How to stop sitewide Adsense one-niche ads?

One theme coming up on all pages regardless.

[tigertom]

I have a site that has ads for widgets coming up on every page regardless of what that page is about.

Refreshing the page doesn't work. The Adsense bot is not disallowed by 'robots.txt'. I deleted my cookies also.

Even if the page is about a topic I know there're plenty of relevant ads for, it still shows ads from this other topic.

Seems like it's decided my site is about this niche and nothing else (it isn't).

Sorry if this is a standard problem. I haven't heard of it before.

[ogletree]

How long has it been since you put the ads up.

[eeek]

This is why we really need a negative keywords feature. It'd help publishers; it'd help Google; it'd help advertisers.

[Khensu]

Immediate Divorce
Sit on the beach afterwards
And watch the waves roll in!
SchlockyAttorneys.com/Hawaii

You mean ads like this

[tigertom]

Khensu: No, the ads aren't like that. They're OK, just off-topic for a lot of pages. But maybe 'widgets' is a tacky subject too. I don't know. It ain't payday loans, for example.

Ogletree: The ads have been up for about three months now, so they've had enough time to assess them

The only other unusual thing is that there was a surge of hits for long-tail pages on 'widgets' last month. Also, there are loads of links for 'widget'-related topics on the front page. The surge has past, but Google is still serving up these ads on _every_ page.

Now, I did pull up a page on a lucrative topic a few weeks ago, and the ad was on-topic, so it's queer.

I've not seen this before, and I wondered if the experts knew the cause.

[BillyS]

Do you know if these are PPI ads? Maybe somebody decided they wanted to advertise on your site and you're seeing PPI ads and not PPC. If the offer is high enough, those will run.

[tigertom]

I thought I'd turned off PPI (Pay Per Inclusion) years ago, but now I can't find the option in Adsense that does it, or if it exists at all.

[johnnie]

Use your fliter

[eeek]

Use your fliter

Mine's full.

[Khensu]

Dump it on a off day except for the "for sures" and start over again. I usually dump my filter quarterly and it takes about 3 days before it is half full again but it takes 3 month for it to fill up all the way. You would be surprised who is not coming after you after that much time has elapsed.

[eeek]

Oh, I've done dumping. It still fills up quite rapidly.

[bumpski]

To turn off "CPM" ads you must email Adsense. Assuming they still do this. This should include site targeted ads.

I've found in the past if Google, for whatever reason is having difficulty crawling your site, or if you've done something like put the Adsense code in an IFrame; Adsense will drop back to its perceived site wide topic for your site.
I used to use an IFrame successfully (now years ago) for Adsense ads, then Adsense added a new feature Add Sectioning
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> etc.
When this feature was introduced all ads on the site went to the obvious generic site topic and were far less targeted. Pulling the Google code out of the IFrame and putting it back directly in the body fixed the problem.
The TOS allows IFrames; Adsense simply suggests you not use them. Its a shame, now fetching Googles javascript(s) can slow down you site's rendering. Putting code at the end of the body in a div helps some.

[tigertom]

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

I've used this. It doesn't help, in this case.

[londrum]

i have the same problem but i'm thinking it might just be because of a lack of ads at the moment. pre-recession there were enough ads to fill all my different pages, but now there aren't enough to go round, so you end up with more and more generic ones.

i have ad blocks with 3 ads in, and i frequently see one of the spaces filled up with the perfect topic, and the other 2 filled with more generic ones -- so it can't be anything to do with targeting.

[tigertom]

Londrum: I think you're right. Just saw relevant ad pop up for a lucrative subject.

Perhaps I just expected too much of the mighty GOOG; to have ads for all occasions.

[netmeg]

Don't forget, just because YOU see a set of particular ads doesn't mean that's what your users see. That's why I have developed a small network of friends in other parts of the country and world (who are blood sworn not to do any clicking) who check one or two of my sites when I ask them and tell me what they see.

[eeek]

Don't forget, just because YOU see a set of particular ads doesn't mean that's what your users see.

True. But when I see poor quality ads my CTR seems to reflect the problem.

[Jane_Doe]

Sometimes you just have to remove those topics from your site altogether. I added some pages to one of my sites on a topic a lot of people probably don't write a lot about and then got ads for that topics on every single page of my site. My earnings went way down. I just had to get rid of the new pages altogether and then my ads and income went back to normal.

Eventually I will put them on their own site as there clearly seems to be a demand for ad space for that topic, but I don't want them taking over all of the ad space on an existing site with higher paying topics.

[tigertom]

Just found this option in [google.com...]

'Interest-based Ads Preference'

Turned it off. Let's see what happens.

[tigertom]

Nope. Still doing it.

One thing which might work, but which I can't implement yet, due to having a complicated .htaccess file:

Redirect pages on the offending topic to another domain hosted to point to the same directory e.g.:

www.yourdomain.com/annoying-subject-page.html

301 redirected to

www.yourotherdomain.com/annoying-subject-page.html

Then the Google MediaPartners bot will target yourotherdomain.com with the annoying ads.