Google Adsense Not Using Page Content Question.

Why my site only shows one topic.

[mbuttrey66]

Lately most of our pages that have Adsense on them are not showing relative ads...

They are mostly staying with the exact theme of the website...NOT THE CURRENT CONTENT.

For example:

A page is about red widgets, and yet it shows ads for green widgets.

<snip>

This is similar on other pages, too.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks,
Matt

[edited by: engine at 8:16 am (utc) on July 11, 2007]
[edit reason] Specifics and links removed [/edit]

[Quadrille]

Several possible reasons, but the most likely, I think, is that each page only has a fairly small amount of unique content - but a lot of shared content (navigation, promos, etc).

Everything on a page 'counts' for adsense, unless you specifically exclude it, so all the links to other kinds of wodgets are counted, and 'widgets - the site theme - is common to many of them, while the page theme may be underrepresented.

If it hurts adsense, it maybe affecting SEs, too.

[Rosalind]

Imagine this scenario: my domain name is "widget ropes", and a band once released an album called "widget rock". Say the band's name is "The Crazy Jellyfish". I am getting ads related to jellyfish.

It sounds odd, but that's exactly what is happening on one of my websites (different keywords, of course). It mainly happens on new pages and ones without a high density of any one keyword. This gives an insight into one the ways Adsense tries to guess the topic of a page and then target its ads, but in practice it doesn't seem to work all that well.

[netmeg]

It can take a while for AdSense to figure out not only what your page/site is about, but also what your visitors like to click on, depending on how much text you have. My main site is ALL text, and it took a year or more before I got good targeted ads with a great CTR.

[mayest]

Everything on a page 'counts' for adsense, unless you specifically exclude it

Is there a way to specifically exclude content (header, navigation, etc) from Adsense? If so, could you please share it? Also, would there be a downside to excluding content?

[AdSenseAdvisor]

You can help focus your ad targeting by adding section targeting in your HTML:
[google.com...]

This doesn't guarantee specific targeting results, but it does guide our crawlers to the most important content on your pages. Be sure to read the entire Help Center entry (especially the last paragraph) for tips on implementing this feature effectively.

-ASA

[timwestla]

Imagine this scenario: my domain name is "widget ropes", and a band once released an album called "widget rock". Say the band's name is "The Crazy Jellyfish". I am getting ads related to jellyfish.

LOL. I had a page that said something like, "if you add the two values..."

The AdSense ads appearing on that page were related to A.D.D. and Attention Deficit Disorder...

[mbuttrey66]

You can help focus your ad targeting by adding section targeting in your HTML:
[google.com...]

This doesn't guarantee specific targeting results, but it does guide our crawler

This looks like a positive option.

Guess I should have payed more attention to the tricks when originally signing up years ago.:O

Thanks.

[Rosalind]

It's unfortunate that you can't do anything about excluding the domain name as well as specific page content. Not all of us have keyword-targeted domains, sometimes it's a brandable one, or something that just sounds cute but is only loosely related to the topic. It would be good if we could exclude the domain name, yet still include the page titles and directories.

[Rosalind]

I just made a feature request to Adsense support. If this issue affects you, you should do the same.