Increased emphasis on themes for adsense taregting?

it's anecdotal evidence, but it sure feels that way

[paybacksa]

I don't see enough traffic to prove anything, but it sure seems to me that AdSense started to increase a sort of "domain theme" weighting factor for taregting ads this past week.

For example, www.mysite.com/index.html is about widgets, and has several directories of stuff on the widget industry. Ads have always been about widgets industry.

Folder www.mysite.com/travel/index.html is about travel, and has many pages about travel. It is not linked to www.mysite.com, and has no connection to widgets (it is actually a site in development, not intended to stay as a subfolder of the widget site). Ads have been about travel... until this week.

Now the travel section has ads about widgets... apparently AdSense adopted the "theme" from the domain, even thogh these pages are not linked, and do not have any connection to widgets.

[rubenski]

I had kind of the same experience two weeks ago. I added a new folder to my site with a new site in it in English, while my main (/) site is in Dutch.

I noticed that suddenly English ads were appearing on my main Dutch site.

The English and Dutch section were unlinked then.

I don't know if they keep some kind of theme record of your domain, but it sounds reasonable to me.

[icedowl]

I think I've been seeing the same sort of trouble.

I have "word1 word2" in my titles and I've been seeing a lot of "word1 word2", "organize your word1 word2", "free word1/word2", etc. in the ads displayed.

Since "word1" and/or "word2" is not what the page is about, I think something is broken. Very broken.

[europeforvisitors]

I haven't noticed any obvious boost in "theme" on my site's collection of AdSense ads, but overall, I think it would be an improvement over a keywords-only approach.

For example, an article on using ATMs in Europe might display ads related to European travel instead of the current ads that I'm seeing (which are for ATM equipment, parts, and supplies).

[arrowman]

I have "word1 word2" in my titles [...] Since "word1" and/or "word2" is not what the page is about, I think something is broken.

I suggest it's the titles :-)

[icedowl]

Yes, exactly my thought also that it has a connection to the titles. I just changed the titles for a section to see what happens.

[paybacksa]

The test site has nonsense URL, repeated in the page titles, so that is not the factor here.

Further research: if I purposfully post a new orphan page SEO'd for topical ads far off root site's theme, it works for a while (half hour?) and then reverts to either the root site's theme, or PSAs and then the root site's theme later on.

Without any cross links, I can't understand how AdSense reverts to the root site's theme unless it has bound that theme to the domain name.

[skippy]

I have been seeing kind of the same thing. My problem is that primary my site is a B2B site. However, I have a large resource section that is more B2C and it is the only place Adsense runs. Lately I have been seeing Ads that are a mixture of B2B and B2C. In the past the ads were targeted only to B2C.

Some how I think google is getting confused with the theme of my site. This also coincides with an aggressive linking campaign focused on the B2C resources I am currently running. I know media bot runs separate from google bot perhaps this is just a coincidence.

[valeyard]

Some sort of theming is definitely going on and causing problems on some pages. Ads that would fit perfectly on some pages on a site are showing on pages where they are totally inappropriate. This seems to apply to old established pages as much as new ones.

The real problem is that you can't even filter these ads, since then you'd lose them everywhere.

Unfortunately Google insist on letting their PhDs try to do everything algorithmically. If Google wants to know the main topic of a page, the best thing to do is ask the person who wrote it.

We need some tools and we need them fast.

[longen]

Today i added new pages relating to Shipping, very different from the rest of my content. These pages are getting lots of ads about buying ships, wharfs, etc. The remainder of the ads on these new pages are theme related. I assume this happens if there no shipping ads available, or if there is another Publisher whose site is 100% ships and therefore more relevent.

I expect that if the CTR on my shipping pages turns out to be low, that i will start seeing only theme ads again.

[europeforvisitors]

I regularly get ads for shipping materials in an article on packing (as in luggage), so feel free to have mine. At least my articles on cruising aren't showing ads for pickup bars. :-)

[Visi]

Consider yourself lucky there efv:)....can send you some dating service ads from sports page if you want...lol