Totally unrelated ads ONLY in the homepage

After years of adsense my homepage is not working with adsense

[zorogat]

Today, my homepage is showing totally irrelevant ads and as a consequence my ctr and ecpm are terrible.
No changes whatsoever have been made to the website.
What I don't understand is that ALL the other hundreds of pages of my website are showing relevant ads..
is Adsense broken?
Has anyone experienced something like this?

[Lame_Wolf]

I cannot see the point of people wanting to put adverts on the homepage.

Has anyone experienced something like this?

Sorry, no. I never have adverts on the HP.

[zorogat]

Why not? My homepage is making almost half of my Adsense money..

[farmboy]

About those ads you're seeing on your home page - are they related to anything you've been searching for recently?

Have you changed anything on that page recently?

How long has this been happening?


FarmBoy

[Lame_Wolf]

Why not? My homepage is making almost half of my Adsense money..

The whole idea of a site should be to either provide useful, honest info. Or, you have something to sell.

The homepage - to me - should be an intro to what is in the site. By having it on the homepage, you are letting your visitors go before they really view your site.

I know I wouldn't do it no matter how much it brought in. Each to their own :)

[zorogat]

Lame_Wolf,
my website is a blog and the homepage is a stream of VERY useful articles about language learning, written by professional teachers. My point is that my visitor can get 6 complete articles before leaving the homepage. All that in a single pageview and ad impression.
I can see what you mean but I assure you the info is very useful and honest :)

Farmboy,
this started 3 days ago. I've tried to re-upload the index to make the bot scan the page again with no success.
No change at all in the website.
The only change is an off-website one, but I really hope it's not the cause of it all, otherwise I am going to leave the Adsense program.
This change is related to Google Adwords. Basically they mailed me one of those 75 euros free coupon at my physical address. We already have a google Adwords account owned by my business partner so, in order to be able to use the 75 euros coupon I had to open a new Adwords account with my name in it. I opened this exactly 3 days ago and things got messed up, but I hope it's only a coincidence.
Why would they send me a letter with a free coupon and then penalize me for using it? I hope I am being paranoid here.

[zorogat]

I guess the lesson here is "NEVER give your Adsense income for granted"

Is there a way I can contact the Adsense team and ask what's happening?

[alephh]

Sounds like you're also the victim of the latest adsense "improvement":

[adsense.blogspot.com...]

Which basically makes sure that any well-optimized site shows unrelated ads killing CTR, eCPM and CPC.

Check out the "February Collapse" thread.

[farmboy]

Let's ignore the AdWords coupon thing for a moment because it might not be related.

I've had a problem with getting relevant ads on a page or two from time to time in the past. Sometimes I just took AdSense off for a few days and put it back and suddently relevant ads appeared.

If your site is a blog with new information being added to that home page on a regular basis, I think you're probably lucky to have been getting relevant ads as long as you have. With six full articles on that page that change, I can see how Google might have a difficult time determining what the content is about.

I don't know what to tell you that will help unless you wanted to set up a site and post one article per static page and use your blog to provide a brief excerpt of each article and send visitors to the articles on the site.

Back to the AdWords coupon, if you're using AdWords to send traffic to a page with AdSense on it, that could cause you some problems with staying in compliance with the program policies. It can be done but some people do it in a way that seems to meet Google's disapproval. IF that becomes a problem, Google might disable your account or send you a warning. I doubt they would just start showing non-relevant ads for that problem. I think the non-relevant ads is a different issue based on the information you have provided.

And one last note - remember that the ads you see when you visit your site might not be the same ads other people see when they visit.


FarmBoy

[zorogat]

Alephh,
thanks but my case doesn't seem to be that one.. the only ads i see are Google Trivia, they are not from advertisers, its like Google has no idea what the homepage is all about.
Another important thing is : also all my categories pages are behaving like that.
The only pages that show perfectly related ads are the single articles and single pages.

Farmboy,
thank you very much, I've already removed the ads form the homepage, if it doesn't work in a couple of days I'm going to remove ALL the ads from the site for 3 days and see what happens.
The weird thing is that I've got 2 ads in my home page (and in the categories page) : a 250x250 and a links group. The 250 x250 is showing only Google Trivia like 'What's the capital town of Peru?', while the links group totally disappeared. Instead of the links group I can see the following:
Google Ads - See ads for <input text>
Basically there's an html form instead of the links. If i submit the form by clicking on it THEN, no matter what text I input, all my related advertisers appear.
This is VERY strange, I wish there was a way to show my website in here, because I'm puzzled.
Also you said I've been lucky, but if you'd see the website there can be no mistake what the website is about because every article is strictly about learning the english language (for italians).Even a stupid Bot can understand that in 2 secs ;)

Last thing: I don't know about Adwords but we are not using it for this website, we are using it for another website where we sell things and with no Adsense..

[zorogat]

Another observation: I just checked and since i removed the ads from the homepage my ECPM skyrocketed and and CTR doubled, it's like the algo is trying to put my back to my normal earnings, but with less impressions.... I am more puzzled than ever..

[farmboy]

... but if you'd see the website there can be no mistake what the website is about because every article is strictly about learning the english language (for italians).Even a stupid Bot can understand that in 2 secs ;)

Bots just don't have the same logic ability as humans.

The easiest example is a site about politics. Candidate A is running against candidate B. You support A and put up a site that often includes articles about the shortcomings of B. The bot will see those references to B and you'll likely get ads supporting B. A human can determine that's exactly the type of ads you don't want to show to people who visit your site and support A, but the bot can't.

