Too Much Content for AdSense?

I've had a few clients with high-volume sites who couldn't properly monetize the sites with AdSense. The problem, oddly enough, is that they have too much content on their sites.

What's wrong with having lots of content, you say? Nothing, especially if that content is unique and is properly indexed in the search engines. These sites fit the bill perfectly. But they also had problems getting targeted ads with AdSense.

A common problem with larger sites is that either there's no single theme that spans the entire site or the site-wide theme isn't the topic you want to base the ads on.

Remember, AdSense doesn't just look at the content of a page to determine which ads to show. It also looks at the content of the other pages on the site as well as the pages that are linked to and linked from the pages in question. (Small plug here: I have an inexpensive special report about Google's AdSense patent that explains many of these things.) On larger sites sometimes the site-wide characteristics override the page-specific characteristics, leading to seemingly untargeted ads.

How do you fix this? By working at improving the on-page elements that AdSense uses to deliver targeted ads. Things like the name of the page, its title, the headings, the body content. And, just as important, using section targeting to exclude site-wide elements that are messing up the targeting. It takes work and experimentation to adapt the pages this way, but I can almost guarantee it'll work and you'll see your clickthrough rate rise accordingly, especially if your site benefits from natural search traffic.

Not to mention that these changes will also lead to better
page indexing in most cases, as many of the techniques you use
to improve ad targeting are also search engine optimization (SEO)
techniques.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

Comments