Ads on website search pages seem to have lower coverage

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Ads on website search pages seem to have lower coverage

If specific query strings haven't been crawled?

surfgatinho

9:38 am on Apr 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

This just occurred to me. On some of my sites I use a facets based search setup so users can drill down to find what they are looking for.

There are 2 issues here; firstly the querystring combinations can be fairly unique and secondly the facets are nofollow / noindex.

I'm seeing quite a few blank ad spaces when looking at these pages and am thinking this may be related to the "Brand Safety" issue.

One thing I was thinking of was editing the URL parameters in Webmaster search console to "Does not effect content". The other is changing the facet links to not be nofollow (which I'd rather not)

Any ideas?

Travis

10:15 am on Apr 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

Yes, this is certainly due to the "Brand-Safety". Adsense's bot has to fetch a page, before ads are shown. This kind of page keeps getting new, and unknown by Adsense at first.

NickMNS explains it well here :
[webmasterworld.com...]

bhukkel

10:29 am on Apr 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

Try to rewrite your GET parameters to POST. For me this solved the problem of blank ad spaces.

In my experience it has nothing to do with NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW, i have lot of pages with it and ads are showing perfectly. As long as the page gets crawled every few weeks.

surfgatinho

10:41 am on Apr 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

@bhukkel thanks for the suggestion but this is using the Drupal facets API which is so mind-numbingly complex that I don't think this is an option.

@Travis - that's quite a thread! Will have a good read through it. I overlooked it because coverage has not been an issue for me. Always around 75-80% (inline with ad balance - if that limits it?)

What I have noticed is there are blank ads (as mentioned) with no backup shown. Also, there are often a mix of filled and unfilled ads on the page - so how does "Brand Safety" sit with that?

surfgatinho

10:44 am on Apr 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

Does anybody know if setting the URL parameters in the Search Console has any effect on Adsense / mediabot - assuming the accounts are linked?