Adsense on custom search pages way off-target.

[blaketar]

Our site uses a custom search engine written by our developers. The search brings up wonderfully targeted content within our site so we thought perhaps we would add some adsense to the search result pages. The layout is very similar to google's search result pages with adsense located in the right-hand column and the search results listed in order on the left.

My concern is the targeting of the google ads appearing. Out of the five ads displayed on a given search page 1 MAY be on-target and not all the time. Certain cases have ads displayed almost 180 degrees off the topic...

The same search term used on google.com produces very targetted ads and many of them lower-paying so I doubt it is an issue of low-vs-high paying ads on our site (then again I do not know the exact bid of the advertiser....).

We have Interest-based Ads Preference turned OFF and Third Party Ads Preference turned OFF.

Has anyone dealt with this sort of "Custom" search issue? Perhaps the title of the page needs to be formatted a certain way?

Thanks!

[ecmedia]

Blaketar why don't you use the Google CSE. It is a G product and fully compatible with AdSense and generally produces very high income for publishers.

[netmeg]

In my opinion, you might be flirting with a policy violation. AdSense TOS says you can't place AdSense on any non-content pages (excluding AdSense for Search) Whether or not they consider a search results page to be content - well, they don't consider them content for indexing purposes. And you can't put AdSense ad blocks on AdSense for Search results pages (although you can add a link unit). It's not clear, but if I were you, I'd not risk it.