It's probably been posted here before, but for all the newbies, a full explanation of adsense section targeting. You can decide which text on a page you want your adsense to relate to. For instance if your first paragraph contains all your keyword rich text, but you have some clutter high on the page before that you can add <!-- google_ad_section_start --> within the HTML before the first paragraph and then <!-- google_ad_section_end --> after it. You can also do this with multiple sections on a page, but make sure that there's enough content within the start and end tag. If you have content on a page that you want Google to ignore, just put in <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> around that section. Remember the following. Google says: "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 emphasise significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our programme policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages."
I've tried this technique a couple of times and it didn't seem to make a difference. I'm not sure what they mean by "significant amount of content" but I included a couple of good sized paragraphs. Anyone else had better results?
Same. But my page was dynamic. It had blogging tags. Then adsense showed ads only about blogs. That wasn't good. Skinny
Well for instance if you have allot of scripting on a page or you're showing adsense on a forum, there's allot of code that clutters a page, so by enclosing the main content within the start and end tags it makes a big difference if you were experiencing non-related ads displaying on your sites. Google's not bad at figuring out what your page is about, but exactly specifying to them can't hurt either. I'm interested to know though that if another section of a page contains keywords for a high paying keyword that's not included within your start and end section what Google will do in that case... MtraX
I haven't seen much of an improvement on my site with site targeting. I still get a lot of blog ads no matter what I try.
Great post MtraX this is something I have seen but havent got round to learning, thanks for the easy explanation. I would also be interested to know if it affects other keywords outside the tags.
If you're getting blog ads, why don't you just filter them out? It's important to (if you have control over your blog code) wrap these tags around your posts. Like Google says they don't guarrantee anything, but it can only help in my opinion... Turfsniffer, what do you mean with affecting keywords outside the tags?
I've filtered out a bunch of blog ads, but they keep multiplying... Actually, I think the blog ads only show up now when my main keyword has run out of ads.
As I've said before, the best use of section targeting is to exclude content. See Tip #9 on my Google AdSense Tips page. Particularly good for removing ads that are triggered by a specific word in the content that is not really related to the general topic.
What I mean is will Adsense pickup on words outside the ads or will it only see whats inside the tags that you specifiy? Thanks for the link Eric.
Section targeting is not an absolute. You're giving hints to Google as to what's important and not important about your page. Google may ignore your hints entirely, especially if they think you're trying to spam their algorithms. In general, though, the keywords outside aren't ignored, they're just given less weight.
Eric You beat me to the answer, haven't checked this post recently ;-) I agree about the ignore tag. One thing I haven't tried though is giving weight. What weight are you giving your ignores? Is it possible to give weight to start tags? MtraX