On my website I have noticed that more often than not, my ads are not being targeted correctly. My website is a forum, running IPB as the software. Often I'm gettting ads about MySQl and WebHosting. I have placed the <!google_ad_section_begin--> and end tag around actual calls to posts, and calls to topics. And sometimes it hits the targeting spot on. Others it's way off. BTW, my site has nothing to do with hosting, or sql, or san diego churches (i get that one most frequently). Does anyone have any experience with Adsense and IPB?
I have exactly the same problem and it occurs only in the forum software. What I have been able to figure out is: a) Google has not indexed my site at all yet (bettermost.net) b) The forum software seems to generate the wrong ads when the url contains index.php. When I take that off, correct ads are shown. I don't know if this is going to be an ongoing problem, or if it will resolve itself when Google gets around to really index the site. Any ideas?
Google managed to index and cache my site (bettermost.net) last night, although the cache snapshot looks messed up with the skyscraper ad appearing out of place (any advice on that?) and it only picked up one and cached one link. However, targeted ads are still not consistent, especially on the forum pages. It seems whenever the URL has index.php, or something like that, I get lots of ads for web hosting and SQL products. Take that out, and I get targeted ads. Is there a way around this? Also, when Google does identify your site, does it cache everything internally linked at the same time, or does it wait to come back. It doesn't appear to have indexed/cached the forum section yet, for instance.
Does your forum support URL rewrite a.k.a. Search Engine Friendly URLs. You can try to rewrite the .php to .html.. This might help