adsense uses URL

[winglian]

I was "playing" around with adsense and I found that when there is no content on a page and only the adsense block, then it uses the URL to determine what to show in the adsense block. Here's how I tested it.

Create an index.html page with only the adsense code and no content.

to your apache.conf file add the following lines which allow you to play with the names and directories and only have to have one page

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule  ^(.*/)?(.[^/]*)\.html$ index.html [L]

restart apache and go to
www.example.com/index.html - you shuold get PSA's
www.example.com/asbestos/index.html you should get asbestos related ads
www.example.com/asbestos.html you should get asbestos related ads
www.example.com/nissan/cars.html - you should get ads about cars

etc, etc
if your domain is non-generic, this test does not work as well

Wing

[macdave]

I noticed this last week. Viewing pages on my development box (behind the firewall), I used to get nothing by AdSense defaults. But recently I've been getting real ads, which appear to be triggered by words in the URL.

[valeyard]

I first noticed this a while back when viewing pages from my own hard disk. Instead of PSAs I started seeing ads for office supplies and filing cabinets. Took me a while to realise that the reason was the "file://" in URL!

I think that was a bug - haven't seen it for ages - but it certainly seems that for a new page Adsense uses the URL until the page has been properly indexed and analysed.

[jetteroheller]

This brings me to a new problem.

Before my attempte to live from AdSense and other advertising, my main income was and ist also now to deliver seminars about internet promotion.

At this, I burn my software with my most important web sites on CD to give my students examples.

Shure, my most important web sites are also the ones with the AdSense code.

So there is suddenly the situation, that there are several CDs and installations on hard disk around pulling real ads with file:///d:/internet/my-example.com/

[linear]

Wow, that's interesting.

I don't think there's anything in the TOS about a requirement to serve your pages from some httpd. But the idea of them being spidered sort of presumes that, doesn't it? Yet it's just not explicitly spelled out.

Imagine a book with an included CD-ROM, the pages on which all had adsense blocks, and with file URIs designed to facilitate matching. Something like that could even perform pretty well--the book buyer is prequalified in a very real sense.