From a post on Ecademy.

I was wondering if anybody had advice on the best ways of tailoring the adverts being displayed via Adsense. I am running a test on my blog site at the moment where I have added in the Adsense code to display adverts on my site. However, to date, the adverts only seem to display links to other blogging software products - I would prefer them to show adverts for the things I tend to blog about, e.g. gadgets / software development / comedy etc.

You've just hit the problem with Google AdSense. It seems that either Google doesn't have enough Ads, or they are not good enough about finding context, or the blog companies are spending huge amounts of money on AdSense and so swamping the real Ads. I also have a suspicion that Google forms a view of a particular site and uses that as the context until it has indexed the specific page. Which means that the problem is that Google isn't indexing blogs fast enough. (which they don't).

Whatever, the net result is the same, AdSense doesn't seem to work very well on blogs. I have exactly the same problem. I write about all sorts of things, but all I ever seem to get is Ads for Blogging Systems. And just because it's a blog doesn't mean that every person viewing it is looking for a way of building their own blog. Quite the reverse in fact.

Here's an example. I wrote about Win XP being 0wn3d in 200secs a week ago. If I use the Google preview adsense tool (IE6 only, yuck!) on that page, Google is suggesting 12 Ads of which 11 are for blogging systems. Bizarrely, I go back to the same page, 5 minutes later and the ads have changed and now 7 out of 12 are for blogging systems. WTF?


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[ 09-Dec-04 3:15pm ] [ , ]