I've noticed some interesting things about how adsense picks keywords.

On one of my sites, i added a subdirectory to work on a new version of the site. I took one of the pages that previously had no adsense on it, and put adsense on it in the subdirectory.

So, i had: www.site.com/version2/page.html

page.html displayed weird ads, related to the text of the page.

I then copied /version2/page.html over /page.html -- it displayed the same ads as the rest of my site.

This leads me to believe that google looks at the full path of your page to determine ad keywords.

Why is this relevant?


Well, a couple reasons.

1) The keywords in *this* site don't really show that great ads.
2) The site is about A. One section of the site is about B. Since the majority of the site is about A, ads in section B are related to A.

I'd like to give adsense more "hints" about the site. What's the best way to go about doing this?

One theory is to make a subdirectory and put "page.html" in the new subdirectory. That might be enough to tell adsense, "hey, this different content, it's in a different directory"

Thoughts?

AdSense seems to "show what it knows" until it learns what your page is about, especially if most of your site is about the same general subject, or even if you have a more popular site that earns most of your Adsense money, it will sometimes use those ads on the new site or page at first. Over time, it seems to get smarter at interpreting what the new page is about. If it's a high traffic page it seems to learn faster.

You can help it speed this curve by using the

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

comment tags around the most relevant part of your text. There is also a comment tag when you want it to ignore a part of the page in determining relevancy. Also be sure to use keywords you are targeting in the title metatag, on-page titles and h1 tags for better relevancy.

I've noticed if you use page.html for awhile and it already has ads running, then later you change the copy or use it for a template to create a new page while live ads are already running, it takes it a lot longer to learn what is relevant for the new copy than it does if you get the new page the way you want it, and only then ad the AdSense code.