No ads/PSA ads

Influenced by # of urls filtered?

[sailorjwd]

Does anyone have any input about the increased likelyhood of Ad timeouts/psa ad showing if your URL Filter list is maxed at 200 entries vs an empty list?

The obvious answer is yes, the filtering would slow delivery - but does anyone have any more specific data on this?

The reason I ask is because I recently maxed out my url filter list and during a similar time frame I am getting no ads at all (no PSAs either) on pages about 30-40% of the time. Ads usually show up if I refresh the page.

[hunderdown]

I have to ask--why are you putting so many URLs in the filter? If you feel that you need to block so many potential ads, then maybe AdSense isn't a great service for your site?

[sailorjwd]

I put urls in the filter for inappropriate, off-target ads... I've tweaked my words on the pages to help focus subject matter but that only works so far.

Site is about programming - lots of examples.

Perfect for adwords since income is incredible.

But there are a lot of ads for things like 'website templates' and folks trying to sell 'Office XP'.. or when talking about database 'tables' I would get a lot of furniture ads.

You can bet that a significant # of us are at or near the 200 url limit.

[hunderdown]

Thanks, that's interesting. My site is a well-defined niche content site and I've never had a problem with off-topic ads. I've only put about a dozen URLs in the filter, for certain competitors and some companies whose reputations I don't like.

Is it possible that you've filtered out so many URLs that some pages aren't getting any ads--or are you confident that you're blocking the off-topic ads to allow the on-topic ones to appear?

[sailorjwd]

There are plenty of ads...

I also just entered the keyword exclusion tool beta for adsense - helps alot since I can exclude ads based on keyword and not just the url. So, when talking about designing database tables I don't get 'furniture' ads :)

I am getting an avalanche recently of ads, and at the same time spam email, for 'OEM' versions of Microsoft operating systems and office software. There must be dozens of folks try to sell this stuff with adwords campaigns... excluding them by keyword has been a godsend - I don't think I could keep up with all the urls for these folks. They are even starting to misspell words in their ads in order to get around the keyword filter (I think)... like edition as 'edtion'.

[HughMungus]

I've always wondered how Google feels about people using the filter that way. Anyone ever run into trouble for filtering what they see as "off topic" ads?