERPs should come first and if you have everything in place, the MediaBot should get the content right.

[ndaru]

Yes, especially if you have a good PR. Your new page will be in the SERP in two days or less. No need for special URL naming.