Accidental AdSense Discovery

If you've been using AdSense on your websites for any length of time, you know how frustrating it can be if the AdSense ads don't closely match the content of your pages. With mismatched ads, your visitors aren't very likely to click on the ads and there goes your AdSense income.

I've been building AdSense sites for a while and usually don't have much trouble with the ads matching the content. However, not too long ago, as I was building a new page, I just couldn't get the proper AdSense ads to show up. The subject of the page was related to financial issues, but the AdSense ads were about camping equipment!

As I read the content of the page, there was no doubt about the subject matter. I had my best keywords in the page title, in the meta tags, in the headline tags, in the image alt tags and I had a generous sprinkling of the keywords dispersed throughout the page content.

I refreshed the page several times, hoping that the ads would change to the proper subject. But each refresh of the page only brought more ads for camping equipment.

I have built thousands of AdSense pages before and I never ran into this problem. I did everything I knew about in trying to optimize the page for my financial keywords, but nothing seemed to work. I tried increasing the keyword density, but I still saw ads for camping equipment.

If you refer to Google's AdSense tutorials, you'll see that they do have some special codes that you can insert into the HTML code of your webpage to inform Google of the content area they should use for determining which ads to display. Google supposedly reads the content between these tags and ignores anything else. I put the special codes on my page, expecting that finally I'd get the correct ads. I refreshed the page and guess what - more camping ads!

At this point, I was running out of ideas. I had done everything that made sense, but no matter what I changed, I just couldn't get the right ads. I decided to walk away for a while. Maybe Google needed more time to accurately judge the content in order to make the correct decision about the ads.

I got side-tracked with other matters, so I ignored the new webpage for about a week. I decided to check the ads, since surely Google would have them right by now. I opened the page and - you guessed it - more camping ads!

By this time, I was near the end of my patience and I was getting desperate. I decided that I would grossly overload my new page with the financial keywords in an effort to find the problem. I made a copy of my page and put it in a different directory on the server, just so I wouldn't lose my original page.

After making the copy, I opened it in my web browser and much to my surprise, I was seeing the proper AdSense ads! I didn't make any changes to the content of the page - none at all. This page was an exact duplicate of the one that kept showing the camping ads. The only difference was the location. The duplicate page was placed in a temporary directory for testing. I used one of my keywords for the name of the directory and that made all the difference with the topic of the AdSense ads that Google displayed.

I did a little more experimentation to see what I could learn. I stayed with the new page, the one that was showing the proper ads and made a few changes. First, I removed the special Google HTML codes. I refreshed the page and the right ads were still showing up. Next, I started removing some of the keywords. I was still getting the right ads. I experimented with all the aspects of the page, even the page title. No matter which items I changed, I was still getting the correct ads. After exhaustive experimentation, I determined that although keyword density, page title, headline tags and image alt tags are important, the directory name where the webpage resides seems to have the most impact on the topic of the AdSense ads that Google displays.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, where you just can't get the right AdSense ads, Change The Directory Name!