Section Targeting With Adsense
As an adsenser you are bound to have noticed ads on your webpages that have absolutely no relevance to your site content. If you are new to adsense or if you have not yet experienced this, you will come across it sooner or later. Over the past few weeks some of you have sent me emails asking why it is that you are getting irrelevant adsense ads served to your pages. In this post, I will explain to you how Google allows you to 'resolve' this problem.
You'll notice that the word resolve is in single quotes. I would like to emphasize that even though there is a solution to the problem so to speak, even after you implement this solution you will occasionally notice some irrelevant ads although in my experience not as often as before implementation. The Google Adsense Program even as sophisticated as it is, does not always get it right to put relevant ads on your site. Even Google knows this so they made provision for adsense publishers to rectify this problem.
How? Section Targeting. What is it? It is a way to allow the adsense publisher to insert HTML code to sections or paragraphs in your content that you want to highlight to the Google crawlers as important. This then enables the crawlers to focus on the content specified and in turn allows Adsense to place ads on your site based on the content that you have specified.
The following is taken from the Google Adsense Help Center where you can find information on section targeting. It reads as follows:
"Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.
To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.
To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.
The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:
<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head><body>
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
</body>
</html>
You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that we can't guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you've made to your site.
In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages."
Hope this post was of help to you.