Are you guys using the Adsense tags to improve keyword targeting? Is it something usefull or not? I'm having terrible KW targeting problems these days. tags such as <!-- google_ad_section_start -->, etc. -T
I just added it a couple days ago, I think it takes awhile for AdSense to pick up on it (upto a month).
I have never used them because I always felt that I got relevant ads displayed. I wonder if they would help make the ads even more targeted? Interesting post...
See below. The text comes from the Adsense FAQ site. The key questions are - how quickly does the bot take these tags into consideration? - is there a minimum size to the sections that are emphasized? I'm gonna make some tests... What is section targeting and how do I implement it? Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting. To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting. The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format: <!-- google_ad_section_start --> <!-- google_ad_section_end --> You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag: <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following: <html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head> <body> <!-- google_ad_section_start --> This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here. <!-- google_ad_section_end --> </body> </html> You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that we can't guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you've made to your site. In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.
I have seen this, but so far my site seems to be served pretty relevant adds for my pages so until I see something, wrong, I am not gonna mess with something that appears to be working just fine.
I use them in an English language web site and I think the results are ok, at least the targeting is exactly what I expect to be.
I have found these tags to be a good way to ensure AdSense doesn't target keywords in other advertising on my site.
I've used it on certain sites to ensure that AdSense targets the content of the page instead of the domain name.
Tyler Yes i see sometimes Google run the domain name instead of the meta or the text i will check my pages and see if i can make some diffrence.
I think that's the main issue here. If your pages are generally only about one subject, targeting will not work and won't be needed. On the other hand, if you have pages where the main-content suggests very different advertisements than the link-text, targeting may work. I tried targeting for a popular but under-performing page - and it did not work at all. At first I saw ads that seemed more relevant (within a day, so waiting months is certainly not something I'd say is needed) but soon google seemed to think that this wasn't an improvement and it went back to the same old totally irrelevant ads. Something in the google small-print does say that even if you do target, they will still try to figure out which ads make you more money. In my case the subject was probably just hard to figure out. (literature)
using it on all of my content based sites...yes relevancy increases after 3-5 page refreshes generally.
I also find it to be very useful for blogs, because they often cover a wide variety of topics and the targeting let's you choose which ones to emphasize or ignore.