Jan 3 2007

Tips on Section Targeting Adsense Ads

Posted by visio in Google Adsense/Adwords, Seo Articles
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Have you ever wondered how you can make your Adsense ads more relevant to your site? Most webmasters have experienced irrelevant ads displayed on their sites. This is especially annoying when the site has lots of good content and the target of the ads is seen nowhere on the page. Most of us realize the main methods of improving relevancy in our ads such as having relevant content surrounding the adsense and by having a targeted page but most do not know that there is a built in Google Adsense Section Targeting feature that allows us to tell Google what parts of the site are relevant and which are not. This technique is really exciting to me as in seo to explain different factors i may have to use a site as a representation which means I may be using and posting keywords which are not related to my site. This can off-set my page adsense target.

So if you are experiencing Adsense relevance problems read the rest of this article. If your not you might still want to continue on as the info provided here can be helpful if you should ever have problems with Adsense or if you should ever need to target parts of your site.

What is Adsense Section Targeting?
Simple question. As I noted before most webmasters I have talked with had no idea this method worked and to top it all off the method was made and recommend by Google Adsense which means you will never have to worry about getting banned for using it. Okay so you want to know what it is?

It is actually very simple. It is a piece of code which you place before and after a section of your site. This code will tell the Google Adsense robot one of two things. It will either tell it to ignore the content inside the code or to emphasize it. This can come in handy if you are having google adsense relevancy issues. Please note this is not guaranteed to fix your problems although it usually works well. I should also let you know that targeted high paying keywords on a site that is irrelevant to those keywords is highly ineffective I do not recommend it.
How to emphasize a section of your site
Lets start off by adding a emphasize tag to part of our page to let Google know we think that is the most important. Heres how the tag works:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Part of page we want to emphasize. This can be as long as we wish but keep in mind the more you emphasize the less emphasis can be put on each sentence/word. Also the section must start with the start tag and end with the end tag or it won’t work.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

How to tell Google to ignore a section of my page
This is probably the part most of you have been waiting for. This is the code which will tell google to ignore part of the page. Just in case somebody was wondering this is for Google Adsense only. it will not effect your Google rankings and will not effect other forms of Advertising.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

This part of the page I wish to ignore. Google Adsense: please forget this part exists.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Make sure you put these tags after the <body> tag and before the last </body> tag. As stated before emphasizing or ignoring too much content may raise a red flag. Using this method does not mean Google does not use other factors any longer. Google will continue to use their Adsense targeting methods and abusing this method may get your Adsense account flagged for inspection. Do not abuse or overuse it. Do not try to emphasize unrelated keywords. Only use it to make your ads more relevant to your site. Other uses will get you in trouble.
Google states it may take up to 2 weeks for the targeting to take place so you must be patient. I have also noticed it work within 48 hours so it can be pretty quick as well.
Resources related to Adsense Section Targeting:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168&sourceid=ASO&subid=en_asblog&medium=link

JenSense

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/08/section_targeti.html

I have not read any other posts by her as of yet. The post about Adsense was good and basically what I said. If I had found it before writing all this I might have just linked to hers. I will be looking into her other articles to see what else she says because so far I like her information.