Making Adsense Smarter and More Relevant

Many bloggers like myself put ads in their blogs. You can trust me when I say that I don’t make enough money to retire yet (’cause I won’t blow smoke up your you know what) but a little income is still income and some extra coin sure doesn’t hurt.

Have you ever written an excellent post only to find dumb irrelevant ads ruining all of your hard work? I know that I have.

AdSense isn’t always as relevant as Google’s press would like us to believe, so sometimes it needs a little help. This technique will make your AdSense work smarter and be even more relevant.

For example, this technique demonstrates an easy way to make your AdSense ads be more relevant by inserting a small amount of code around the text that you want to base it’s relevancy on:

<!-- google_ad_section_start --> [ *your text goes here without the brackets ] <!-- google_ad_section_end -->

You can also designate certain sections that you wish to ignore by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

Unfortunately it wasn’t made clear whether or not we can wrap the code around text within the post itself.

According to Google’s AdSense Help Center they only give examples of using it with HTML code (which I assume is for using it within the template itself), so I wondered if that was the only place where it can be put. A quick look at the AdSense Help at Google Groups proved to be useless.

But after Googling around a bit I came across another post that answered the question. YES indeed, we can put the code within our posts.

It also answered my next question:

Last week I wrote the Google AdSense team to clarify a point regarding the use of the new AdSense feature for hinting to mediabot where the content is on your pages … but after having modified my WordPress templates to place those comment tags around each individual post, I started to wonder whether you could use them more than once on a single page, which I was in the case of archive or index template pages.

I got this (abbreviated) response back from Google: We allow more than one set of comments, so feel free to either use them around each post, or around all the posts, whichever works better for you.

So my approach will be a little different from the above referenced blogger. Instead of putting it in my template (which doesn’t make any sense to me — no pun intended from now on I will just add it to my posts, wrapping the code around specific keywords that I want AdSense to focus on. And as soon as I finish writing this I’m also going to go back and code all of the important keywords within my most popular posts.

So now we all know. If this post should help you to make more money all that I ask is to remember me in your Will. And if that is too much of a stretch some link love will be nice.

Filed under: instabloke, blog, weblog, blogging, blog tools, google, adsense, blog tips