One of the most common problems that bloggers using Adsense have is that they constantly find that they are served with ads for blogging products and services. Whilst this might not be a big problem for a blogger writing on the topic of blogging (I don’t mind too much here at ProBlogger) – it can be terribly frustrating if you’re writing on a niche topic that has nothing to do with Blogging. For one ads on blogging don’t pay very well but secondly if you have another topic and you have ads for blogging your readers are not likely to click on them as they are not relevant.
ALJ at Chatquah & Galoshes has the same problem and posts about Getting Better Adsense Ads. They come up with the following solution – block some or all of the following URLs from serving ads to your site using the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ feature that Adsense supplies.
ALJ says it got rid of a about 30-50% of the offending ads – not perfect but an improvement.
I’d also suggest that you scour your page for any words or code that contains anything to do with blogging as it will trigger the ads. Don’t just look at your actual text, also see what is in the code behind it, your URL, picture names – everything. Especially what is at the top of your blog as most people believe the first few paragraphs often trigger the ads.
Anyway – here are the URLS AJL recommends blocking – I’m sure there are others too:
‘blogs.ardice.com
secure.netfirms.com
workpad.com
www.blog.wareareyou.com
www.blogger.com
www.blogidentity.com
www.blogster.com
www.ezsgblog.com
www.infoworld.com
www.infoworld.com/rss/rss_info.html
www.miego.com
www.myblogsite.com
www.myownblog.net
www.securesafepro.com
www.squarespace.com’
I tried removing “blog” and “RSS” and even “WordPress” from my old blog, though the upgrade to 1.5 broke this.
It seems that AdLinks helps here since it lists some of the keywords that are triggered by your blog. It also gives you a directory of the “offending” advertisers.
The question beneath is: How can we make it clear to the bot, that those words are there for the site structure (like contact / sitemap) and not as content itself.
From a HTML structure point of view it is totally correct to use semantical markup as H3 for my column, because it describes the structure of the webpage. But Trackback, last comment, archive, RSS feed, in different variances etc do not show the content of the page.
Especially regarding blogs, it would be great, if Adsense came up with a solution to bloggers. It can’t be, that I am forced to break my site and dismantle the blog relevant words, only to get it working …
Dave…
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future…