Here’s a nice tip from the Optimization Tips section of the AdSense Support website. It deals with section targeting. By adding comment tags to your pages, you can now tell the AdSense bot which page sections to highlight or exclude when it tries to find the contextual relevance of your page.
From the AdSense Support website:
To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.
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:
<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head>
<body>
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
</body>
</html>
There’s no limit to how many sections you can “tag”. Bloggers will find this feature particularly helpful because now you can exclude sections which “dilute” the contextual relevance of their pages, e.g. global navigation links, blog comments, RSS links, etc.
Blogspot.com users can use this tip from Digital Inspiration. Edit your blogger template this way (use at your own risk):
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<$BlogItemBody$>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
Wordpress users may view the HTML code of this page to see where the exclude and highlight tags were added. Sections I excluded are the sidebar, comments and footer (use at your own risk).
With section targeting, publishers now have some degree of editorial control over which AdSense ads get displayed on the page. “Some” is the operative word here, as Google still doesn’t guarantee results. Also, don’t expect to get focused, relevant ads instantly. It may take up to 2 weeks for Google to “see” the tags on your webpage or blog template and to start serving ads targeted to the sections you highlighted. In theory, it seems the competitive URL filter technique I discussed in the previous Practical AdSense Tips V post may not be needed after all, but that still remains to be seen. I’ll be posting my observations in the next couple of days.
Competition does spawn innovation. Let’s hope Yahoo comes back with a better targeting tool for their Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) ads. The race is on :)
Via Threadwatch.