This is as much a rant as it is a question... I'm building a new page on my site, and I look over at my sidebar where I have 3 skyscraper AdSense banners (1 text only, 1 image, and 1 that can be either). All three of them are showing "Own a Business? Be Found on Google!", an ad for Google AdWords. They are all the same banner. They are all one on top of the other, and it looks ridiculous. I've seen two identical image banners one on top of the other before, but never three. I shouldn't even have 3, one is text only. Seriously, does Google pay the same CPC rate that other ads competing for that space pay? Or is Google giving themselves a special rate to clog up all my advertising space? Update: Just refreshed my page, and all three Adwords banners updated to three identical Google Places banners. I mean, come on - mix it up Google. I don't want the same banner three times. I strongly doubt this has to do with not having eligible ads, because my pages have some pretty high competition keywords on them, and there is plenty of text on the page. Is Google maybe just doing it to me because they know its my IP address? And for regular users maybe they cool it off a bit and display real banners? Can I opt out of displaying ads for Google services completely? I don't trust them displaying their own ads on their own service. They probably take their friggen AdSense cut from it too. And does anybody know anything about why identical banners would display one on top of each other like this? I never see this on other peoples sites, just my own. Thanks to anybody who can help me with this...
I sometimes get the same ad in the footer and header of one of my sites that has two leaderboards, but it is less obvious because they are so far apart. This raises two questions - are these actually the *same* ad code pasted multiple times or did you make a new ad block for each? And why do you have so many ads on one page - and right next to each other too!