While the site I serve adsense ads on has x content, I know my visitors are interested in y and z topics (as one of my sites captures the youth market - pretty easy to work out what ads they will click on). As our site is information based, adsense gives some financial aspact to it. How do you manipulate the kind of google ads served on a site?
The only "kinds" of ads you an choose between would be text and graphic based. If you want to change the ads being displayed, I would change your content to match the ad types you want.
You can also exclude certain ads from showing. So for example, if your running a blog about tires, and your getting ads for tires and ads for blog software, you can weed out all the blog ads and which will only leave the tire ads.
Can you do that globally or is it domain by domain? Is there any easy way to see what's being served to know if you want to block it?
easy: pub keywords rich with your page which has adsense then use an iframe to display regular things or js to display them (your page can not be seen from Search Engine), they use style sheet to use the IFRAME to cover those keywords. Remember you can not mess with adsense ads, but you can mess with your own things as you want.
Many of our internal pages on this site are points of entry so I need to keep the SEO focused on the real content. We rank first on just about every term we want to compete on as this site is the number 1 authority. I have added some keywords for the ads I want to show to the footer... this seems to be working but I can't add much more because of the negative seo impact. Thanks though, I'll keep that in mind if we have another project where this can be done without harming the serps.
then you keep adsense in an IFRAME which only has the keywords, then you include the IFRAME in your pages, so mediabot will will scan IFRAME for adsense and Googlebot will scan mainpage for search egine.