Over the last few months I have noticed that more and more of the adverts that adsense has been serving me have become irrelevant to the content on the pages. I suppose this is my fault really for not fully understanding how to tell the google ad servers what my webpages are about.
This has originated from when I first started my website over 7 years ago. Before you start to say "Why didn`t you see it sooner" I just want to say that until recently the website has been more of a hobby than a necessity. In the present economic climate the revenue I get from my website is crucial to hold my head above the water instead of drown in the ocean like many other web publishers.
For my website, it is harder to make google realise what a webpage is about as my whole website is regarding language translation. Only 1/13 is in English with the rest being chinese, german, french etc... etc...
I`ve been looking over google analytics for a long time and the depth of the statistics can be dumbfounding but I`m starting to realise which pages perform badly for adsense and the reason why. The adverts have nothing to do with the content.
Most people know that you can guide google in the right direction with google_ad_section_start and google_ad_section_end inside the web content but this has never worked for me. Then I started to play around with the meta description and meta keywords in the header and wham! I have always had description and keyword meta tags but now I know they were no where near complete. As my website is in PHP I have always self generated those two segments of the webpages as it makes it easier handling the different languages but it was a big mistake.
Now I have started to go through my whole website and adding really focused keywords and descriptions that are 2to 3 times the size and this has started to see a change in the tide of adverts being shown. Irrelevant Ads will be a thing of the past, but for now I still have a few thousand pages to adjust.
