Targeting really stinks today

[ownerrim]

this is one of the most frustrating things about adsense. sometimes for days and weeks the targeting is dead on. then...out of the blue the relevance of the ads becomes crap. and it often has nothing to do with the number of advertisers available. they're still there. it often has nothing to do with on-page content, especially when a page mentions relevant keywords quite a few times (without spamming, of course). so, what's the problem? of course, i don't have a clue.

however, i do think adsense should provide some type of option where publishers can indicate in the control panel (or however you might do it) what the site is ABOUT. basically, this would be a list of keyphrases or keywords. ok, the first argument against this would be that publishers would try to list keywords for which their site or sites is hardly relevant---

suggestion: the keywords would apply to one site only, the keywords would be manually reviewed by a google person, and google would charge a review fee for this manual review. 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 200 bucks. Sure, I'd pay it.

sound like a bad or half thought out idea? maybe. just floatin' ideas in the wind. back to my basic point: my targeting sucks today.

[birdstuff]

europeforvisitors often suggests that we should be able to use negative "helper" keywords in the meta tags. Not to fool the mediabot, but rather to nudge it in the right direction if it's having trouble picking up the theme of the page.

For example, if an article on a Bristol, TN NASCAR race drew ads for hotels in Bristol, England you could tell the mediabot that the article has nothing to do with Bristol, England.

This makes perfect sense to me and it should be easy to implement.

[ownerrim]

negative helper keywords. sounds good. GG or ASA, if you're out there (like beseeching the gods of olympus), is there any indication that something like this might be implemented someday?