AdSense Section Targeting Is Not For Keyword Stuffing

So someone was complaining about the ad targeting on some of their pages. Although this isn't directly related to that problem, when I took a look at their pages I noticed this fragment at the bottom of each page:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<font size="1" color="#EFEFEF">gluten, gluten free, wheat gluten,
gluten intolerance, gluten celiac, wheat allergy, celiac disease,
gluten free diet, gluton, symptoms of celiac, celiac symptoms,
celiac testing, celiac nutrition</font>
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

This, my friends, is what is commonly known as keyword stuffing, and it's a bad thing to do. Google in particular frowns upon it.

If you're having trouble with the ad targeting on your pages, do not stuff keywords into an ad section as shown above. Remember that ad sections are hints to Google about what's important about your page and what's not. Any ad sections that are blatantly obvious attempts to sway the ad targeting will be ignored.

What you should do is use section targeting to emphasize the important parts of your content. But even more importantly, you should use natural search engine optimization techniques to make sure that AdSense knows what the page is about. This means using appropriate keywords in as many of these as possible: domain name, page URL, page title, headings, body text, anchor text of outgoing links, anchor text of incoming links. And making sure that the AdSense crawler can read the page in the first place — if you block it, it'll have to guess about the content based on the URL, the other pages in the folder or on the site, and the incoming links. Do this — and do it correctly from the beginning — and you'll see relevant ads. See the section targeting chapter in Uncommon AdSense for more.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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