I’ve been running adsense on this website for a few weeks now but until today just haven’t been getting relevant ads showing up. This morning I worked out that it was because of the behaviour of the default permalink style in Wordpress.
The way I worked it out was by creating a fresh post without adsense and testing it in this adsense sandbox. To my horror, although the post was about an IT related subject, all the suggested ads were related to Photography. I made a couple of changes to sidebar.php in the theme to remove recent posts and an adsense ad that I had there too, but it didn’t make any difference.
When I changed the permalink style from the default http://sitename/?p= to date and name based /category/date/post-slug and retested in the sandbox the difference was immediately clear. I now had relevant ads for the post. I figure it must be something to do with the way the URL's are constructed in the default permalink style that makes it difficult for adsense to figure out the correct ads to display on my dual-themed site.
Incidentally, testing in a sandbox is a good way to fine tune the words in a post before adding the adsense links to it.
so my issue is similar… i get relevant ads showing in the posts because of the permalink changes i made but none (0) on the homepage. is there something up with having an index.php page as homepage?
Comment by josh — January 25, 2006 @ 4:23 pm
so just as soon as i had posted the above statement, google started inserting relevant (somewhat, anyway) contectual ads on my index.php. maybe it was related to having a link back to the site?? anyway, issue solved i guess.
josh
http://gizmonation.com
Comment by josh (again) — January 25, 2006 @ 4:37 pm
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Comment by tosh — January 25, 2006 @ 4:37 pm
I see. That’s good.
Put ads in the posts themselves, behind a < \!--more--> tag, so that the ad doesn’t show up in the post on your home page (and have the possbility to be influenced by other content) but when you click the post you get the post on its own page with the ad in it … then the ad will reference exactly that content.
Comment by James Stephens — January 25, 2006 @ 4:41 pm
I’ve also noticed that Adsense shows only (mostly?) “Blog” keyword ads if your URL includes the word “Blog”. For example, http://www.philhord.com/blog/category/date/post-slug always showed “Blog” ads. But when I changed it to http://www.philhord.com/generic/category/date/post-slug. the blog-related ads abated.
Comment by Phil Hord — February 7, 2006 @ 10:11 am
Yea, i got the same irrelevant ads too on my wordpress homepage and single post.. kinda irritating. I’ve emailed google… now waiting for their reply.
Comment by Christian — March 27, 2006 @ 1:32 am
Nice tip! I too encounter irrelevant ads in my wordpress. Will try and see if this works. Thanks!
Comment by Share Video — November 26, 2006 @ 7:39 am
hey friends,
my site is also showing irrelevant ads on the first page of the forum, http://www.latestdumps.com/forum2/index.php
and inside some pages the ads match the content.Do you friends suggest any solutions..
thanks in advance
Comment by ld — November 28, 2006 @ 5:56 am
Using Permalinks on Wordpress is the best way to get well targeted ads. You can also use section targeting with the template so that the Google Bots concentrate on a certain area….
Stuart
Earners Blog
Comment by Stuart — January 2, 2007 @ 11:52 pm
Heya,
I found your blog while searching for a tutorial on how to kill onyxia in world of warcraft, strange huh? Anyway, I like your site so it will go in my bookmarks. Take care, greetings from Sweden!
I dont know if you play yourself but if you do check out my site, I have a method that lets you cheat and dupe infinite gold and epics.
Wowdupezone
Comment by L70 Draenei Mage — June 21, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
I have also noticed that the home page for wordpress doesnt really do too well with adense accuracy. Once you go into the posts themselves, you start seeing that that title bar as well as the URL starts to have more specific information in it and adsense picks right up on it.
However on the homepage, the detailed title bar and long URL are not there and adsense has trouble figuring it out. I am tweaking with a few things in the header to try and get better results. One thing I have noticed is that if you put a META keywords line in your header, adsense does a lot better on the home page.
Comment by general info — September 3, 2007 @ 11:50 am