Anyway to point adsense

To a complimentary product?

[johnnydequino]

Say my site promotes widgets. The entire site and content is about widgets. Anyway to get adsense to only display wrench providers for those widgets?

Right now, the default adsense ads are widget ads. This would be kind of neat if possible.

jd

[Sanenet]

No, Adsense will provide ads from a range of "widget" related ads.

You could try honing in on the keywords on the page, banning ads that have nothing to do with your site, but at the end of the day there's no way to define which ads appear on which pages.

Depending on your site, maybe specific widget ads from affiliate sites like CJ might be better? Experiment!

[annej]

Jenstar has pointed out before that sometimes it helps to put the key words you want right by your ad placement. I find it helps at times. I just put a little slogan about each page just above my ad towers. It looks natural to visitors as it truly does tell what the page is about but I can use words that will help adsense focus in on the topic.

This is more of a nudge in the right direction though. It still has to fit the text on the page.

[ChrisKud5]

"Jenstar has pointed out before that sometimes it helps to put the key words you want right by your ad placement. I find it helps at times. I just put a little slogan about each page just above my ad towers. It looks natural to visitors as it truly does tell what the page is about but I can use words that will help adsense focus in on the topic.
This is more of a nudge in the right direction though. It still has to fit the text on the page.
"

This is obsurd. Their is no possible way google could disect each page when they targeted ads by creating a layout for each page and attributing a higher relavency variable to words or phrases closer to the ad placement. This idea is rediculous and any correlation you see is in your head. Adsense scans the text on the whole page. That would take a ton of processing power to regenerate an entire page and map out words and phrases and assign them a higher or lower relevency value based on the location of words. This idea is 100% false.

Just the fact that you said "Jenstar has pointed out before that sometimes it helps to put the key words you want right by your ad placement. " shows that it is not based on fact but coincidence.

[mike schmitz]

I agree - I find it highly doubtful that Google would have the ability to check for proximity of keywords next to their ad placement.

I would suggest modifying your widget page to include the wrench name in the url and making sure the world count on the page is higher for wrench then the basic widget itself. Just a thought.

mike

[annej]

Just the fact that you said "Jenstar has pointed out before that sometimes it helps to put the key words you want right by your ad placement. " shows that it is not based on fact but coincidence.

I'm getting several nice coincidences then as I've added these to several pages that wern't targetting well and it's really helped. There are times it doesn't work though. So if it is a factor it's just a subtle factor.

Hopefully Jen will see this and let us know if I'd understood her right.

[Jenstar]

Jenstar has pointed out before that sometimes it helps to put the key words you want right by your ad placement.

Yes, this does work, although not as well as it did prior to the April 1st algo change. I am not talking kw kw kw kw kw <adsense script> kw kw kw kw kw. If that worked without receiving warnings from AdSense, you would see it everywhere ;)

But when you have your AdSense code surrounded by your site navigation links; at the end of the article between an author credit blurb and your site's copyright information; near sponsored links; it can definitely skew the ads. For example: If you place your AdSense script near the bottom of a page, next to sponsored links on "hockey sticks", you could very easily see hockey stick ads on an article entirely about unrelated widgets, with the only hockey stick reference being the one at the bottom next to the AdSense script in the source code.

Ideally, you'd want to see something like title, then script (either placed there, or as a div floater), then body of article, to get the best targeted ads.

So you'd have something like:
Are purple widgets really better than green?
<adsense script>
Green widgets have been the popular choice over purple widgets for years. However...

But you definitely wouldn't want:
purple widgets, green widgets, widgets, widget makers, widgetry, buy widgets
<adsense script>
buy widgets now, green widgets, purple widgets, online widgets.
That would certainly set off that "excessive keyword" warning several people here have received.

I have done lots of testing on this, and it does work. I hope this explains what that reference means :) I have discussed this numerous times in various threads over the months, and many others have reported success with this.

[jomaxx]

Absurd? Impossible? "100% false"? Chris, why do you insist on posting your most uninformed responses in the form of a flame?

The fact is that proximity has been used as a factor in search engine algorithms almost since the beginning. It doesn't refer to the distince in pixels on the screen, of course. It's got to do with the proximity of text in the source code. I have no personal anecdotes to shed light on whether Jenstar's observation is correct, but it's certainly plausible.

[annej]

Thanks, Jenstar. I thought I had read messages by you about this before. And you explain it so much better than I could.

I have noticed something interesting lately. If I add these little blurbs with keywords and change the ad format to trigger the bot visit it doesn't seem to correct the ad matching problem right away. Instead it seems to take a week or two as if the proximity aspect is looked at later. But the web pages I changed a couple of weeks ago have much improved targetting now and they are related to the keywords I added.

