Here's the deal. Saturday I fired up my new tech blog, "Good Stuff". The title of the blog when I set it up was "Good Stuff: Gadgets, Toys, and Technology". Sounded catchy to me, but Google apparently thought that since I had the word "gadget" in the title, it should server up ads like "kitchen gadgets" and "boys toys". My site is about digital cameras, mp3 players, gaming consoles, stuff like that. http://blog.good-stuff.us On Sunday I removed all occurences of the word "gadget" from the site. The title is now "Good Stuff : Digital Cameras, MP3, GPS, Gaming". Yet still the gadget ads remain. Not that I have anything against "Gadgets and Gizmos", but not all that relevant. When I drill down into a specific post, I get nice relevant ads. In fact right under my pretty picture of the Canon Powershot S2 IS, I have an ad titled "Canon S2 IS Camera". Now that's more like it. http://blog.good-stuff.us/2005/11/canon-powershot-s2-is/ Google-MediaPartners has been crawling my site like mad, yet the "gadgets" ads prevail. Any suggestions on how to get better ads served (without keyword spamming)? Do you think it will change if I wait? Thanks! Gary
You're still using the word "gadget" in the Technorati links. Sometimes all it takes is one use of a word to cause ads targeting that word to show up. It depends on what advertisers are bidding. See my AdSense tip on how to handle this.
Ack! Stupid technorati tags! Thanks for spotting that. I like your tip, particularly the part about the "paranoid schizophrenia" ads. Nice.
I get real good targetting with adsense. I wrote a blog about Fox's tv show prison break, (by the way the blog is about fox's over-promotion of the show) I went to check and see what kinds of ads they served up with adsense and it was an ad for the tv show.. So I definately know fox is going overboard. It is one of my biggest frustrations with yahoo. I have several sites with adsense ads and the targeting across a wide range of categories and topics is spot on.. I go to yahoo and I have a hard time finding any topic with a decent level of inventory or a lack of targeting.
That came from a consulting gig I did for a client, who was wondering why those kinds of ads were showing up on a page that had nothing to do with mental disorders. This was before section targeting, so all you could do then was either (1) rewrite the text, (2) insert the offending word dynamically via JavaScript, or (3) insert <span> tags strategically in the middle of words to break them up. These all had problems, though. Section targeting is definitely the easiest way to get rid of these problem words without otherwise affecting things.
Actually I've been quite impressed with AdSense targetting. Every permalink page on my blog has a dead-on accurate AdSense block. It's just the front page where it gets confused. I think I blew a circuit when I put "gadgets" in my title. Somewhere in Google land a server eneds to be put out to pasture.