Ambiguous words serve up irrelevant ads

How can you pick the right meaning in a word?

[wildfiction]

Here is an interesting problem. The AdSense ads on my web are usually spot on and perfect for my audience. However, I have produced a number of pages that have an ambiguous word that AdSense is picking up on and serving up irrelevant ads. The word is "tick". I run a futures day trading web site.

Tick has more than 2 meanings but the 2 that I'm concerned with are:
1. The smallest price by which a financial future can move. For example 0.1 points in the S&P 500.
2. An insect that feed off the blood of mammals.

Now I mention the word tick all over these pages that I'm talking about and AdSense picks up on the second meaning of the word and so the ads are all about tick repellents etc. which is not unreasonable.

Now my question is, how do you stop AdSense from seeing that type of meaning? How do you get AdSense back on track on those pages?

[roycerus]

* Rename the page to finance-tick.html or something like it.
* Make sure words surrounding adsense unit has finance terms.

Regards,
R

[peewhy]

Have you considered using a symbol?

[Woz]

... or replacing the "tick" word with a graphic of the word? Tedious, but effective.

Onya
Woz

[larryhatch]

Futures man might want to still bring in traffic for meaning #1.

In some markets (stocks especially) you can only sell short on an "up-tick",
i.e. not during a steady slide in prices.
How about not using 'tick' (except as a graphic maybe) but instead
emphasizing the text words up-tick or uptick, down-tick and/or downtick?

That should discourage the pest control ads. -Larry

[Bronte]

If the same tick-repellent advertisers keep appearing, then blocking their ads may help to a degree.

[wildfiction]

Have you considered using a symbol?

Peewhy: How do I do that.

Others: Many thanks for the useful suggestions.

[elfred]

I'm facing the same problem, but mine is more subtle. Basically, the words that make sense for my pages are compatible with another environment that is completely unuseful for my visitors. If I block the ads shown, I'm afraid I will end up showing nothing as it looks like the net result is that AdSense is targeting its ads towards the "other" environment. This causes those ads that are relevant for mine to lead to a very low value as they are not the main target for the original advertiser.
I hope I wrote it clear enough :-)

[wildfiction]

Blocking ads is a good idea but I run some other (minor) sites and the word 'tick' in the context of an insect may well be correct on one of the other sites.

Replacing the 'i' in the word tick with another ascii code that makes the 'i' appear but not allow the word to be interpreted as tick would work - I will investigate that.

In the meantime I have revisited those pages and the ads now being served up by AdSense are in context and there are no more ads that are relevant to the pest/insect industry. This confuses me because the content on the pages have not changed. My conclusion from that is that the AdSense Big Brother is following me around the web and when he sees me post a comment like this he goes off and tweaks the AdSense settings for my account :)

[peewhy]

Wildfiction

Use an industry standard symbol font such as Webdings, it it more likely to be in your font list. The 'tick' symbol is the letter A and it wil show as a tick.

[wildfiction]

When you say 'tick' symbol do you mean the check-mark symbol?

[peewhy]

That's the one!

UK Speak!