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Accidental AdSense Discovery
by Carson Danfield
If you've been using AdSense on your websites
for any length of time, you know how frustrating
it can be if the AdSense ads don't closely match
the content of your pages. With mismatched ads,
your visitors aren't very likely to click on the
ads and there goes your AdSense income.
I've been building AdSense sites for a while and
usually don't have much trouble with the ads
matching the content. However, not too long ago,
as I was building a new page, I just couldn't
get the proper AdSense ads to show up. The
subject of the page was related to financial
issues, but the AdSense ads were about camping
equipment!
As I read the content of the page, there was no
doubt about the subject matter. I had my best
keywords in the page title, in the meta tags, in
the headline tags, in the image alt tags and I
had a generous sprinkling of the keywords
dispersed throughout the page content.
I refreshed the page several times, hoping that
the ads would change to the proper subject. But
each refresh of the page only brought more ads
for camping equipment.
I have built thousands of AdSense pages before
and I never ran into this problem. I did
everything I knew about in trying to optimize
the page for my financial keywords, but nothing
seemed to work. I tried increasing the keyword
density, but I still saw ads for camping
equipment.
If you refer to Google's AdSense tutorials,
you'll see that they do have some special codes
that you can insert into the HTML code of your
webpage to inform Google of the content area
they should use for determining which ads to
display. Google supposedly reads the content
between these tags and ignores anything else. I
put the special codes on my page, expecting that
finally I'd get the correct ads. I refreshed the
page and guess what - more camping ads!
At this point, I was running out of ideas. I had
done everything that made sense, but no matter
what I changed, I just couldn't get the right
ads. I decided to walk away for a while. Maybe
Google needed more time to accurately judge the
content in order to make the correct decision
about the ads.
I got side-tracked with other matters, so I
ignored the new webpage for about a week. I
decided to check the ads, since surely Google
would have them right by now. I opened the page
and - you guessed it - more camping ads!
By this time, I was near the end of my patience
and I was getting desperate. I decided that I
would grossly overload my new page with the
financial keywords in an effort to find the
problem. I made a copy of my page and put it in
a different directory on the server, just so I
wouldn't lose my original page.
After making the copy, I opened it in my web
browser and much to my surprise, I was seeing
the proper AdSense ads! I didn't make any
changes to the content of the page - none at
all. This page was an exact duplicate of the one
that kept showing the camping ads. The only
difference was the location. The duplicate page
was placed in a temporary directory for testing.
I used one of my keywords for the name of the
directory and that made all the difference with
the topic of the AdSense ads that Google
displayed.
I did a little more experimentation to see what
I could learn. I stayed with the new page, the
one that was showing the proper ads and made a
few changes. First, I removed the special Google
HTML codes. I refreshed the page and the right
ads were still showing up. Next, I started
removing some of the keywords. I was still
getting the right ads. I experimented with all
the aspects of the page, even the page title. No
matter which items I changed, I was still
getting the correct ads. After exhaustive
experimentation, I determined that although
keyword density, page title, headline tags and
image alt tags are important, the directory name
where the webpage resides seems to have the most
impact on the topic of the AdSense ads that
Google displays.
If you find yourself in a similar situation,
where you just can't get the right AdSense ads,
Change The Directory Name!
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