Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Google says don’t. They provide a couple of bad examples too. I will say that the examples are pretty obvious. They don’t provide any acceptable examples but they tell you what you can do, as in change the ad colors or put a full border around your ads.

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/10/match-google-adsense-font-type-and-size-to-increase-ctr/

Great blog about matching Adsense fonts. The post doesn’t discuss whether it’s ethical or acceptable under Google’s guideline to do so. I guess it depends… the old, I’ll know it when I see it rule. But it’s a good tip:

In Firefox - Right click the ad, Select “This Frame” then “View Frame Source”. A new window shows you the whole source code with the CSS code too.
In Internet Explorer - Just right click the ad, select View Source.

For the leaderboard
Title
line-height: 12px; font-size: 11px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 12px; font-size: 10px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;

For the large rectangle
Title
line-height: 14px;font-size: 11px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 14px;font-size: 10px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;

Are your Google Ads Targeting incorrectly?  Try this tip from Google’s Adsense FAQs to tell Google which part of your page to target:

 

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>
 

A good example of a poorly targeting page is here: http://xlife.zuavra.net/curse/ 

The page is about technical problems he’d had.  Rather than showing software ads, all the ads are targeting religious seekers.  The author jokingly wrote that he was cursed in the title and later says that the Linux errors must be “God’s wrath”.  Google decided that the overall topic of the page must be religious and serves ads as such.  I will say though that I was more tempted by those ads than I am by ads on a typical page, but the Adsense targeting may be helpful for some.

At http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html, Google has posted how to verify that a spider named Googlebot is really from Google.  Telling people to check DNS seems like telling us the obvious.  The helpful tip was to also check the fully qualified domain name as spider owners could spoof that.  I’m not tight enough on bandwidth to care if I’m being over spidered, even by rouge spiders spoofing their namres so this isn’t all that valuable to me.  I do like for Google to index as frequently as possible, though.  Welcome Google.  Come on in… take off your shoes and relax.