Forum Moderators: martinibuster
[edited by: Jenstar at 3:45 pm (utc) on April 3, 2005]
[edit reason] No promotional URLs please, as per TOS [/edit]
First point is that you aren't allowed to post URL's to your site in this forum - you might like to remove it before a moderator does.
I don't unfortunately know the problem to the forum ads question. I have a page that is generated from a database, and the ads aren't always relevant on there. I have a feeling that the bot visits/ads load before the content is generated, therefore the bot doesn't know what to target, and can only go on what it can see (before content load).
In my case I put in a couple of paragraphs about the page at the top of it that the bot *will* see as it's not generated from .asp and that seems to do the trick once the bot's been a couple of times. I don't know if it's possible to do this on your forum page. Hopefully some of those who use ads on generated pages can chime in - I might get some answers too!
I suppose the other question is do you have a channel on the forums banner, and do the ads pay? If the ads are paying, then I wouldn't worry that they are not related. In fact, visitors will see a variety of ads on your site (some relevant, some not) and this may well be a positive factor for CTR, as opposed to seeing the same ads on all pages.
Googleboot is having hard time indexing the forum pages due to the above, consequently producing very poor targeted ads.
Solution (which worked magic in my case):
Install a mod which via .htaccess makes the url's (pages) appear as static html pages and removes all them session id's from the pages address (the last thing you want SE wise are session id’s in page URLs. They give the spiders a really hard time indexing the forum pages.
You want to look for a mod which turns your forum into a more SE friendly forum. You should experience a dramatic increase in CTR and daily income almost immediately after instaling it.
The problems on your forum (from experience) are the session id's and dynamic urls.
Max is very correct here.
When I first joined AdSense my site (not a forum) had session IDs and based on Google's suggestion I ripped them out and the ad content improved within the week. I also had (and still have some) dynamic URLs which I switched to appear as static URLs for at least the 1st page per section and this also made a huge difference.
hey thankyou for that, ok with this mod you are talking about.
Where can I get it? I'm new with this stuff and don't know about session id's, dynamic urls and so on.
Do a search for "your type of board" (not sure what type you are running) + "search engine optimization". There should be a mod (fix) for your board. I know that phpbb boards have a few.
P.S.
Word of advice, some advance knowledge is required to install the mod (some board scripts will need to be modified etc). I recommended not to fiddle with it is unless you really know what you are doing. It is not for beginners.
Time to set up a web site on your own computer, and you’ll learn all about web servers and related. You’ll then be able to respond to common problems, and you’ll be able to experiment with updates, or other programs that may enhance your site … so when you have a problem solved … you can then upload the solution to your “live” web server.
That’s a much better scenario than … “so I guess the mod isn't an option”.
