I'm playing around with adsense in several blogs, and I get way too many Adsense ads for blogs. I've been playing around with google_ad_section_start/end to try and ignore the sections that have the word blog. It looks like it may have been some slight difference, I thinks I may get slightly less blog ads, but I'm still getting too many. Also, now I'm getting PSA's too often instead of the blog ads. Any other suggestions?
How long have you been testing the section targeting for? It can take 2-3 weeks to show results, because the media partners bot generally visits a page about once a month or so. Have you checked your logs to see if the mediabot has been by those specific pages since you made the changes?
If the blog is hosted on blogspot.com then it's a bigger problem because it lumps all sites on the same TLD together for an advertising pool. At least that is what I have observed with subdomains on my own TLD..
All blogs are in Wordpress with their own URL. Not on any kind of shared blog hosting. The changes were made this morning, but I have a real time visitor monitor in place, and could see the Adsense visit - Googlebot-AdSense 2. within 15 minutes after I made the changes. I put in (temporally) some specific unique hard coded words as a test, and got Adsense for those words, but at the same time, still was getting blog ads. I generally find that changes to text is reacted to by Adsense very quickly. I know that Google says 2-3 weeks, but that does not seem to be true.
Does your title on the site have the word blog in it, as in "Blah Blah Blog"? That will cause blog related ads. Try to not have any reference to it being a blog in the title.
Yes it did, but that was the only reference - the rest should have been ignored by surrounding them with google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) tags I changed the title - and so far no change even though Googlebot-AdSense 2. visited within seconds of the change in title. I'm wondering whether having the blog in a wordpress sub-directory tells Google it's a blog.
Just an FYI, the ignore tag doesn't really ignore that content, but rather de-emphasize it. There is also a chance you are getting themed ads rather than targeted ads. Are you seeing the same thing on the individual entry pages, as well as the index page? Index pages are a lot harder for targeting purposes than the individual pages.
I rewrote a bit of wordpress, left out a lot of stuff I felt was not needed. I changed the way titles, metatags and meta decriptions are generated.. If google is able to identify wordpress as a blog, my version is probably not, code wise spoken. I don't get (or just a very few) blog ads. Don't really know if its due to my changes, but anyway they are gone.
Ok, now I see some action, I changed the title a few hours ago to contain some words not in any posts. I tested for a while and blog ads kept appearing, so I changed the title back to one that contains the word weblog Now it's 2 or 3 hours later, and I get ads matching what the title was previously. In a skyscraper ad, 4 ads match the old title [which is not displaying any more] and one is a blog ad. On another page, I get 4 about search and meta tags, and one about wordpress. I guess I need to wait a few days and play around. But MattL made a good point - the title counts for more than I would have thought.
Don't do anything. If your blog ISN'T about blogs, Adsense wilL EVENTUALLY give you relevant ads. It took Adsense about a week and change to FINALLY deliver relevant ads to my site. Now I don't get a single blog ad. It just takes Googs time to spider your site's content, etc. P.S. If you're using WP, have you installed the Google sitemap plug? It automatically pings Googs whenever you update your site. Pretty cool little gadget that plug in.