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Adsense Relevance fix

On some of my website's pages I've had trouble with the Google Adsense ads and relevance.  One of the things I need to do on my site is have my own internal Ads.  In the upper right corner of my pages you'll see a couple links to important pages on my website that I would like visitors to be aware of.  In addition at the bottom of every page I have copyright information and links and additional information that visitors may be interested in to fully appreciate my website.

Please see my Adsense Relevance Tips

Adsense "sensing" and relevance

At times Adsense "senses" my ads, copyright notice, or even links to other sites as topics for my pages.  I've shuffled my content around hoping for more relevant results.  On a few pages, at times, I simply disabled the Adsense ads because they were so miss-targeted.

Help Adsense targeting by eliminating the irrelevant page content

So I wanted to hide my upper right hand corner ad box and my text in the bottom border of my page.  I've been playing with IFrames and they've made an amazing difference.

I created new empty web pages.  One page is simply the content of my ad box, like this:

Looks like normal page content doesn't it, but it isn't.  The actual content is at:
"http://www.bobshowto.com/_frm/bhtadbox.htm" and a copy is on my mirror domain which I won't get into in this article.  See how simple the page is.  Now to show this content, or ad box, in the upper right hand corner of all my web pages I use an IFrame directive!  Here is some sample html code:
<iframe
name="bhtadbox-sm"
width="160"
height="90"
frameborder="0"
src="http://www.bobshowto.com/_frm/bhtadbox.htm"
marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0"
vspace="0"
hspace="0"
allowtransparency="true"
scrolling="no"
>
</iframe>

I inserted this code in the upper right corner of the right border for my website.  I did a similar thing for my bottom border.  Note that you must work out the appropriate width and height to use.  I put these mini-pages in my _frm directory (frame).  In this way I can tell search engines not to crawl these mini-pages using my robots.txt file.  (More recently I prefer to prevent content indexing by using the embedded meta direction "robots=noindex".  This allows Google to crawl the content of the page, but directs Google not to add the content to it's index.  Historically Google did not always comply with this directive, but I would say since at least 2006, this directive has worked well with Google.

My hope was this effort would hide all my extraneous advertising text and links from Adsense, and I'm fairly sure it works.

One of the big surprises with this Adsense fix

Once my website was crawled by the Google search engine, Googlebot/2.1, when I searched Google's index I realized my bottom border text was no longer in Google's index, nor was my ad box.  I used to search for my website copyright marking like this:
site:www.bobshowto.com "All rights reserved.   Email Bob at"

That search would find all my pages but now Google no longer indexes my copyright notice.  The notice still shows up in the Google cache, but Google is really just showing my mini-pages in the _frm directory.  (This has some interesting advantages!).  This was a great way to find all my web pages in the Google Index, but the copyright marking is gone from the Google Index except for a few "supplemental results", and this is fine by me.  It should mean searchers are even more likely to find the true content of my pages!

Another smaller surprise

Page load time is slightly reduced.  When you use IFrames the web browser can display your site's content before it renders the IFrame content.  So my little ad block is rendered a little after the main page content.  I like this feature also.  This has many advantages, for example, please read my Adsense Slow Fix article.

Web site statistics

Unfortunately some website statistics packages count the display of an IFrame as a Page View.  So if you have two IFrames in your web page, your statistics may show 3 page views even though your visitor only looked at your one page with two frames.

Warning, use this information at your own risk.

While I believe these recommendations meet the Adsense terms of service (TOS), you must use these suggestions at your own risk.  ALSO: please remember the side affects mentioned in the paragraph above.

Hiding non-relevant text

Hiding this non-relevant border text has eliminated some of the Adsense relevance problems.  At times I would get Pay pal related ads just because I mention Pay pal in my bottom border.  Even here I've split up the term Pay pal hoping Adsense won't pick up on it!

I hope this helps with your website.

Thanks,
Bob