I'm almost sure every webmaster with a forum had observed this phenomenon already. I just wanted to run this by the group here to discuss what a remedy could be. Here is what I observe on my forum(s): as a new thread gets started, it does not have relevant ads at first. That is pretty obvious and looks quite normal and the same as any other new page. The ads shown are only relevant to the main theme of the site, which may not be relevant to the actual subject matter, but what can you do if AdSense does not know anything about this page yet? Within a day or two Google MediaPartners bot comes around, gets the page indexed and ads start to show some degree of relevancy. So far so good. As the thread becomes old(er), it naturally gets pushed off the first page and, also quite naturally, the discussion winds down and the pages gets visited only once a day, a week or a month for that matter. Here is the heart of the problem: if you go back to a thread that used to be popular few months back, all ads are the site-default (often irrelevant) ads again. Note that I use all the normal precautions: the URL of the thread never changes, all the sessions are handled by cookies and all the CGI query variables are cleaned off by using .htaccess You'd think it's no problem - the pages are hardly visited anyways, why care about relevancy of ads - but I have found that, considering large number of old pages on an established forum, even occasional visits to those old threads amount to considerable traffic. It's hard to estimate it accurately, but I would say in my case it's no less than 25% of the overall traffic. I wouldn't want it wasted in terms of ads revenue. I could not find any references to necessary page revisits by Mediapartners bot. It seems logical that they would need to revisit the page just in case the content had changed, but I can't think of any sane or TOS-compliant way to keep the Mediapartners index of ALL the pages of the site fresh. Any input on the matter anyone?
I've heard it theorized that if a page is not visted by a HUMAN(does not count known crawlers) within a weeks period of time it drops out of the adsense database. Then if that page is not indexed in the google search engine database it defaults to generic ads or an instant scan of the page. There is of course no proof on this at all it was just mentioned by some guy who THOUGHT he knew. Try to send at least one person to those pages every week or visit them yourself.
Not sure if I hv understood ur prob correctly but as per as my knowledge goes....Recently I have seen google ads follow the URL rather than the page content...with your pages i do see Yahoo ads which are following the URL keywords rather than ur page content...hope that helps
I would absolutely love to do that, but that seems impossible. Naturally, the old pages are not getting as much attention and they relatively rarely (but often enough for me to make a big deal out of it ) attract visitors. Besides, I'm talking about dozens of thousands of pages. Just a visit per page per week times, say, 50,000 pages will create 7142 pageviews per day, which is a nice target for the entire website, let alone the older section of it. I'm not sure if that's going to fly well with the TOS (again, talking about dozens of thousands of pageviews per week) in case someone targets the site for impressions. It's been a while since I carefully read the TOS. What does it say about artificially generated pageviews (not clicks)?
You are right to not artificially generate pageviews. That is against the TOS. However regular surfing to check your own site is just that. I have about 200 to 400 views from my IP address every month according to my logs(not sure how many of those pages have adsense). This is just from basic upkeep. So if you visit those pages to check that the adsense code is still targeted that to me is not artificial pageviews but REAL page views Now Bad part of that is you are talking so many pages no human can do that :-( Brainstorm time: Wonder if you created new channels and replaced the adsense code on those pages? Would that make adsense recrawl? Maybe google can help? Maybe they have something to keep a page index longer.
I looked at a post I had written at the beginning of this month, and it already had "lost" its ads. I don't think anyone had viewed it for a while, so I have a feeling toomuch72 is correct in his theory. I bet google just has to "clean shop" every now and then.
I've been dealing with this as well, and discovered if you have the correct meta tags installed on each post to indicate the content of the page, generally they will be fairly relevant. The misconception is to uses the same site-wide meta-tags in an overall header, this will of course theme that page for incorrect ads till the bot re-indexes it.