hurricane relief ad

why does it appear?

[albertoF]

Hello,

I've been running a site with adsense for a couple of months. I dont get many visits, but still it used to show normal adverts.
Now i just get those "hurricane relief" or "make donation" lousy ads on my homepage. Other pages seem to work normally.
Does it have to do with CTR or can it be a warning before getting kicked out of the program?

Thanks

[DXL]

It's a public service announcement (PSA), its common for them to show up if you aren't generating paying ads for that particular page. I used to see them all the time on some new sites, but I haven't seen any lately.

You just have to wait it out.

[Tapolyai]

Or you can specify an other text, or blank through your Adsense account.

[Pengi]

For some reason, the Google Bots are not finding enough content to identify suitable ads to show.

Make sure your page is actually online and accessible.

Try adding to or changing the content on your page, and check you are not blocking the Google bots from accessing your page.

[Knappster]

Make sure you haven't used words like "flood" or "disaster" on the page. Or even "Katrina."

[wrgvt]

I have a page on one of my sites that's about a novel centered around a terrorist hijacking (just typing those two words probably sends this message to a NSA database somewhere. Hi guys!). AdSense must decide not to serve any ads for this page since it's always running PSAs. The benefit to me is that I use this page to test alternate ads to make sure they look right and fit appropriately in that same spot across all the pages of that site.

[malachite]

Have you added anything new to your homepage recently? if so, you may have included a "stop word" - wrgvt touches on this - a word which Google doesn't like so PSAs suddenly show on the page.

Re-read your homepage and see if there's a word which might trip the "ads off" switch.

Example: you're reviewing a song called "Murder and Blood" by Joe Bloggs and the Webmasters, but Google picks up the words "murder" and "blood" as bad words. A quick email to Adsense asking them to manually review the page can do the trick.

[FourDegreez]

It would be nice if they could get some new PSAs...

Are people really still donating to hurricane relief?

[DXL]

Make sure you haven't used words like "flood" or "disaster" on the page. Or even "Katrina."

That's incorrect. PSAs often reflect what major problem had just occurred, regardless of the content that appears on that page. I've seen PSAs for earthquake relief show up on food sites, and tsunami relief on fashion sites that I ran. By your reasoning, nobody would put Adsense on a blog related to floods or natural disasters because it would display PSAs only.

And its bad advice to eliminate the use of the word Katrina. One of my clients had content related to Katrina on his site. While I was picking up 5 and 10 cent clicks on some of my sites, he was getting $4-$8 clicks. The reason was because major law firms were shelling out big money for ads targeting people who needed a lawyer to help them with possible property issues relating to the hurricane. That and Gulf South government agencies were also paying top dollar to promote their programs for relocating back to the Gulf states.

This goes back to one of the problems with Adsense speculation, you have to look at what actually works and doesn't work. This guy's making up to $8 a click, I wouldn't discourage anyone else from removing keywords that would generate those kinds of ads.

[europeforvisitors]

I was getting "Katrina relief" PSAs on a couple of new pages right after they were published a few hours ago, which surprised me since AdSense usually begins serving targeted ads instantly. (The pages are now serving targeted ads.) So who knows--maybe there's some backroom maintenance going on at Google's end.

Home pages can be tricky, too. I stopped running ads on my home page a while back after several episodes of wildly mistargeted AdSense ads instead of the usual on-theme ads.

[shrimp]

Could be a glitch but I will say that a search for lists of 'stop' word can show you some words in your text that you might not have thought of that trigger PSA's. Sometimes it surprises me, and occasionally I have to make a graphic w/ a word on it to replace the word in a paragraph just to get targeted ads. Example. I had a page all about metal roof panels on a construction job I did...but the word panels brought up 4 out of 4 ads for companies selling web hosting equipemnt. The precise term for the roof panels is R-panels, and that term is now in an image, not text.
If my name were Katrina or even IVAN, I'd have to change it!