Firetop

One or two sites I’ve worked on of late have had problems with the relevance of Google Adsense adverts appearing on their website. Typically the problems have involved adverts being relevant to the website’s name (or domain), but not what the website is actually about. For example, this website ‘Firetop’ on initial installation of Adsense saw a huge amount of advertising for ‘fireplaces’ - relevant to the content? Nope! Whilst rooting around in the Adsense help pages I came across a couple of useful comment tags which enable a webmaster to emphasis key areas of content for the Google Adsense spiders to prioritise, with inverse tags to highlight areas to ignore. Within 48 hours these fixed 99% of the problem and increased relevance accordingly.

I found the main problem to be the head area of a page because it typically contains the website name in the title or meta tags, this then causes it to be picked up by the Google Adsense spiders. By using the weight=ignore tag I excluded the page header completely:

– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –
page header
– google_ad_section_end –

I then used the default section start tag to emphasis the editorial content of the page; blog entries and associated comments:

– google_ad_section_start –
Blog entries and comments
– google_ad_section_end –

This did the trick nicely, all adverts appearing on pages with a decent amount of content now function perfectly - much better for relevance and click through rates. If you’re wondering why the adverts on this posting now serve irrelevant advertisers, re-read paragraph one and you’ll see why!

The full Google Adsense Help Center article is available here with code specified in full.

Technorati Tags: advert relevant, keyword targeting, google adsense

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