Index Page Conundrum

Where are the targeted ads?

[Jon_King]

I know this topic has been talked about numerous times before but I can't seem to get past this one - a single home page showing PSA's.

I have numerous sites and hundreds of pages and only this one shows PSA's. I have tried every thing mentioned in this forum without success.

If it is only content that determines the ad type, I should be totally fine. What is left to try? Writing Google?

[Jenstar]

Did you check this thread [webmasterworld.com] from last week?

Make an identical copy of your page, save it as index2.html (or something along those lines), upload it and then visit it to trigger a mediabot visit. Check back throughout the day and see if it is suffering from PSAs (it might show themed ads initially). If it is showing PSAs, the issues could be stop words (most likely), script confliction (with other javascripts on the page) or a frame breaker script problem.

You can drop a line to Google at any time and ask for help. But if it is a stop word issue, you'll have to figure out what is triggering it and change it, since Google will not override that filter on an individual basis.

[Jon_King]

Jenstar,

Your clairity is much appreciated. After following your advice it seems to be a stop word problem. The page is an industrial product or service, and I can certainly not imagine what word(s) could possibly cause the problem.

I will dismantle the page and repost paragraph by paragraph to isolate the offender.

[Jon_King]

One more question, does the stop word trigger on the initial visit?

In other words once the Mediabot has visited a test page and the ads are not PSA's can I be sure there is not a stop word present?

[Jenstar]

They *could* be themed ads, which makes it all the more fun to figure it out ;) Themed ads can be shown on pages pre-mediabot visit for some accounts, on pages that there are not specific targeted ads for, or pages that have had a mediabot visit, but haven't been "assigned" (so to speak) the targeted ads.

Themed ads are usually the ads that emcompass the overall theme ads of your site. ie. if your site was about hockey, you'd see general hockey ads; if your site was about cars, you'd see car related ads, even if they arent specifically related to the content on a particular page on the site.

[Jon_King]

Well, the test files worked great. I made a few changes, mediabot visited within 30 minutes or so - great ads.

I copied the 'good' file as the index page, its been 4 hours and mediabot won't visit. I tried changing the ad sizes more than once to no avail.

I guess the only thing left is the particular url has been blocked?

[Duke_of_Url]

I'm seeing much the same lately, so I tried the experiment mentioned above. Copied homepage to test.htm and refreshed it, watched out for media bot calling by etc etc and now, 5hrs or so later, it is for the most part showing relevant ads on the test copy of my homepage. This suggests that this (unmodified from original) page hasnt got any stopwords, so is there any way i can gee up mediabot to visit my old homepage and deliver some vaguely relevant ads? Would removing the ads code for a day, then dropping it back on, gee things up at all?

thanks
DoU

[ddent]

Here is a tip for people looking for stop words: Do what some people in CS sometimes call a 'binary search'.

Here is how that works practically speaking:
Take your index page, copy it into two files. In the first file, remove the half the content, in the other file, remove the other half of the content. See which one is showing PSAs (if both, either you are having a different problem or both halves of the page have stop words in them). Now, for each of those files, keep chopping them into two half files. Discard files which are showing targetted ads, keep chopping files which are until you've figured out what is causing the PSA.

[Jon_King]

I have done the page chopping and the Mediabot visits any new page I post right away with good ads.

I am able to past anything at all as the index page and always the same PSA's. - no matter the content. I even tried it with a blank page, and a 'good' internal page as the index, same result.

The problem seems to be that Mediabot won't visit the index page. I have been watching it closely for a few days and the bot really has only picked up the robots.txt, contact form and one other page.

Things might be different if it would scan the index page. I will wait for that to happen.

[Jon_King]

It has now been 4 days since I switched the home page. The Mediabot just will not visit. Does anyone know if there are 'bans' put on certain pages, maybe for optimization?

[loanuniverse]

The Mediabot just will not visit.

It has been mentioned here that changing formats will trigger a visit.

Also, you can check what ads will be shown using an unregistered Opera browser v 7.2 or above.

[Duke_of_Url]

Jon

Yeah I'm still in the same boat as you, I did the copy of index.htm to a test file trick and reviewed the page throughout the day, 80% of the time proper ads showed without making any content changes. I raised a support call with ggl and have had a couple of replies, along the lines of '..our engineers are looking into this problem...working as quickly as we can to address this problem...appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience this has
caused you..' so my fingers are crossed. I also suspect that a return visit of the mediabot will help get things back to normal, as I've been seeing PSAs for many days now too, but I'm not sure when/if it'll happen. For now I've loaded up an alternate 160x600 graphic, rather than leaving the PSAs on there :-/

DoU

[Duke_of_Url]

update: am getting proper relevant ads now, for the first time in days, and a pleasant email advising me of this from ggl. Fingers crossed it continues ..!

DoU

[Jon_King]

loanuniverse,

I have used every kind of ad format and page content change imaginable. It is a url problem. The exact same page does well when not the index page.

I guess I should turn in a support request.

[Jon_King]

I wrote AdSense support yesterday regarding the PSA problem and although I havn't heard back, the support team seems to have corrected the problem. This morning there are no PSA's just well targeted ads.

[Jon_King]

Final post for this thread....

AdSense Support emailed stating that the site should now be displaying relevant ads. It is!

They also offered help if there are any other problems. Excellent service by my way of thinking.

Thanks to all that contributed in this discussion.

[Brooklynese]

I had this same problem recently and through some testing I discovered that my stop words were a phrase I was using right above the google ads. The phrase was 'You may be entitled to monetary compensation' (I have a Lawyer Search website.) I removed 'Monetary' first and the test page was visited by mediabot but showed only PSA's. I removed 'Compensation' next and still only PSA's.

Finally I removed the entire phrase ('You may be entitled to monetary compensation') and the test page showed relevant ads in just under a 1/2 hour.

I changed the home page extension from .htm to .html, then .shtml ...all of these extensions show relevant ads when accessed directly but when I type in the main website address (mydomain.com) It shows only PSA's.

I guess I need to email Google support.