Don't work for me also. I also have problems with bad targeting, I have many differnet subdomains with differnet niches AdSense is showing the same ads on all of them, this sucks .
Never knew this existed thanks As mentioned by another poster "I have no problem with the adds they serve" as the url & content relate exactly to the adds I want where I have adsense. For ablog as Jim mentioned this is great info thanks
Google does take the Section Targeting into consideration, but don't think it counts as the total weight in the algorithm. Text is considered as is the domain name, and, if the domain is "recycled", what the website content used to be about. Dave Jackson http://monetizethis.blogspot.com/
I suspect the negative keyword tag (e.g. exclude this section) is probably listened to more than the "prioritize these words" tag. After all, the prioritize tag would be too easy to abuse.
it's part of the TOS that using this tag to wrongfully lead the ads to show for keywords that aren't related to the content will get you banned and that applies to hidden content too
Like this has stopped people before. Google would still have to catch the individuals, which may be hard to do AND one could still skirt the edges of the TOS using the prioritize tag. While the "ignore" tag makes sense, I'm surprised that Google offers the "prioritize" tag and I'd be even more surprised if they put much weight in it.
I find the "ignore" tag is useful, for things like footer information that may contain irrelevant keywords. If you're not writing specifically about things like privacy policies, terms and conditions, and so on, there's no point in showing ads about these things.