Having Non Relevant AdSense on your Front-page?
Suffering from the Public Service Ads (PSA), RSS feed or blogging related ads?
Your not alone :)
It is time for a new project apart from DuoBlogger, and Hendrik advised me to buy an old domain rather than a whole website. So I went out and searched Google and ended up at some Indian website selling 10+ year old domains for $200 each. (yourmaindomain.com)
Now you might think, what’s the catch…..why selling them so cheap? Indeed the domains were all banned from Google’s index. However the good part was that the domains had an history of backlinks and still had an index in archive.org.
I wasn’t really looking for any specific niche because I was basing my niche on the domain name, i.e. if there was an domain name with iPhone apps in it – then I would go for the iPhone niche. Looking at domain names is a good way to find out what keywords you want to use to market your niche. Having the keywords already in the domain name has several advantages for SEO purposes.
Google tends to rank websites higher, which already have the keywords in the URL name, without having many backlinks pointing to their website.
Take for example; Blogger – it’s ugly – but once you let them host your domain – you benefit from their age, I believe blogger is like 6 years old (?). It’s easy to rank with blogger for niches which hardly have any competition (50,000 or less results) with just a few well placed backlinks from PR 6 and up.
Anyway so I added content to my Herbal Supplements blog (note: 11 years old :D registered in 1998 – The Google spiders visits the website every single hour) and a week later I slapped AdSense on it. It’s ugly, and that’s also my strategy – to let the visitors leave fast upon their arrival on my blog – by either clicking the back button or an ad. Tip: Do not let the users have to many options to look around the site as this will greatly reduce the chance of a user to click on any of the ads.
After 3 days I still had a major problem, the front page ads were as relevant as my grandma is with computers, thus getting near zero clicks. Only the sub pages were relevant. The theory behind this is that you (and especially me in this case) threw AdSense too early on the blog. The AdSense spiders still have an old page cached in their system thus giving you non relevant ads. (this is not the case with interest based ads – as they are cookie related)
Getting Rid of Non Relevant Ads on the Front Page
To resolve this issue, make sure to have some content on your website. Write your main keyword in the sidebar (in the widgets) and use a proper title and description on your blog. If you passed that then your ready to fix it. Hendrik told me simply RELOADING the page should fix it, however that was not the case for me as it took more than 3 days with 300 page reloads (designing phase) for any relevant ads to show up.
If you’re using wordpress – then you don’t have to do much – simply load another theme template (make sure you’re not using adsense in any widgets) and wait an hour before switching back. This will alert the AdSense bot that there are no ads to display on your website resulting in a complete reindex of your content in their system for your website once you put the theme back on.
Otherwise, when your not using a blogger platform, then you will have no other option then removing all the ads or wait weeks untill they reindex the website. Shame but it’s the truth.
If you’ve experienced the same and got something to correct/suggest to others, make an comment below as everybody will benefit from it.
Cheers,
Mark
I read another blog which was discussing this topic as well and I found it interesting. I think that relevancy really builds trust.. and when are irrelevant ads on your site, people will not click.. it will be, of course, of little interest to your readers. If there are relevant ads, then readers will be more interested in what these ads offer and will therefore be more likely to click through – generating income for the blog owner. Consistency and relevancy are key
Good article! I am having this problem on some of my sites though! About that site.. hmm too bad those names are banned! 10 year old domains can be valueble
yup. you not alone because i also suffer same situation. But i know how to solve that problem. hoho!
But then again if you have a lot of content people will probably be back. Which means there’ll be higher chance of them hitting one of the ads. Also it’s you’re not your ;)
I found that non-relevant ads really only happened when you set up the blog, within a couple of days this matter is usually resolved.
Another thing I would like to add, about having your keywords in the domain name: I registered http://www.healthydietweightloss.com purely for the long tail keyword “healthy diet weight loss”, and the blog has been on page 1 of Googles SERP’s for the past 2 weeks or so – for that main keyword, and the competition is 61,000,000 or something! So it does play a part…
Petra is right, I’m pretty sure. When I first put the adsense ads up on my old blog, they were just public service ads. later, they were relevant ads.
This is a big problem if not resolved quickly. Basically you have to make your pages seem relevant for specific keywords. Then hopefully there are some decent paying advertisers that are targeting those keywords. It is normal for this situation to exist when you first add adsense code, but if a site is not properly optimized, the problem could persist.
Very nice tips, thanks :)
I never really thought about it before, I will consider changing my AdSense plan…