Finally got unpaid traffic and my ads became untargetted

Just a vent

[MediaSpree]

Well I checked my server logs and saw that finally, FINALLY after months of paying for my traffic through adwords one of my pages got picked up and linked to from a prominent website. The referals from that site were more than the ones I paid for, GREAT! So I go to look at the page to see what all the fuss is about and my ads are completely untargetted on that page! Every other page is correct, except the one that people are reading most. I hope it corrects itself soon before the fire dies out!

(p.s. I am flattered that people like my content but I'd like to at least get a few clicks from them :)

[euripydes]

Refresh the adsense code on that page. Change colour combiantions, channels info, whatever. The robot will re-crawl and (hopefully) improve the targetting.

[MediaSpree]

Thanks, I took your adivce and changed my channel and ad color. Lets see what happens. Do you its also relevant that my normally targeted horizonal adlinks unit has only a "change to ads about" form and no adlinks links on the page as well?

[WallyWorld]

I once complained to Google that I was getting lots of untargeted ads on certain pages. They replied asking which pages and fixed the ads on the ones with a decent amount of content.

I don't know how they can do that but the ads were much more targeted after that.

[bumpski]

If the site linking to you added some sort of tracking string, you may get untargetted ads (for a while?). You should have an Adsense relevance fix in time. Check your logs to see exactly what the requested URL is when visitors come from the site linking to you.

Example:
www.yourgreatsite.com/widgets.html?tracking_string

The link will still hit your page:
www.yourgreatsite.com/widgets.html

But as far as Adsense is concerned it is a new page! For Adsense to fix relevance on this "new" page, it's got to crawl it with Mediapartners bot which at times is very quick and sometimes seems to take more than a week!

I learned this when I added tracking strings to my Adwords ads. All of the sudden when I clicked on my own ads linking to my site I noted that the Adsense ads on this particular page were no longer relevant, or had switched to a default set of ads that seemed to be used for the site "ad theme". Ads similar to those on my home page were showing up on page widgets.html, when the?tracking_string was appended.

[MediaSpree]

Well I think I may have found my problem. I submitted a sitemap to google before I wrote this article. I forgot all about keeping my sitemap up to date. So I guess its my own fault :) Site map resubmitted! Come on Googlebot, come back boy!

[bumpski]

Sorry to say but I really doubt it's your sitemap.xml or txt.

Is the page in question "URL only" or "partially indexed", meaning all that is shown is a URL instead of a proper Title?