Adsense targeting WAY off on translated pages

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I noticed a significant drop in CTR today (50%+) and am looking for possible causes. Though I doubt it accounts for my drop in CTR I did find the following to be decidedly unhelpful.

I went to Google's usercontent translation service and tried my site. All of the ad units on my site stopped showing targeted content for my sites topic and instead showed ads for Translate, French Translation,
Language Translation and Translate to English.

My site is decidedly not about translations or language or anything related to those terms.

Google's usercontent pages are also ignoring my frame busting script so the url is usercontent.com etc.

Is there a fix for this? (script that works OR way to get more targeted ads in translate).

Oh, and even though the page is translated to French, the ads remain English. Not good.

[incrediBILL]

I started a similar topic over a year ago about adsense, translations and cache pages with adsense and it started out strong and turned into such a big problem for google we never heard back about the final disposition.

The adsense advisor at the time originally came out saying it would be resolved soon, to soon admitting it was a problem so big it exceeded her scope, to fading away into oblivion.

You're screwed.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hah, thanks for being quite blunt Bill :-)

The problem, for me, goes beyond just poorly targeted ads too. Since all links are no longer really on my site (now framed under "translate.usercontent..." ) anyone clicking gets redirected to my home page instead of the links real destination. I set it up that way so that for a link to be usable it has to actually be on my site, not posted (or framed) elsewhere. I do this to protect affiliate relationships by not letting links appear on sites I do not control, wich is in the TOS for many affiliate programs.

In other words I can't monetize translated content well and It's also being used by scrapers to copy my content into foreign websites.

<meta name="google" content="notranslate"> works to block the translation but not stop my page from appearing in Google usercontent.

Is there a way to actually remove my content from usercontent without actually blocking Googlebot?

[zerillos]

same thing here. i have a lot of visitors who translate my pages and i saw the same drop yesterday.

the translated pages show the same issue, (ads for translation services). however, this is the first time I looked at the ads on the translated pages so i can't know for sure if this started happening yesterday or not...

[zerillos]

I've noticed some website show no ads at all when served from translate.google.com
how do they do that?

[incrediBILL]

Here's the previous thread on this subject:
[webmasterworld.com...]

At the time ASA said it was going to be evaluated, then suggested it was looking complicated, then it was obviously dropped and never fixed while we're all still losing money on this nonsense.

[mromero]

Have you all tried placing up pages with genuine translations?

Visiting sites in other languages shows me ads in the proper language.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Have you all tried placing up pages with genuine translations?

Definitely on my to-do list for early 2011.

[zerillos]

I see that not all websites are affected by this translate problem. I found a website that has the same ads when browsed directly and when translated. however, i believe they are premium publishers...

[mromero]

Sgt_Kickaxe This has been on to-do-list for years. Yesterday we threw up our first genuine translation and half the adverts are in the translated language and half in English.

[zerillos]

here's an interesting thought.

if you check out side diagnostics in your adsense account you'll probably see lots of links like these
http:/ / webcache. googleusercontent. com ... something...
and
http:/ / translate. googleusercontent. com ... something...
being blocked by robots.txt

i know i do. first i though it was just a glich in the system.

could it be that google is blocking the adsense bot from accessing its own pages? this could count as a reason for the ads being off topic on those pages.