Localized AdSense content

Last week I was in the United States for a short vacation. Although most Europeans would find it hard to distinguish a Canadian like myself from an American, I can certainly tell that I'm in a different country as soon as I drive over the border. It's not just the stern-faced border guards asking to see your passport (though that's a big clue). Or the strange money (all the bills are the same color!). There are other subtle things, like different speech patterns and idioms (like “drive-up ATM” versus “drive-through ATM”), different street layouts and traffic patterns (the northern Detroit area is full of streets with no left turns allowed, instead you drive past where you want to go and do a U-turn), different banks (is the Fifth Third Bank a merger between the Fifth and Third banks, or the fifth Third bank, or 5/3 of a bank?). Which brings us to today's topic: localized AdSense content.

Localization is the geek term for adapting material for a specific locale, which is a cultural and/or linguistic and/or geographical grouping of humans. For example, the localized version of “localization” in the UK would be “localisation”. You'll often see locales described using language and country codes: for example, “en-US” refers to English as used in the United States while “en-CA” refers to English as used in Canada (and no, they're not the same). Localization affects more than spelling and grammar, however, it also applies to things like date and number formatting (”1,000.00″ vs. “1 000,00″), sorting sequences (do accents matter?) and other things. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a good FAQ on this.

Your blog or website is viewable by a worldwide audience, so you should give some thought to localization. The first think is to decide which language or languages you're going to support. Most sites are in one language only because of the effort and cost required to support multiple languages. For example, I've had requests for a French version of this blog, but I can't see myself doing it anytime soon because the postings I already write in English take so much time to do already, translating them (or coming up with entirely new content) just isn't worth it.

But even with one language there are localization concerns. There are many variants of English in use, for example. There are two general approaches:

• Write for your own locale. This is the simplest choice. You know your own language and culture best. Works well if your readers are primarily from that locale. Or else you write compellingly enough that your audience will figure it out.
• Write for the most popular locale. English sites often slant themselves towards an American audience. I do it, for example, by using American spelling for the most part — thus you see me talk about “color” and not “colour”. (Though I do sneak in the occasional Canadianism like kerfuffle or pogey — so instead of referring to AdSense as “webmaster welfare” I might call it “webmaster pogey”).

But of course, that's without considering AdSense. In theory, you shouldn't be concerned with AdSense at all in writing your content, but in reality we all want to tweak our content so that it attracts the best ads. So keep these important facts in mind:

• AdSense can only be used with certain languages. Originally, you could place AdSense ads on any page, but not too long ago Google tightened the rules. Now the page content has to be in one of the supported languages. If your content is in a different language, you're out of luck.
• The ad inventory varies greatly by language. Remember, the ads you see all come from AdWords, and AdWords advertisers can choose which languages and countries they want to target. This is a good reason why you should use the alternate URL or alternate color feature of AdSense to make sure that those icky public service announcements never show up.
• The words you use affect the ad targeting. Generally speaking, Google's algorithms are smart enough to handle simple cases. For example, “traffic equalizer” and “traffic equaliser” show the same general ads because Google is smart enough to treat “equaliser” and “equalizer” as equivalent. But using the wrong variants might cause you to miss advertisers who are advertising based on exact matches only.

Then there's the whole problem of which URLs to use for your pages. Most web servers support a feature called “content negotiation” which lets the server automatically choose the best version of a web page based on information provided by the web browser. This lets you use one URL to serve many different versions of a page. The problem, of course, is that the AdSense crawler is not going to see all the versions of those pages — it's just going to get the default version. It's better to use separate URLs for the different versions of a page and provide a way to automatically redirect visitors to those pages instead of having the web server do it transparently.

If you have further questions about this, please leave a comment or else send me some mail.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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