AdSense Targeting Problem

One word with two meanings

[wishus]

Hello, Webmaster World! Long time lurker, first time poster and all that jazz.

I have a blog about widgets and I write how-to articles on it.

My new article is about how to use a the "train" feature of a widget that lets you train the widget like you would train a dog to do tricks. The word "train" is mentioned many times in the article.

Unfortunately, the AdSense ads displaying are for trains, train tickets, train stations, model trains, etc.

I've considered trying "Section Targeting" around every mention of the word train, but that seems tedious and the Google Help page indicates that it may take up to 2 weeks before they re-crawl it.

Any ideas?

[Chapman]

I had a similar problem on one of my sites about wine labels where ad targeting ended up being for labels of the office supply and industrial shipping varieties.

Over the course of a year, no amount of section targeting or keyword/content restructuring showed any significant improvement.

Finally, I wrote Google support describing the problem (providing them screen shots of the content and ads that were appearing) and the issue was solved the NEXT day... never to have resurfaced.

Chapman-

[londrum]

you could adjust your text a little bit and talk about 'training', rather than 'train'.
adsense should pick up on that word easy enough.

[netmeg]

If it were I, I'd whip out the old thesaurus and find some other words to add to it, to let Google know what kind of train I'm talking about:

accustom, brainwash*, break in, care for, coach, cultivate, develop, discipline, drill, drum into, dry run*, educate, enlighten, equip, exercise, ground, grow strong, guide, habituate, harden, hone, improve, instruct, inure, make ready, mold, prime, qualify, rear, rehearse, run through, school, season, shape, sharpen, study, tame, teach, tune up, tutor, update, warm up*, wise up*, work out

hmmm... brainwash...

[Chapman]

Netmeg-

Boy did I try that! That's probably why I spent a year before throwing up my hands and writing support.

For whatever reason, on that one site, I couldn't get targeting to budge from shipping label ads.

Of course now, if I were to want to, I'll never be able to show ads for shipping labels.

Perhaps the OP will have more luck with his site in trying to redefine the crawler's view of his content but sometimes nothing seems to work!

Chapman-

[wishus]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Unfortunately, the feature of the product is called "train" and nothing else. As the article is fairly technical, I don't think using synonyms would do a service to actual human readers.

I also have an objection with having to alter a well-written, proofread technical article to try and game AdSense into displaying the proper ads. In addition, if a future article was authored by a guest, I might not be at liberty to change it.

(Also, the problem word isn't actually "train" - that was just an example I made up because it was easier to communicate out of context than the real word).

Chapman, thanks for sharing your experience. I would have never tried emailing them about it. I would have assumed they're too busy to have time for a small publisher like me.

[londrum]

one tip that might be worth trying out... that i think works pretty well... is placing the words you want the ad to be about directly after the ad (in your html code).

you can always move the words to somewhere else on the page with CSS, so they don't have to appear after the ad when someone looks at it.

adsense seems to weight those words pretty high when it targets the ads.
that way you can maybe leave all the other words on the page alone.

[Chapman]

wishus-

I would have assumed they're too busy to have time for a small publisher like me.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. I couldn't believe how responsive they were... followed up as well!

One caveat however, you've got to be pretty confident in TOS compliance before sending them screen shots and domain names.

Chapman-

[edited by: Chapman at 9:32 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2007]

[norton j radstock]

You could make an image of the word to use in place of the text version.....
;-)

[greatstart]

You could make an image of the word to use in place of the text version

This is exactly what I do to get around the targeting problem, and it works!