An example was a page about dreaming of your ideal widgeting project. Dreaming was getting all this woo woo dream stuff. Not what I wanted! So I included goal setting in the blurb above the ads. Now I am getting goal setting type ads which fits the article perfectly.

[richmondsteve]

annej, what you did could have resulted in targeted ads being displayed a couple of weeks later, but then again maybe not. Coincidence, correlation or causation? I'm not singling you out, but after reading some recent threads here I thought I'd throw those 3 words out for people to consider...and yours was the last one I read. ;-) Cheers.

[annej]

In my experience proximity of the key words is a factor. I've had instances where the only thing I did was add one word next to the ads and it shifted things from being way off to being on target. But proximity is just one of many factors. Other times I've had to tweak the page title and/or a few words in the text. Sometimes it takes all three. Sometimes you just have to give up on using adsense with that article. But I do think key word proximity is something worth a try if you are having targeting problems. Some of you are saying, "What if it doesn't work?" I'm saying, "What if it does?" What do you have to lose trying it?

BTW the delay aspect is recent. Earlier the results occured pretty fast.

[ChrisKud5]

"In my experience proximity of the key words is a factor. I've had instances where the only thing I did was add one word next to the ads and it shifted things from being way off to being on target. But proximity is just one of many factors. Other times I've had to tweak the page title and/or a few words in the text. Sometimes it takes all three. Sometimes you just have to give up on using adsense with that article. But I do think key word proximity is something worth a try if you are having targeting problems. Some of you are saying, "What if it doesn't work?" I'm saying, "What if it does?" What do you have to lose trying it?
BTW the delay aspect is recent. Earlier the results occured pretty fast.
"

No, I would say that is coincidence and not due to placement of text. No way can or does google map out each and every page and value words based on proximity. I am surprised people would even think that it was a remote possibility that this would take place. If your page is about a certain theme, your ads will be about a certian theme. This talk of keyword proximity is so far off it is funny.

[annej]

They do it in the serps algo so why can't they do it with adsense?

[jomaxx]

The only thing I can think of is that Chris misunderstands what Jenstar is decribing, because it would obviously be a fairly trivial task to factor in proximity of page text to the AdSense code. To say that Google doesn't do it is one thing; to assert they cannot do it is preposterous.

I'm not 100% convinced Google does it or that it would help with relevance, but if Jenstar says she's tested it then she's in a much better position to comment than I am.

[paybacksa]

Matt Cutts said the same thing about proximity of influential text to AdSense at PubCon Orlando last year. I put it to work the next day with great success.

When adjusting pages, I call the text near AdSense "whisper text" .. it whispers into AdSense's ear to infuence the ads.

[mike schmitz]

Chris - just to be clear...I think Jenstar is talking about the relative proximity of keywords in the code to the google <script> call and not the page design and what items are close from a UI perspective. I thought it was the latter as well at first.

Mike

[annej]

Yes. That's why I if I am using a CSS float I put the little key word blurb in the float.

[richmondsteve]

I can confirm that proximity does appear to be taken into account. I did plenty of testing after someone first mentioned it here a few months ago.

[Visi]

Would have to disagree with you Chris, there is a relation here. We have an index page that deals with perhaps 5 topics per month and after some experimentaion over the past 12 months have found that sweet spot that triggers ads for us. Has moved around a bit as others have noted but Google definitly keys in on this area of the page script.

[asp4bunnies]

This is obsurd. Their is no possible way google could .... This idea is rediculous and any correlation you see is in your head. .... This idea is 100% false.

... No way can or does google map out each and every page and value words based on proximity. I am surprised people would even think that it was a remote possibility that this would take place... This talk of keyword proximity is so far off it is funny.

Do you work for Google, to be this sure about something that only Google knows the answer to?

[killroy]

"This talk of keyword proximity is so far off it is funny."

Strong words, considering that keyword proximity factors into millions, even billions of searches EVERY day, on just about ANY search engine. I built one myself, a small project, and keyword proximity was one of the simplest, relevancy improvements I could do for it.

I'm not arguing if AdSense does or does not use it, but it would be silly of Google not to use it as it's OBVIOUSLY trivial for Google to include proximity as a factor.

This is technical fact. It has been admited by most major engines PUBLICLY (Who normally wouldn't even admit to a sneeze), and many even PROMOTE the fact that they use proximity (and are proud of it!).

I'm really curious on what you base your outrageously strong and misguided convictions?

SN