Google media bot is one confused puppy

Media bot going a bit crazy?

[profitpuppy]

I have noticed with some sites of mine (and of other people), the media bot is very bad at detecting the content of the page. For example, on a site about xyz topic in Atlanta, it doesn't pick up any ads abut xyz topic, only generic ads about Atlanta. Also on other sites, Adsense get's even more confused, and starts putting up ads that are so completely irrelevant that it is ridiculous. Anyone have any experience or ideas of what to look for that might be causing the problem?

[UserFriendly]

Yeah, I've seen some totally nonsensical ads appear on some of my pages.

The tips that AdSense veterans have offered me are:

• give AdSense at least two weeks to crawl your site and experiment with which ads get the best user response;
  
• use section targeting to emphasize text that sums up the theme of the page, and use ignore sections to play down text that contains terms that you don't want ads being based on;
  
• make sure that your title element, heading elements and file name are representative of the theme of the page;
  
• use keyword analysis to check the density of the most important keywords;
  
• do the AdSense click dance to please the higher beings at Google.
  

If all that fails, you may as well remove ad code from pages that just don't know how to offer something useful to the visitor. But give the pages a decent chance first.

[incrediBILL]

Many people that tend to have issues like this have titles, heading and navigation where 'Atlanta' preceeds XYZ so which is more important, Atlanta or XYZ?

If you have it like that, try reversing it to XYZ in Atlanta and see if that fixes the problem as Mediabot and Googlebot both tend to get the same impression about your page.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:25 pm (utc) on July 9, 2006]

[Powdork]

If you have it like that, try reversing it to XYZ in Atlanta and see if that fixes the problem as Mediabot and Googlebot both tend to get the same impression about your page.

A warning comes with this. You will suffer in the G serps for Atlanta keywords. It's a double edged sword

[incrediBILL]

True, there are some risks, maybe alternate title / heading on a few pages to see what happens. The alternative is to use section targetting from AdSense which clears up the ads but doesn't address the overall problem with the page.

[KeywordCountry]

The tips that AdSense veterans have offered me are:

- give AdSense at least two weeks to crawl your site and experiment with which ads get the best user response;
- use section targeting to emphasize text that sums up the theme of the page, and use ignore sections to play down text that contains terms that you don't want ads being based on;
- make sure that your title element, heading elements and file name are representative of the theme of the page;
- use keyword analysis to check the density of the most important keywords;
- do the AdSense click dance to please the higher beings at Google.

Great points Userfriendly. I would like to add one more point here.

- Check if there are any Advertisers bidding on the keyword with which you want to see ads. Obviously if nobody or less number of people are bidding on the keyword in question, you are less likely to see ads for that keyword on your website. (you can search on Google.com with the keyword and see if you get the ads you are looking for)