Forum Moderators: martinibuster
One legitimate way to get a DMOZ listing is to submit your site (s) for their locality regardless of the relevance. It appears Google has gotten around to locality targeted Adsense ads in the content network. The flaw in this concept is database driven Adwords advertiser's that of course target every possible little locality in the US and the world generating thousands of ads that will never get "clicked". Very, very, few people live where I live, yet now one of my sites is showing many ads targeted at my community or communities that happen to have the same name. This site has some extremely small local interest, but plunking every possible database driven ad on this site for my locality is going to kill my income from this site.
I'm guessing the first source of localization is DMOZ listings. I've never, ever, been able to get a proper DMOZ listing in the appropriate category for the site in question. In fact the number of listings in that appropriate catergory has remained fixed for almost 3 years, which should be just about impossible. So I've done as suggested in DMOZ forums, at least gotten a listing for the locality of the site, where the business is located, but the site has almost no local interest, but the listing in DMOZ is still justified (IMHO). Sorry DMOZ supporters but there are problems!
Now it appears Adsense and Adwords is locking onto this localized information for publisher's websites and using it to target Adsense ads to localities of our websites.
Perhaps Google is also sampling "Who is" information as well so it's time to make this information locality independent also, it's accurate now in my case. Of course to be courteous to this site's visitors I actually do list my true mailing address on one and only one page on the site in question. This page is low enough in linkage heircarchy it isn't even always in Google's index.
I also see a preponderance of ads for the locality of my Webhost, oddly enough at the other end of the US. This is really pretty poor targetting.
I've checked through several ISP's so I don't believe the targeting is client specific, it appears to be site and Webhost specific.
ASA: Will publishers be able to turn off localized targeting where it is inappropriate for the sites in question?
Finally Adsense is conducting so many concurrent experiments it's literally impossible to optimize income on a given site.
Adsense, please keep creating new Ad Units or Ad Unit options, for these experiments instead of poking experiments into existing add units. Please give the Publishers some inkling of control over all these experiments.
-ASA
