I see a problem...

with regularly updated pages.

[NeverHome]

On my site I have a sidebar with regularly updated news/views. The problem is, this "news" sections seems to get crawled by the mediabot thingy once in 24 hours (at best). But because I constantly update the sidebar "news" (usually 2 or 3 postings a day) these nice articles are already buried in the archive before google has figured out the right ads for the page.

I just mention this because I provide about 20% of the real estate (on 1024 x 768 resolution) to the "Ads by Google" LeaderBanner. It would be nice if the meadiabot polled the site more often, and, if it detected a change, crawled and reflected the changes in the ads served as soon as possible. (nice too if the googlebot followed at the same pace). :)

Or, maybe I should just slow down? How the heck can I keep it all in sync? I would appreciate the community's comments. Thanks.

[Blue_Fin]

As indicated in other posts, Adsense does not work well with news pages. You can confirm this by seeing all of the charity ads on the newspaper websites that serve Adsense.

[MonkeeSage]

What about having news panels as SSIs and cloak for mediabot?

Jordan

[Nikke]

Why not just hide the news ticker from bots by java-script including it?

You could place your news ticker in an external file and include it with a <script src="path_to_ticker/ticker.txt">

That way, the media bot won't see it as text.
And if the text doesn't exist on the page, Adsense will show ads targeted to the content the media bot actually sees.

[NeverHome]

MonkeeSage, I fear you are baiting the trap, again! :)

[MonkeeSage]

What do you mean?

Jordan

[Blue_Fin]

Just noticed this in the Adsense FAQ:

2. How do I optimize my site for the most relevant ads?
Our ability to target ads to your site depends on the content and structure of your site. Here are some basic guidelines for optimizing your site:

Place ads on pages that predominately contain text -- only text is used to determine a page's context.
If you have a robots.txt file, you'll need to remove it or add the following two lines to your robots.txt to allow our content bot to crawl your site:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

If your site contains frames, be sure to run the ads in the frame with your page content.
Place ads on pages that don't require a login.
Place ads on content pages that don't change frequently.

[chiyo]

we are considering taking adsense off the index (frequently changing news) pages. They seem to be OK for news item pages once archived. Agree very much that Adsense works best on static pages, as they say. Also if you have lots of frequently changing news headline links on varying topics, the bot will never really be able to work out what the page is about over time.

[jonknee]

It's probably a good thing it only visits though--people with forums that run adsense are complaining that the bot comes are too *often*. Maybe a few rev's down the road you'll be able to pick an option like:

* I don't update
* I update monthly
* I update weekly
* I update daily
* I update multiple times daily

That way they can tilt the bot to who is updating the most (and they can actually check to see if you really do update daily or whatever you pick via the bot).