Tell Google ASAP. I'm sure they don't want this crap using AdSense to spread. This happened to MySpace and Webshots a few days ago, and it was a huge black eye for both sites.

Are you saying it's not just bad targeted Adsense ads? Is it something else?

Maybe your computer is infected with spyware and is affecting the ads?

Are you talking about spyware or anti-spyware?

Sorry. Anti spyware ads. I've tried everything to get them off, including deleting the pages, changing the text completely, etc. It doesn't matter what I do the page still shows anti-spyware ads.

This is a sore-point with me as frequenters of this forum know, so sorry if I'm repeating myself for everyone.

soona99: If you have pages that have gotten off target with Adsense and you fixed/removed the keywords you think were the cause, you then have to be patient. It can sometimes take literally weeks for the Adsense bot to come back and correct your targetting.

The homepage of one of my biggest sites is currently off-target and waiting for the Adsense bot to come back. Next week it will be two weeks.

no, today I am seeing ringtone ads everywhere. It's like they took every word in the dictionary and applied it to a type of ringtone. And my sites have nothing to do with mobile phones at all, they're historical sites.

Clear your filter except for the ones you are totally certain of and

Start Blocking

At 5pm today the ads immediately went back to the correct ones. This is after two days of messed up ads. I tried blocking and they kept coming as fast as I could block.

Never mind...ten minutes later and they're back. Something weird must be going on.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. That's normal. Because G obviously has so many multiple servers, when your ads get off target, your off target ads will "come and go" literally for days as the new targetting gets caught up on all the servers. But, bad news will out, if your ads are off target, eventually they'll stay that way without switching back and forth, until the Adsense bot revisits, which, like I said, sometimes takes weeks.

It's very frustrating after a day to think you dodged a bullet and your correct ads are back, only keep losing them back and forth for a few days before they go altogether.

ASA? Are you listening? Any possible respite for those of us who need a bot revisit? I'm going on two weeks off target on my homepage...

Oh, and by the way, I see ring-tone ads too sometimes, and block them immediately. I think the only thing that prevents us from seeing ringtone ads all the time is the fact that more legitimate ads come to the top and normally push them out, but if your targetting has gone awry, there's less chance of the ringtone ads being pushed out by better ads.

There really should be a way for us to filter by keyword. No one wants these ringtone ads, they're major ripoffs (because they promise something for free when they're really not) and they make us all look bad, the publishers and G alike. Why does G allow them?

I was seeing the "bushclintonkatrinafund.org" ad all over my pages.

I blocked it immediately. I guess sometimes you can also try to add the "www" to it too. I did both and the filter accepted both of them instead of saying it was a duplicate.

Then about a week later, there was a another hurricane fund going around.

What's also weird is that i have my ads set to only TEXT, but sometimes the image ones still show up.

I found something in adsense talking about adding some THEME TARGETING CODE. You can actually put the code around a paragraph in your page and it will tell adsense that you want ads to focus around the words in that paragraph.

I haven't done it b/c my site works fine, but I thought I would share.

Maybe you already know. :)

bushclintonkatrinafund.org

I think it is public ad (PSA).

[edited by: Mohamed at 4:53 pm (utc) on July 24, 2006]

Well that's interesting. I've never thought of blocking a PSA ad. Does it work? I would like to see something besides that ad too.

From Google on targeting:

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<html><head><title>Page title here</title></head>
<body>
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
</body>
</html>

Ann

There's a difference between ads for charitable organizations and what we here call PSAs that are displayed by Google when they don't have/can't show any ads on your page.

An ad for a charitable organization will still say "Ads by Gooooooogle" (or "Ads by Google") in the frame of the Adsense ad box. These are paying ads. There's no reason you couldn't filter these. I believe I have a few in my list.

What we call here PSAs will say "Public Service Ads By Google" within the ad box. I don't believe you can filter these. You can, however, specify "Alternate Ads" to show instead of these PSAs when they occur.

Section targeting hasn't worked for me. It seems I need to rewrite the pages to include as many kewords as possible, almost to the point where the sentences don't make any sense, and I don't want to do that.

What we did do with the alternate ads though, we added a url to an empty page with a stat counter. Now we know how many PSA's we get every day.

I like anti spyware ads as they fit the theme of my site. just don't pay me .03 a click

I sent Google an email with a link to several of the pages running anti-spyware ads. Google replied saying that the ads looked perfectly targeted to him which is very odd since my ctr went down to almost zero on those pages for the past few days. He suggested that I clear my cookies, which I've already done. Section targeting didn't work either. Every day more pages are affected.