FarmBoy

[zorogat]

Yes the politics site is a good example. So basically the Bot out of the blue stopped understanding the content of my homepage.
But have you ever seen anything like this:
-------------------------------------
Google Ads - See ads for <input text> <submit>
-------------------------------------
instead of a link group?
And if you press the submit button then a page is showed with all correct ads (related to language learning).
This is obviously killing my CTR because the links are not there in the first place. Who would click on a submit form with a label 'Google ads'?
Cheers!

[farmboy]

So basically the Bot out of the blue stopped understanding the content of my homepage.

Didn't the content of your homepage change?

But have you ever seen anything like this:
-------------------------------------
Google Ads - See ads for <input text> <submit>
-------------------------------------
instead of a link group?

Yes, it happens when you put up a link unit and the link unit can't find enough ads.


FarmBoy

[zorogat]

Yes, the content changed. It has changed for almost the last two years... that's the weird thing.
I was under the impression that somehow Google understands perfectly the subject of the website, being really monothematic almost to be point of boredom. Yesterday i even went as far as changing the title of the last published post, including some keywords that would make it obvious.
So I suppose the only thing I'll have to try is to remove Adsense totally from the website for 3 days and see what happens.

About the link unit: the fact is that there's plenty of advertisers, all related to the content, if I click on that <submit>... so the Link Unit is acting as if it can't find any related advertiser, but when you click it finds them! what a mess!

Anyways, thank you for your help Farmboy. It's appreciated!

[zorogat]

So, for future reference, to fix the glitch I did exactly what Farmboy suggested and it worked (thank you mate, I think I owe you!):
I removed all Adsense from the website for 3 days and when I put it back everything was fine.
Now both the link unit and the 180x150 in my homepage show ads related to the content of my website.

[zorogat]

.. talked too soon.
After 15 minutes it went back to the unrelated ads.. :(
there is something seriously going wrong here

[zorogat]

also I should mention that if I save the page locally in my hard disk and open it from there I get all relevant ads...
so it's definitively not an on-page factor!

[zorogat]

I also found out that:
example.com/
doesn't show relevant ads

example.com/index.php
does show relevant ads!

I checked .htaccess and it looks totally normal, this is a Wordpress blog just like millions of others. I'm thinking momentarily to redirect my homepage to index.php...

(sorry for the amount of posts but I really hope someone can help with this!)

[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:16 am (utc) on Feb 18, 2010]
[edit reason] exemplified - only use example.com [/edit]

[icedowl]

I'm probably not much help, but I'd try reducing the number of posts on the page. It might help the mediabot to focus better as it might simply be confused and befuddled. It's not as smart as you, me or the next guy.

[purplecape]

Have you tried using the section/emphasize and section/ignore tags? Search AdSense Help for more info.--the basic idea is that you tell the bot "ignore this block of text" and "pay particular attention to this block of text." I have an adlink on my home page, specifically for those visitors who may not see what they want in my site, and I use those tags to help the adlink options stay focused. So far this works.

[netmeg]

You know what, go into the Google Keyword Tool (if you don't have it bookmarked, then Google it) and instead of a keyword, use the option where you type in your urls, and Google tells you what it thinks your page is about.

[zorogat]

icedowl,
I tried to reduce the numnber of posts, I even tried and removed all of the posts. Then I wrote a brief introduction article with all my keywords and publish it in the homepage. Didn't work

purplecape,
I tried to add the Adsense emphasize tags in the parts of the page where the most important keywords are. Didn't work

netmeg,
I tried the GoogleKeywordTool and if I input my homepage URL the tool find all perfectly related kywords


Also I did the following: I copied the source code of my homepage and pasted it into a new one. I called it newpage.php and upload id to the server.. and guess what? it shows relevant ads!

I spent hours looking for a similar case in many internet forums, but failed to find anyone in my situation..
I am starting to think that my homepage is doomed and maybe I need voodoo and black magic ;)

[zorogat]

I think maybe I found out.
I've got an article about learning the english language that explains how to use the expression 'in the buff', where of course the expression is mentioned at least 4 times, as long as the word 'nudo' (the italian translation). There are also examples of using the expression like 'Models are always in the buff'.
That article might have kicked a penalty for using those words in such a concentrated way, infact checking every page of the website (the category page, the homepage and the page of the article) where the article is published I find PSA ads.
I removed the article, but I read that this kind of penalty is somehow sticky and it has to be manually removed (or hopefully the Adsense Bot will discover that i removed the dangerous article that includes 'poison words').

The way the Bot works seem to be totally asynchronous: it checks if your page is bad and if it is, it probably records your URL in a table. At that point no matter if you change the content of your URL because you're in the black list.... I only hope the black list is not a permanent one. I mean i have many hundreds useful articles on the site, which doesn't deserve a penalty just because one single article explains the meaning of the expression 'in the buff'.

I'll keep this post updated to see if it works and to help anyone that will find himself in the same position.
The lesson here is you can't give anything for granted with Adsense, and even a single word that you publish can put you in trouble.

[explorador]

Good to hear you kinda worked it out.

I was going to suggest you to turn off some articles to test that out trying to figure out what words trigger the problem. I was also going to suggest you to edit your redirection to another file like "main-page-of-widgets" instead of the index.whatever because in my experience Adsense takes a the title of the page and also the name of the file in count for the ads, try it for yourself (use diff page file names).

good luck

[purplecape]

purplecape,
I tried to add the Adsense emphasize tags in the parts of the page where the most important keywords are. Didn't work

It can take a while before it starts to work. Also, you should use the "ignore" tags too, around text you don't want used.

[zorogat]

So now everything is fine after a week of suffering ;)
In case someone else finds himself in this situation double check EVERY word of your articles. You never know what could be in the bot black list of forbidden words.
Thanks to everybody who tried and help.

Cheers