How to break the Adsense's "site theme" obsession?

Sub-sections don't show targeted ads

[androidtech]

We have a site that for the longest time was tightly targeted around a particular theme. I'll use the time-tested anonymous "widgets" for discussion purposes. Lately, we've added sub-sections that are related but off-center. For example "outer space widgets". However, AdSense ads on the sub-section pages are still tightly focused on "widgets" and have been for many weeks now, despite the fact that the page content is all about "outer space widgets". How do I get AdSense to move off the dime and show ads that are directly related to the sub-section content instead of the old main site theme content?

If this keeps up much longer we may take the plunge and try a new domain. I'd hate to do because that would mean going down the long road of establishing a presence in Google's SERPs like the existing domain has though.

[europeforvisitors]

If the theme of the site has been "widgets" and the subsections are about "outer-space widgets," is it so unreasonable for the algorithm to assume that "widgets" is the theme? Or to supply ads for "widgets" on "outer-space widgets" pages if ads for the more specific "outer-space widgets" aren't available (which could be the case)?

I'd be more concerned if the site's theme had been "widgets" and new subsections about "whatsits" and "thingamabobs" were displaying widget ads.

FWIW, AdSense usually does a fine job of targeting ads to my subtopics; the home page is where it has had problems from time to time. (That's one reason I took AdSense off my destination travel site's home page; I got tired of seeing "contextual" ads for hotels that were on the wrong continent.)

[andrewshim]

It's been 2 years and I'm still getting site-themed ads on off-center pages. I've found the ONLY way to force page-themed ads to appear are :

- totally fresh page with NO links to site template
- maximum ad blocks where the page-themed ads will appear on the last block
- yes... totally new domain.

Changed things around and really screwed up my stats. I've decided to live with it.

[ken_b]

If widgets is the main theme of the site and you have sub-themes like

outer-space widgets
surface widgets
undersea widgets

...then the issue might be helped if the sub-themes don't link to each other AND if you don't have AdSense on the pages that link to the sub-theme sections, like the home page, etc, but it still might take some time.

At least that has worked for me.

[zjacob]

What I've become to expect is that Adsense has "site theme" obsession only on sub-sections that have few to no advertisers available

OR

that the AS algo is calculating that the site-wide theme yields more revenue despite that there are advertisers for the niche theme within a larger theme.

[bumpski]

If you use IFrames or perhaps even Frames for the Adsense ad code you will only get site themed ads. IFrames used to work well producing targeted ads without slowing down web page rendering, but, Google broke IFrame functionality about two years ago. They never precluded IFrames in the TOS, they just warned they may not produce targeted ads, and they made this come true. Amazingly at the time Adsense Advisor contacted my directly and offered to investigate the problem, which I certainly appreciated, but I had to tell him I already pulled the IFrame code, why? Revenue of course!

Truly ashame because waiting for "pagead2 ... show_ads.js" server really slows page rendering no matter how you code the page these days. (Yes even if it's in a DIV). I just recoded a page to retest IFrames and yes they still only show site themed ads not targeted ads. If you got truly fancy you could IFrame the original page, using script to only show the Google ads (and not the rest of the page) in the IFrame. In this way Google would still think its on the original page and not some other IFrame page just showing the ads.

Other things which (may) cause themed ads are supplemental or non-indexed status of the page. This has varied over time. Use Webmaster Tools to assured your pages are being crawled by Google without error and in a timely manner.

[fredw]

I am wondering: Why would you want your ads to be so tightly targeted? Doesn't a wider range of targeting mean you get a bigger distribution of advertisers and hence more chances for your audience to see something that interests them? Even though your page is about "widget brackets", isn't it true that your audience is still the proper target for the wider "widget" ads?

[Content_ed]

Never been a problem for us, and we've got some pretty eclectic stuff. Have you segregated the sections of your site with internal navigation?

[MikeNoLastName]

I have a worse opposite problem with one of our client's sites. It is a niche weekly current events news column which is syndicated and the domain name is the writer's FirstNameLastName.com. The htacess out of necessity, to avoid duplication penalties with syndicatees who are allowed to incorporate it in full, blocks robots, so Google's bot does not index it. Sooo, Adsense assumes the domain name has something to do with the content and all the ads come up with things related to the writer's FirstName LastName, i.e. Joe LastName ringtones, Are you a FirstName Lopez type..., etc. and totally unrelated to content. Anyone know how to allow the adsense bot in without letting the SE indexing bot index it?

[bumpski]

MNLN

[google.com ]

If you would like to grant our crawler access to your pages, you can do so without granting permission to any other bots. Simply add the following two lines of text to the top of your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

This change will allow our crawler to index the content of your site and provide you with the most relevant Google ads for that content.

Check out the link above, there are a couple other references too.

Adsense used to insist the following be in your robots.txt:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

I've found historically, to truly have targeted ads, your pages must be indexed by Google as well. There's a small chance using robots=noindex metatag (or Googlebot=noindex) on every page and then unblocking Google in robots.txt "may" help. (Check metatag syntax, please) Google will still crawl your pages, but they will not show in the search results. Google then seems to have knowledge of the site and this might be sufficient for Adsense. Using robots.txt to block Google, tells Google don't even look.

[MikeNoLastName]

Yep, I found the MediaPartners-Google* reference on their help pages shortly after writing that last post. Added it, but no improvement yet even after doing an Adsense Preview Tool. It's only been 18 hours or so though.

>but they will not show in the search results. Google then seems to >have knowledge of the site and this might be sufficient for Adsense

Yes, but will Google then know not to consider them a duplicate with the other identical indexed pages?

[ronburk]

a) For small pages, the standard menu/navigation text may sway the results. Use the standard Mediabot markers in your text to exclude navigation text.

b) Have the subsections actually been SEOed for the desired extended search term? Is it in the title tag? In an H1 tag? In the navigation that points to this page? In the (gasp) meta keywords/description?

c) Are the subsections semantically shallow w/respect to the extended search term? Search for that term on Google. Look at the top 50 pages. There will be certain words that are relevant that appear with great frequency in those pages. For example, if I'm going after "outer space widgets", I may find that those 50 pages often contain words like "launch" and "astronaut". I will therefore consider including those terms to give robotic software greater semantic clues as to the subject of the page.