Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The whole site is in English (not one word of Spanish) and the internal pages are displaying multiple, well targeted, ad blocks.
The home page has lots of keywords for AdSense to key on to. It's normal text explaining what's on the rest of the site (all in English).
Any thoughs, other then I'm unlucky and eventually it will probably correct itself? Anyone else seen anything like this?
Anyway, whatever, give it a few days. These things usually work themselves out. Google dopesn't make money displaying PSAs either.
I tried changing the Ad sense from a banner to a rectangle to try to "kick" Google into reindexing the page, but so far no change.
BTW I was wrong about Spanish. They actually appear to be in French. Not that it makes any difference tp the problem. I'm not in France either and there's no French language on the site.
While I guess my hosting company could be using a virtual server in 3rd world French speaking country, a tracert seems to end up in Dallas, TX, and I don't think they speak much French there!
If I take the page, make a copy of it under another name then "index.html" and look at that, it instantly starts serving appropriate AdSense. "index.html" just keeps serving PSAs in French. I could change the name of my "home page", but that could lead to future problems since just using the domain name without a file will default to the index file and that's not something that's under my control.
I seem to remember some sort of method of reporting to Google when pages changed, but I think that was for search engine re-indexing, not adsense.
The other approach is to do what you said and make the home page a different page and have you index.html file do a redirect to the new home page.
I'd rather not do redirects as I don't think they help search engine ranking and doing them on the home page may not be a wise move.
If worst comes to worst and I can't get rid of the French PSAs, I guess I'll just take AdSense off the home page. Better nothing than that.
There really ought to be some sort of trigger to get Adsense to review its "opinion" of a page, but I expect that if there was it would be so badly abused that they'd have to remove it. Maybe if it was limited to one page per day per account it could survive.
They simply said "looks OK to us" or words to that effect so I gather they did nothing.
The odd thing is that it resolved as soon as I replaced one of the AdSense ad blocks with a banner ad from my CJ account. On the very next page load, AdSense kicked in with real ads rather than PSAs in French.
Coincidence? Did AdSense see the banner ad and think "Oh, yes, I guess I should be serving real ads"?
Your guess is as good as mine.
If you're an amazon affiliate, you could follow google's alternate ad instructions for alternate image ads and send them to amazon's homepage with your affiliate ID, or to a product page your readers are likely to want to buy. Alternatively, run an ad, that maybe you could rotate, featuring one of your own pages. If your situation is not the sort that would benefit from an actual ad that you choose, then use the collapsing ad code so that your readers don't click away, thinking that because there's a french ad, it must be a french site.
Google generally resolves such problems in a timely way, but you're going to have a minimum of a day's delay until they do. To allow them to see the problem, you'll need to leave the adsense code in place. By using an alternate ad, you can at least prevent the PSA from doing your site harm.
