The main pages of my site contain a mix of different subject articles. Each page has three articles. They may each be of a different subject. By each article is an adsense ad. The problem is the ads on the main page of the site are all targeted wrong. They are targeted to a group of articles that were there a week ago. The pages that have the individual article on them work fine, its just the main site with the pieces of the articles on them that is wrong. I was thinking of using section targeting and wrapping each article, but again a day later the articles might be of a different subject. Any thoughts on how I can better target my main page? Will section targeting be 'live', meaning once on it will look at that text at the moment, not from what was there a week before? Thanks for any help...
The simplest way to do what you want is to use a 302 (not a 301 -- you want temporary redirects, not permanent) from the actual home page to a temporary home page. Change the temporary page each time you change the articles and the crawler will always be right. Otherwise you'll see the kind of lag you're seeing. If you don't want to actually redirect to a different page, you can do a redirection back to yourself but with an appropriate query parameter. In other words, have any references to "/" get redirected to "/?q=foo" where you replace 'foo' with a keyword or keyphrase associated with the topic of the day.
That /q=foo is an interesting option. I might have 3 different topics on a page, but hitting at least one of them is better than none. Not sure the best way to implement it - without causing a yucky looking refresh. I'll have to think about that one...Thanks...
If you want good targeting, you need to stick to a single topic. The targeting is per-page, not per-section. So you have to decide which topic is most important and emphasize it.
Yea - I'm thinking I might need to highlight a category as opposed to just displaying the latest articles. I implemented the /?q=foo idea in my test environment and it works real well, except for right now having mixed content articles. Question regarding the /?q=foo idea though - What would that do to my SEO goodness? Since my main page url might be always on the change... Thanks for your help and ideas... Matt
Answering my own question regarding the SEO affect of adding a '/?q=foo' to your pages for adsense targeting, I decided to use a USER_AGENT check to eliminate the big boys from seeing this. I assume this is ok and not considered black hat. I'm not trying to trick anyone, just better target my ads without screwing up SEO .