What determines Adsense Ads on Pages

[SENewbie]

I was curious what the most important component was that determines what Adsense ads are shown on pages. I've heard that the file name and the keywords/phrases in the filename have a pretty significant impact on what ads are shown, but does Google spider the entire page as well to help determine relevant ads?

[digitalpoint]

It's the whole page as a whole. Google tries its best to understand it fundamentally.

- Shawn

[GuyFromChicago]

I'll ad that it's been my experience that Google does a very good job of understanding the content of a page also. Every Adsene ad I've placed has always been very "related" to the theme/content of the page it's on.

[compar]

Google bought a company a couple of years ago called Applied Semantics (http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/applied.html) It is generally assumed that this is what they use to determine the theme of the page's content and which AdSense ads to put on the page.

It is also speculated that Google tried to apply this and other tools in their Florida update. The issue would have been to try and determine how revelant a backlink is to the page on which it is placed. The other tool included things like Local Rank, Hilltop, Topic Sensitive PageRank and Semantics.

The experiment did not work and it appears now that Google has gone back to using anchor text as the prime determinant of a link's relevance. However you can be sure that Google will make further attempts to fine tune it's relevance measurement.

[Severus Maximus]

I have to concur with compar.

What I have noticed on my site is that the adsense results are directly related to the anchor text of the links on my page.
Specifically in my web directory I allow 10 listings(links) per page.
on the pages where I do not have a link box to my own site with 12 links on topic A (my sites topic ) I will get adsense related to my directory listing (computers, arts , travel, etc). Here the anchor text of the directory links outnumber my site topic links.
But on the pages where I do have my site link box I will get adsense related to my site's topic. Here the site topic links (onpage and in the link box) outnumber the directory links. It does not seem to matter what the tilte or description of the page is and seemingly neither does the text that comes with the directory links.
I hope they can fine tune this, but it would mean that they would have to give more relevancy to pure text as opposing links on the page.

[Owlcroft]

I have to disagree. I have only just gotten round to adding AdSense to my sites, so I have been paying some attention to what they put up.

By and large, it seems to try to take its cue from the few sentences immediately before and after the ad location (I am using horizontal blocks). That often gives annoyingly inappropriate results. One example is a rather long page discussing technical baseball matters in a general way, such that were the page keyword anything but just "baseball" something is seriously wrong. In the last sentence, there is a one-time mention of the Boston Red Sox--but, on most refreshes, two of the four ads are Red-Sox oriented. Others have reported similar observations.

That is bad in one way--often, some chance remark in a closing sentence will falsely point the ads away from the page's overall theme. It could, especially for the grey-to-black out there, be good: one could conclude an article on, say, sailing ships or astronomy with a sentence saying that such-and-such "was about as popular as a diagnosis of mesothelemia would be." That is not exactly keyword stuffing, or even spam, but it sure opens the door for some dirty tricks.

A more honest use might be to end an article, or article section, just prior to ad placement with a brief, overt, small-font statement: "article keywords: X, Y, Z" or some such--where X, Y, and Z are truly relevant.

I also find ads for Las Vegas hotel rooms in contexts in which I cannot, with the most liberal use of imagination, dream how they were found "relevant" (while the other three usually are).

But Google, is Good, Google is Great, Google is Perfect.

[Severus Maximus]

Hi Owlcroft,

The only one perfect does not use search engines, but that aside, my adsense blocks are immediatly preceded and followed by link blocks in the html (css positioning reformats it aestetically) and though there are some minimal texts inbetween I have not seen adsense to take the cue.
I am always willing to test something that sounds that it might have some merit so I will include a paragraph of text before and after my adsense blocks to see what happens, and will post back the result.

[Owlcroft]

I have seen--on another forum, I believe ("short-term memory is the first to go")--a whole thread on the matter, and there seemed general agreement that, at least for horizontals, proximity text was a quite important determinant.

[Severus Maximus]

I use a vertical tower in the right panel of a holy grail design...... but that should not make any difference (although anything is possible these days).
So the test is already online (surrounding paragraphs) and has been visited by the adsense bot, now I'll have to wait and see.

Another point I'd like to mention is that on the "new listings" pages I typically have more then 20 directory listings at any time. I target new listings by category, and
whenever most of the new listings are mostly from one category the directory listings "overpower" the site's template theme(with the 2 link boxes) and adsense is served in correct directory listing context.

From this I deduce that adsense is served by page theme and because anchor text influeces page theme heavily my issue seems to be that the directory listings (10 per page) are not counting more then the templated site links in determining page theme.
i have also set up several other directory pages with declining amount of site links to find the poit at which the directory listings will determine the page theme.

For me the surrounding paragraphs of text would be a better solution because I would prefer that to lowering my template links count or increasing the directory listings to above 10 per page.