Why Are The Adsense Ads On My Main WordPress Page Not Targeted?
by David Pankhurst - March 13, 2007
Your site is humming along with Adsense - except the main page.
Now What?
Well, there could be problems, but there may not be - if your main page is showing Public Service Ads, but the rest of the site is fine, check these things out first:
- Is your content ‘on target’? Talk about ’snakes’ one day, Internet marketing another, and the latest S.F. movie on another, and each post on its own page will be likely targeted well for ads - but the compilation of them on the main page will make Adsense choke! After all, what ad could you put on there (movie ads about mutant snakes on a plane filled with Multi Level Marketers, perhaps?) In reality, the winner in this tug of war will likely be the topic with the largest ad inventory - rarely the choice you want.
- Are your article titles properly set up? Like the main blog title, default WordPress themes often have lousy tags for titles. In some cases, the date and author name has a ‘higher’ tag than the title! For example, if the article title is surrounded by <H3> tags and the posting date is surrounded by <H2> tags, search engines will give priority to the date over the title - bad for ads.
- Are you ’slow to build’? Some SEO folks believe the first paragraph of an article has more importance to search engines than any other. So is your first paragraph an introduction, or do you get to the meat of the issue right away? On a separate post page you may be able to build slowly and ramble - but on the main page (where there’s summaries or at least other articles) you may not ‘lock on’ quick enough.
- Is Section Targeting OK for the main page? On a single post page, the section targeting can wrap around the single article - easy. But on a main page it has to weave in and out of many posts - if you forget, or miss out, then you could end up including more text that you want, breaking Section targeting tags - and just missing out on the benefit. It’s not a coincidence my ABTheme from ‘Top 10 Tricks to Conquer Your Niche With WordPress’ has section targeting built in - it’s a pain to get right, especially on the main page.
- Are you using the wrong URL? From Google’s point of view, egwebsite.com and www.egwebsite.com are two different URLs - and ads are prepared for each separately (try loading the same page both ways to see what I mean). In WordPress, you set the URL via the Admin panel, so all internal links are the same - but the URL you use to enter the site may be different. For example, say I set up my blog at www.egwebsite.com - but when I visit, I enter egwebsite.com - Public service ads abound, I get nervous, but all other pages (which I visit from my internal and properly set links) are good. By the way, this is a huge reason to promote the exact same website link all the time (the same applies for using
egwebsite.com egwebsite.com/ egwebsite.com/index.php
interchangeably).
Give these a try, and try our WordPress Forum if that doesn’t work - it may be someone has come up with your specific problem before.
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