AdSense on CGI pages

[Sharky]

I know what Google says about not supporting AdSense on dynamic pages. However, has anyone come up with any good ideas to work around this limitation?

I thought of building a small page, with my keywords in the title and meta tags. That page could use an iframe to call AdSense, as usual. A link to it would be placed on one of my real pages, so that the Google spider could find it. Then, on my cgi pages, I could pull in that small page with another iframe.

Has anyone tried this? Any idea whether it would work, or do you have better ideas? In my case, I can't change the names of the pages to *.html or something that looks like a static page, since I don't have the full server access that I would need to make that work.

I'm sure this topic must have come up before, but I couldn't find any info when I did a search.

Thanks!

[JollyK]

It's not so much "dynamic pages" they have a problem with, it's more with pages that are SO dynamic that they can't spider them to display appropriate ads. For example, if you have a search form using the POST method, they wouldn't be able to spider the search results page.

I have lots of dynamic pages on my site, and as long as most of the content doesn't change all the time, Google has told me it's fine. It's mainly things that are the results of form posts, or things that are directly targeted to, say, a particular IP or user, login/password protected pages, that kind of thing, and even some of those can be worked around.

I'm pretty sure it's mainly pages that cause problems for them to spider, though, and not dynamic pages per se.

[Jenstar]

The main issue regarding this mention iby Google is dynamic URLs, which are unable to display targeted ads, which are usually URLs that use session IDs. With session ids, the mediabot believes every individual SID is an individual page.

This is a dynamic URL with a session id - http:*//www.domain.com/index.php?s=34tn5v3o546vmqo3t43egmpo5mye5ya1

That s=34tn5v3o546vmqo3t43egmpo5mye5ya1 is the session ID, and it will be a different string of characters for each visitor, and it will change to a new string when they return for another visit.

Mediabot will visit every single one of those URLs that each of your visitors view, because it views each as an individual URL, not the same URL. If your URLs use session IDs, you will need to remove them in order to use AdSense.

[Sharky]

My pages don't use session ids, they aren't referenced from forms, and they don't use POST. They have URLs like this:

[domain.com...]

I did make sure to remove cgi-bin from my robots.txt file. I guess I'll wait a few more days and see if the pages start showing ads, before trying a work-around.

[Jettie]

My page doesn't use session id too
it's

[mydomain...]

when a user is logged in ...
Is this ok with Google?

[tombola]

That will be fine, Jettie.

To make a URL look nicer, you can even use content negotiation (on Apache server), so you can remove the filename extension from the url.

In your case it would be:
[mydomain...]
instead of:
[mydomain...]

[Jettie]

Thanx Tombola, i will give it a try :)

[Kinitz]

Jenstar wrote:

If your URLs use session IDs, you will need to remove them in order to use AdSense.

But I have seen websites using AdSense with URL containing session IDs - very long session IDs! Does it mean that Google's servers are wasting time on this website and that's why they are crawling my pages (that have no session IDs) much slower? Is it violation of TOS that could be reported?

[Jenstar]

You can do a custom hack (and some php programs have hacks available) to use SIDs while allowing Googlebot. phpbb is one that offers a Googlebot hack, which can then be customized again to allow the mediabot. This is generally an add-on to a php program, or a programmer is needed to allow the bot while still running SIDs.

I have also seen sites with session IDs without any modifications done that are strictly running PSAs. So be sure that you are able to allow the mediabot if you still want to use session IDs.

[jomaxx]

People do that for the regular Googlebot spider, but I don't see how that could work for AdSense. Won't it be impossible to show targeted ads on any site where users are assigned a session ID, because the Mediabot URLs will always be different anyways?

[edited by: jomaxx at 2:56 am (utc) on Dec. 24, 2003]

[Jenstar]

I haven't tried it myself, but someone running the Google phpbb hack that modified it for the mediabot assured me that it worked ;)