Adsense getting context -without- the crawler?

Local dev site, Adsense ads still relevant

[wackybrit]

I accidentally left Adsense ads on while working on a site locally, but before I turned them off, I noticed the ads were actually relevant.

My test site is running on my own local machine (http://127.0.0.1/, etc) and the ads were relevant for the page.

How? I thought Adsense depended on the special Adsense GoogleBot to get context? I've probably missed the memo, so any references to how this works would be great!

[celgins]

Even though you may have been working on your site locally, you were probably still connected to the web via broadband, DSL, etc.?

If so, the portion of Adsense code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

still reaches out over the web and serves ads.

Even if you blocked the Mediapartners bot, Adsense can still display relevant ads.

[Chapman]

Hmmmm- I am still getting only PSA's while working local. Certainly nothing even close to being relevant!

[trillianjedi]

It works on overall topicality. It's the same for pages that have not yet been crawled - Google still attempts to display ads that a relevant to the topic of the site.

TJ

[Chapman]

wackybrit-

Is this something new for you? Were you getting PSA'a in the past or simply non-relevant ads?

Chapman

[wackybrit]

I hadn't accidentally kept Adsense ads on while working on a local site before, so I don't know.

However, it just seemed odd. I didn't realize Google used JavaScript tricks or whatever to get the context of a page. I thought they *had* to crawl to get relevant ads. Clearly not! :)

[loudspeaker]

I've noticed similar things. I don't think it means that the crawler can actually see anything. In my experience, when non-PSA ads showed up, it was triggered by either:

1) The URL with clearly delineated keywords

or

2) The general "topic" of the non-development portion site (e.g. website.com is about flowers. When you start editing dev.website.com, you might see flower ads even though the crawler can not possibly "see" the pages within dev.)

[loudspeaker]

Which actually reminds me of a couple of questions I wanted to ask:

1) HOW do you actually "turn off" AdSense on your development site? Is there a simple way or do you have to have some sort of dev-site script that manually deletes the ads.

2) IF you don't delete them - i.e. if you develop your pages while looking at PSA etc, does it affect the way Google perceives your performance? In other words, does Google "see" and "count" the impressions clearly coming from local copies or "dev."-type sites?

[Knappster]

There's also a chance that Google is serving ads based on your recent web activity (or, at least, that much of it that they can track). I wonder if you'd still get relevant ads if you deleted your Google cookies.