Increase in Alternate Ads in early Feb.?

[JohnKelly]

Sometime in early February my alternate ad dislays increased by 2.5 times. The increase seems to have occured over a 1-2 day period and held fairly steady since.

I did not make any changes to my pages during that time, and some of the pages had been visited back in January, so mediabot should have visited them by now.

This is a return to my pre 1/1/04 levels; right after the New Year holiday my alt. ads went from around 25% to about 10%. Now they have returned to 25%.

Has anyone else experienced an increase in alt. ads/PSA's around the same time? Any known reason for it?

[ByronM]

#1 reason - Unprofitable keyword for advertisers.

Easiest way to "fix" this - setup alternate ads that use other revenue generation systems (affiliate networks, home sold ads and such)

[JohnKelly]

Only thing is that my site is far too broad-based for a single advertiser or category to affect EPC or alternate ad displays.

I am running other revenue generating ads, but something went amiss first week of Feb.

[jonknee]

I can't tell if there is actually an increase (no way to track the thing), but it seems that way. It's taking longer to get ads when I add a page.

I wish there was a URL I could have my CMS ping (via SOAP or XML-RPC) to let Google know I updated and need the bot to come visit.

[markus007]

Google keeps changing the algorithm that matches keywords to ads. I got hit pretty hard around that time as well.