PSA on one area of site

Just started two weeks ago

[jawhite]

I run a portal site which has a large search engine database. Users can browse by category or do a search. Ads appear fine when users are browsing by category. These are static html pages. But when users do a search it only shows PSA's. This just started a couple of weeks ago. For the past year very targeted ads had been showing for searches. Any idea why this would have changed all of a sudden?

[jawhite]

any ideas on why this would happen?

[Jenstar]

Probably a Stop word [google.com] issue.

[lammert]

Do you use a GET or POST with your search?

When using POST, the mediabot does not know what information is displayed on the SERPs and this can cause PSA's to occur, so POST is not recommended for own SERPs with adsense.

When using a GET, every search URL is different like www.example.com/search.cgi?kw1+kw2 and the Mediabot first has to visit your page with the same query string to see which ads to serve. Maybe it is not fast enough or is blocked from your site for whatever reason.

Look in your server log files to see if the Mediabot visits just after a user submitted a query. If the Mediabot didn't visit your site with the same query, the adserver does not know which ads to display and you will see PSA's instead.

[jawhite]

I'm sure it's not a stop-word issue on this site.

I am using 'get' for the search. It had worked fine for a year, up until March 3 and then it just stopped. Stats show that NO ads have been delivered since March 3.

I will check my logs as you suggested. Thanks for the tips.