Link Unit: view ads about box

on a well established site

[moishe]

I decided to play with the little link ads, selected the 468x16 and dropped into my page. This is a well established page on a site that does very well with Adsense.

Here is the problem:
No ads show, only "ads by google view ads about" and a little search box. This is the only Adsense on this page.

Has anyone run into this?

[annej]

Did you just put the adlink unit up? Sometimes it just shows the little search box until it can spider to see that the page is about.

[moishe]

Yes. That being said, the page has been up for 2 years with Adsense on it for most of that time...

Infact, I replaced a standard Adsense ad with the link unit.

[moishe]

AARRGH, I put the exact same code on another of my pages and it works just fine. Does anyone know for sure what triggers this adbox, could it be a structure issue with the HTML or something....?

[moishe]

AdsenseAdviser? Anyone?

[annej]

I don't know what triggers it but after a day or so all my adlink units were showing the list of 4 or 5 instead of the search.

[moishe]

Well I gave it 3 days and the search box still persists so, off it goes. It is unfortunate as the adlink would have worked very nicely on this page.

Perhaps at some point someone who knows what causes this will chime in.

[hunderdown]

moishe, I have had an adlink very successfully on my home page for several months now. Lots of content, lots of keywords to chew on.

But every one in a while, I see that box. I think it's random, AdSense checking to see if visitors to my page want to see something different. And it goes away again after a while.

I also wouldn't assume that all of your visitors are seeing the searchbox. It might just be you.

If I were you, I'd put it back and track results withi a channel. You can always pull it again.

[moishe]

good idea hunderdown, thanks

[solidgas]

It was my understanding that the search box which displays on text links is equivalent to the PSA's which all have been seeing in large numbers this month.

[hunderdown]

I don't think that box is the same as a PSA, unless it's all you see.

But I don't see it that often so I could be wrong.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

moishe -

Feel free to sticky mail me the URL in question. Sometimes when there is an insufficient inventory of ad topics for a particular page, a search box appears in the link unit.

As another publisher also stated, this could just mean your page has not been recrawled since you pasted the new link unit code into it.

Make sure there is sufficient text-based content on the page so that our crawlers can determine the page's meaning.

-ASA

[moishe]

Thanks ASA,
It has just started showing a single ad so I would assume that you are correct, it must be ad inventory related. Across my site, I am seeing 1, 2, 4 and five ads on different pages.