Forum Moderators: martinibuster
But even then, there are likely to be times when the ads don't make any sense. I had a run where my sports site showed nothing but mosquito ads. And then there was the two week stretch where my modeling hobby site showed nothing but Pilates ads.
The bad ones go away eventually.
[google.com...]
Some of the widgets I write about and review, have names similar to widgets of a completly different category (or even share the same names, even if there was no similarity), and I was getting ads for the other completly different category.
The best example I can come up with that has nothing to do with any of my sites, would be if I was writing about Mustangs, as in horses, and gettings ads for Mustangs, as in cars.
The easiest way I found to fix this, was to make sure that the link name (not the title of the page), was like this:
www.whatever.com/2004/09/09/mustang-horse-care
rather than
www.whatever.com/2004/09/09/mustang-care
Simply adding the equivalent of "horse" into the link name made every ad from then on be appropriately targeted.
btw: my URL do contain the keyword of the pages topic (for SEO sake), but that doesn't seem to help my ads...
my URL do contain the keyword of the pages topic (for SEO sake), but that doesn't seem to help my ads...
If you want to rule out other possible problems:
Find a website running AdSense with pages on the same topic as you. If they're getting correctly targetted ads, do a keyword analysis on their page(s). You can find some free online tools that will do this analysis for you. Compare that to the same keyword analysis of your page(s). Look for words they have that you don't, or words they have a whole lot of that you have few. Something obvious may jump out at you.
Did you mean to try to target other keywords, like say "Red Widgets"? That's an Idea, hmmm... I'm off to try that.
Did you mean to try to target other keywords, like say "Red Widgets"?
If that is what analysis of a competitor's website that is getting targetted AdSense ads for the same topic reveals, then sure. OTOH, if analysis shows that those pages often contain the term "Frankfurter", then I would try making sure I have both "Widgets" and
"Frankfurter" on the page.
These are machines, not humans, that determine what the "theme" of a page is, and one of the pieces of data they have is the results of offline data mining analysis that shows them what words tend to correlate with a given word.
For example, Google may have determined that when the theme is "swimming pool", the page often contains the word "chlorine" or "board" -- even if it doesn't contain the word "swimming". Google may use correlated terms like this to infer that the word "pool" on a given page really is referring to "swimming pool", or to strengthen its opinion that the theme of the page is really "swimming pool", as opposed to, say, "swimming".
If you can locate pages on your chosen topic that are receiving (unlike you) well-targetted AdSense ads, then you may be able to use standard keyword analysis tools to discover one or two choice words (that need to be added or removed) that may sway Mediabot's opinion about what the theme of your page is.
As far as I know from SEO, G doesn't like using on page characteristics to determine anything about the page.
Did I get you right?
By "tools" you mean keyword density and prominance tools?
Sure. Just word counting. If you can find/build something that lets you say "what words do these two pages have in common, not in common", that's nice too. But, you could do it all with pencil and paper if you have time on your hands -- it ain't rocket science.
are you saying that Adsense uses those characteristics to determine the topic of the page?
That is what I infer from the fact that changing the text on the page appears to alter the ads displayed (eventually). I am sure other factors are also taken into account, but it's pretty hard to ignore the content of the page if you hope to display an ad that's relevant to that content.
As far as I know from SEO, G doesn't like using on page characteristics to determine anything about the page.
I think that's a pretty extreme view of Google's use of on-page attributes, but with variables numbering in 3 digits, it would be surprising if there were not at least some areas where on-page factors are virtually ignored. Should you compare off-page factors to see why someone else is getting the ads you want? Sure, but my prejudice is to look at the content first. In my little neck of the woods, that has generally seemed to hold sway over AdSense's attempt to identify theme. YMMV.
The problem of deciding what ads are relevant to a given page is somewhat different than the problem of deciding how to rank that page for a given search term, however.
Did I get you right?
Pretty much -- if Google is displaying on-target ads for someone else's page and not for your page, then see what's different about the two pages. Sing the "one of these things is not like the other" song.
:-)
And Off to work I go :)
