I didn't think this belonged in Placement / Reviews / Examples because I got it placed just fine.. but on my new lawyer blog, I have an adsense banner in the index.php file coming up just before the post, then I have one in the sidebar as well (in addition to adsense deluxe). The thing is, the sidebar.php ad is only showing blog related ads. Why is this? does it have something to do with the content of the sidebar.php file? Can I fill that file with law related keywords that won't actually show up on the site? thanks,
If your site is new, I think the main reason for showing blog related ads is the presence of the word "blog". I had this issue for the first 3 weeks and then by the time the adsense bot arrived next, I cleaned up the wordpress template by removing all backlinks to wordpress.org and also the term "wordpress". In your case, the thing in sidebar is a link unit and not an ad unit. It is at present showing only wordpress related links. May be it will get fixed after some time. Or you can use the "Competitive Ad Filter" option in adsense to temporarily block those sites. And one more thing - remove that "Advertise on this site" link from the ad unit. It can improve your CTR.
thanks for the suggestions. I didn't even know you could remove that! thanks again, it's much appreciated.
I don't think the placement will determine whether ads are relevvant or not, you just need to give ot time for the right ads to pop up. If they still do not match content, perhaps you should take the adsense code off for a day or two and then place it again and see if the relevant ads come up.
that's what I thought as well. I was just surprised that the header ad block I put in was relevant and the sidebar unit was not. that was what made me think it picked up on info in the file.