A Question For You Adsense Pros

[galorfindel]

Just put some pages up with some Adsense on them a few days ago. One of the pages in question is here

http://www.y2marketing.com/personalinjury/Ann-Arbor-Personal-Injury-Lawyer.htm

My question is why is the Adsense so off topic? Shouldn't I be getting ads for personal injury lawyers???

I am a newbie so please forgive my ignorance in this matter. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Charlie

[Scoreboard]

Actually, I wouldn't say those are too irrelevant at all considering there is as much mention of "medical", "doctor", and personal injury afflictions as there is mention of personal injury legal content.

It's not a perfect contextual matching system but your Adsense ads are nowhere near some of the screwy mismatches there are out there.

Let the Mediapartners bot hit that page a few more times and see if it's refined. If not, work with your content and page layout a bit to see if you can trigger the ads you want. But don't do so in such a manner that the end user suffers or in such a way that you are working for no other reason than to game Adsense.

Good luck.

[galorfindel]

Let the Mediapartners bot hit that page a few more times and see if it's refined. If not, work with your content and page layout a bit to see if you can trigger the ads you want. But don't do so in such a manner that the end user suffers or in such a way that you are working for no other reason than to game Adsense.

Good luck.


First of all - thank you for your advice, it's much appreciated. How does the Mediapartners bot work? How often should I expect to hit my site? Is there a schedule it follows? Also what recommendations would you have in regards to tweaking my content and layout to trigger ads more relevant to "personal injury lawyers"?

Thanks,
Charlie

[Robert_Charlton]

galorfindel - First, I'm in no way an Adsense Pro, but I found your example kind of fascinating. All of the Adsense ads I see in the left column of your page are about "demographics," and yes, your page tries to be about "Ann Arbor Personal Injury Lawyer."

Though you may not think your page is about demographics, take a look at this quote from your page that appears just above the Adsense ads, in the left column of the page and very high up in your source code. I've italicized what I think is producing the results you're seeing:

Save time! The Ann Arbor personal injury lawyer links below have been collected for you using a sophisticated mathematical formula. Statistically these links represent the most accurate and relevant references for someone searching for a personal injury lawyer in Ann Arbor.

As I read the paragraph, I think that it's conceptually much more about demographics and demographic selection than it is about personal injury lawyers. You also use essentially the same text elsewhere on your page.

Above this text in your source code are another couple of lines. Here's the second line, again with some words italicized that I think skew the meaning toward demographics...

Up to date and crucial references, links and resources to help you choose the best personal injury lawyer in Ann Arbor in less time.

To me, the ads suggest a degree of linguistic analysis that's surprising. I don't know whether Google considers text proximity to its ads in determining what it shows. That might be another factor.

Semi-seriously, I hope you'll keep the page up there as is for a little while so forum members can check it out. ;)

[galorfindel]

galorfindel - First, I'm in no way an Adsense Pro, but I found your example kind of fascinating. All of the Adsense ads I see in the left column of your page are about "demographics," and yes, your page tries to be about "Ann Arbor Personal Injury Lawyer."

Though you may not think your page is about demographics, take a look at this quote from your page that appears just above the Adsense ads, in the left column of the page and very high up in your source code. I've italicized what I think is producing the results you're seeing:



As I read the paragraph, I think that it's conceptually much more about demographics and demographic selection than it is about personal injury lawyers. You also use essentially the same text elsewhere on your page.

Above this text in your source code are another couple of lines. Here's the second line, again with some words italicized that I think skew the meaning toward demographics...



To me, the ads suggest a degree of linguistic analysis that's surprising. I don't know whether Google considers text proximity to its ads in determining what it shows. That might be another factor.

Semi-seriously, I hope you'll keep the page up there as is for a little while so forum members can check it out. ;)

Robert,
Thanks for the analysis. It's funny because I have been staring at this page for the past few days trying to determine what has been causing these kinds of ads to appear. It never dawned on me to read that paragraph above the ads "as if" it was talking about demographics and by golly you actually could draw that conclusion.

I am not at home at the moment but when I return I am going to change the content up a bit to see what happens. I will use a test page and leave this current page up as is so I can track my results during my experiments. I wonder if anyone else has ever posted their adsense experiment results. There is obviously a formula being used. Maybe just a word saturation percentage cross referenced with possible category matches. The ads on this page sometimes show medical related categories which sort of makes sense given the number of times the word "injury" appears as well as other medical related keywords. Who knows?

Charlie

[Robert_Charlton]

What's intriguing to me about this example is that the algo driving the ads that I saw ignored all of the literal keywords and went instead for a conceptual abstraction of the text that's high up on the page.

Could be an element of the ranking algo as well.

I wouldn't be surprised at medical related categories appearing... and in fact before I looked over at the ads, that's what I'd expected to see.

PS - I almost have to remind myself that Google of course is not conceptualizing or abstracting anything... it's just using associations it has catalogued.

With regard to your page and the ads displayed, I think you'll eventually need to cut out a lot of verbeage that pulls it off target... perhaps put the gory bits about personal injury on another page.

[Marcia]

Robert is right, it's picking up the topic from the listing of demographics so it's right on target.

What was puzzling to me is why, on a page of mine about womens sportswear, they were running adverts for pet clothing - dog apparel and sweaters. I tried to track it down semantically, and what I found was this:

On a closely linked page - an "edge" to the "node" (or page) in close proximity, in other words - was the word fleece (which had been removed from that page, but was still on other pages and connected in the same site and section.

Google search: define fleece (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&oi=defmore&q=define:fleece)

So fleece is to animals to pets to dogs as sportswear is to fleece clothing to apparel to pet clothing to pet apparel to pet sweaters to dog sweaters. To GORGEOUS dog apparel and sweaters! ;)

PLUS - Orvis sells them all and they're an AdSense advertiser, if you go look at the Orvis site. I didn't have Orvis on the page, but all those connected keywords are part of the taxonomy - so they're lexically related.

See the connection there between womens clothing and dog sweaters?

[Patrick Berry]

try giving the bot a hand by using the following

<H1> Personal Injury Lawyer Resources - Ann Arbor </H1>

that should on its own be enough.

[Jenstar]

<h1> and <h2> tags don't have as much influence with the AdSense googlebot as it does with the serp googlebot.

Proximity is a major influence though, so note what you have immediately preceeding and following your AdSense javascript. This can really skew what ads are displayed, such as the case here. So AdSense is targeting perfectly for that page, even though they are not the "high paying" ads you prefer to show ;)

[Patrick Berry]

yes i realise that,

but still, that would the place to start.