AdSense Ads Off Topic

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AdSense Ads Off Topic

Live page Off Topic, Cache on topic

jdancing

5:37 pm on Aug 31, 2008 (gmt 0)

I am not a big adsense guy, but got into it a bit after I stumbled into owning an article site that did quite well for a long time. Lately, traffic dropped a bit and click through rate dropped.

I notice many articles display nothing but SQL related ads no matter the content is about. I thought maybe Google is not indexing the pages, but when I look at the cache of these pages it is recent and the adsense ads of the cache version are perfectly on topic.

Any ideas as to what could cause this? The url of the cache page and live page is exactly the same so there is no weird redirect thing going on as far as I know.

jdancing

9:50 pm on Sep 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

I guess I am not the only one at a loss as to how this is possible.

jdancing

10:01 pm on Sep 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

My last bump.

OutdoorWebcams

6:07 am on Sep 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hev you made some update of your website scripts that maybe was buggy and produced nothing more than something like 'You have an error in your SQL syntax...' recently?

If the Mediabot (who recrawls your site from time to time) sees enough of this messages AdSense might think 'SQL' is your overall website theme and only display ads about SQL.

This could also explain your drop in traffic, because Googlebot would also only index this error messages. Have you tried a search for "site:yourdomain.com SQL"?

Green_Grass

6:46 am on Sep 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

They do sometimes go off topic.. Google is not perfect. Normally an email to adSense support will resolve major targetting problems.

I am currently experiencing one in two ads which are totally offtopic, leading to fall in EPC and CTR.. Need a 'maintainance' to fix it, I guess..

jdancing

12:08 pm on Sep 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

The script is rock solid and the site never goes down. What you say might make sense if the cache was of a sql error page, but the cache can be very recent and will have nice targeted ads while the live pages will have all sql ads.

This happens on 60% of my pages.

One thing you do bring to mind, at the bottom of each page there is a page load information snippet of text like:

"Script executed in 0.117s using 4 SQL queries"

This is such a small % of total text on any page, it is hard to believe it would have such an effect.

I see a lot of sites that do this, but maybe I should take it off...

OutdoorWebcams

12:37 pm on Sep 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

>>>This is such a small % of total text on any page, it is hard to believe it would have such an effect.

I would agree, but you have it on each page. Maybe that's enough 'SQL' in total on your site to let the AdSense algo consider SQL as one of your site themes and test performance of SQL-related ads on your site.

I would take that information snippet down.
(also because, as a visitor, I don't care how many queries in what time were needed to collect the page content - and I assume most visitors don't even know what this message talks about)

jdancing

8:39 pm on Sep 13, 2008 (gmt 0)

I did get rid of it a on the 11th and it seems to be helping as fewer pages seem to be coming up with sql ads. If this is the cause, I would think in a few weeks, the sql ads should be gone.