I noticed that G had spidered a few more pages of my site, so I went to the ad network cp to update my weight. It jumped from ~700 to ~1200. Fine, but then I decide to update the ad network code- we only have a few days left to do that- everything looked fine- 5 ads on all pages, then I validated again and my weight dropped to 898. I tried re-validating a few times, dropped to 300 and then back up to 898. What can be causing this, and is there anything I can do about it?
I'm not sure exactly how Shawn does the validation, but I'm almost positive that, if the page (my site for example) is not utf-8, then ads with foreign chars will not show correctly. I am now assuming that Shawn actually (with a script) checks to see if a valid coop ad is being displayed, and if the chars are not showing correctly, the ad is not counted. That would account for the fluctuations-- sometimes the validator sees 3 ads, sometimes 5 etc. Gotta change to utf-8 ....
Actually, my weight is still fluctuating after changing to UTF-8... Maybe the validate script also checks things like how many ads are on the page.... some of my pages have no ads, others have one adsense "button" ad and others have a 5 ad skyscraper .... hmmm. I don't know what would be causing this.
I've changed it to UTF-8 and nothing happened... The weight is the same... Anyway, I will leave it that way so that ads can appear correctly...