Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Why Is AdSense Suddenly Displaying Irrelevant Ads?
I have a WordPress blog about fitness. For months I’ve had relevant AdSense ads displaying on it. Within the past week I’ve noticed the home page is displaying totally irrelevant ads, yet the internal pages continue to display ads based upon the posts’ content. In looking at my main page, the title, description, tags and page content contain nothing that would trigger such ads. I also have the All In One SEO plugin reinforcing it.
I’ve included the HTML section targeting tags around specific content and that has no effect.
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
…content goes in here…
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
I’ve been to the Adsense forum and others have described the exact same problem; home page has bogus ads, internal pages don’t, happened just recently.
I’ve attempted to use the competitive filtering, but it’s like hunting elephants with a sling shot because you’ll never be able to make it stop. Besides, that whole filtering thing is set up wrong. It’s on the account level, not the site level. So while I don’t want Joomla ads displaying on my fitness site, I do want them to display on a web design site. Damn Google gives you a gun and then idly sits in the corner watching you shoot your foot off with it.
I have noticed a pattern, though. The particular website in question has the word “online” in the domain name. Domain names are very powerful when it comes to AdSense and search engines in general. So I fired up SpyFu to spy on the domains displayed in the ads on my pages. Every single one of them had the word “online” in their keywords. (SpyFu’s awesome for seeing what AdWords advertisers are up to. It shows you the keywords they are bidding on and also the ads they are running.)
Ok, so that one little word in the domain name looks like it could be the culprit, however I can’t exactly change my domain name so I need to find another way to turn back the Way Back Machine to make new things old again.
Today I went into Adsense Setup > Ad Review Center and have completely disallowed Google’s partner ad networks to display on my account. I’m hoping that will take care of the problem because I don’t know what else to try. Google claims that those partner networks have to adhere to Google’s guidelines, but who knows.
If you have this problem and you’ve found a solution, please leave a comment and share what you know.
UPDATE: Here it is the next morning and guess what? Relevant ads are once again displaying!!!! Everyone clap and be happy. I’m going to keep an eye on it, trust me, because that particular page was earning me several dollars every day and since the problem started, no mo money. I’ll keep this post updated.
UPDATE: Several days later and I still have relevant ads, so at this point it looks like those Google partners don’t know what they’re doing. Shame on Google for not minding the mint.
UPDATE: It’s now several weeks later and I continue to get nothing but completely related ads appearing on my site. My conclusion is that the irrelevant ad problem was indeed a direct result of allowing Google partner ads to display.
