Question: Why are my adsense ads for blogging or computer-related items instead of what my site is really about?

When you place adsense ads on your blog, one of the first things google looks at in determining what ads to show is the title of your blog. Many beginning bloggers put the word “blog” or “web site” in their titles, which throws off the google algorithm. Consider the following:

Marcie’s Recipe Blog Website
Marcie’s Gluten-Free Recipes and Delicious Desserts

Which one do you think will have more relevant ads more quickly?  The second one.

If you use WordPress, google is pretty good at figuring out where the content actually stars and ends.  However, you can also make a simple edit to make sure google sees your actual content.

Simply go into your theme’s appearance and edit the following files:

• archive.php
• index.php
• search.php
• single.php

You’ll need to find the routines named either <?php the_content(); ?> or <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Then  enclose those tags in other tags so they look like:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

and

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<?php the_excerptt(); ?>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

This will cause google to look at those sections first and ignore the rest of the page’s words like Blog, Website, Log-In, etc.

Chances are you will not notice any immediate effect the content targeting immediately.  Some changes take minutes, others hours or even days before google will start serving relevant ads.  You just have to wait it out.

There is no indication using these tags will affect your site’s Search Engine Optimization, since they are specifically for the google adsense crawler.

As mentioned earlier, google is very good at targeting ads on blogs, but if you are seeing strange Internet-related ads, content targeting may just help.