Those pesky Public Service Announcements (PSA) from AdSense have taken over my dog blog, DoggieNews.

They only seem to show up on the homepage, and on the archive pages. On the permalink pages, AdSense displays paid ads.

Since the homepage generates a big percentage of page views, I'm losing a lot of money by having the PSAs show up. And it was only recently that they began displaying, probably only a week ago. For the longest time, PSAs never showed up there.

You won't actually see PSA ads on my dog blog right now because I've replaced them with a back-up set of ads, which is actually Yahoo Publisher ads. But my experience with Yahoo Publisher shows that it pays less than AdSense. So, I'd rather figure out why PSAs are suddenly showing when they didn't used to.

I think the reason why is because there's been recently a reduction in ads for the words, "dog" and "dogs". It used to be these keywords generated a bunch of ads on Google's SERPs. The PSAs are showing up simply because what few advertisers are remaining for these keywords have may have blocked their ads from AdSense.

I'm going to try to replacing the META keywords with more lucrative ads like "dog training", or "puppy training". I'll let you know if that fixes it.

Labels: Public Service Ads

If you're running AdSense on Blogger, there's a little trick you can do to minimize the number of PSA's on your archive pages.

On the Archive Settings, there is a field for the "Archive Filename", as follows...


Enter a filename representing your biggest money keyword. In my case, I used "adsense.htm".

Blogger uses this filename when creating archive pages, such as follows...


By having the word "adsense.html" as my archive filename, AdSense will use this to determine ad relevancy.

By default, Blogger will use the filename, "archive.html", and this will often cause AdSense to show PSA's.

Of course, this "trick" can apply to any blogging platform, not just Blogger.

Labels: Blogging, Public Service Ads

My home-based website publishing blog, "In Your Web", has a nagging problem of getting a lot of public service ads (PSA) from Google AdSense.

This only happens on the homepage.

The reason is the domain name "inyourweb.com". Considering that keywords in the domain name, directory name, and filename, is a key factor towards determining relevant ads on AdSense, now you see why I get so many public service ads on the homepage. The other pages are ok, because those have more keywords in the filenames.


So the million dollar question is, "Why did I choose such a stupid domain name?"

Well, it wasn't that stupid at the time.

In Your Web was first launched in October 2003. That was only 7 months after Google AdSense was launched (March 2003). At that time, no one understood how AdSense determined relevancy, we were all still trying to figure it out.

I chose the name "In Your Web" because I wanted something that was easily recognizable. I was going after a domain that could be easily branded. Knowing what I know now, I would picked out a domain that had a keyword in it.

Blocking Public Service Ads

You can't force AdSense to display paid ads instead of the public service ad. Remember that the public service ads are displaying because Google can't figure out what else to display.

AdSense does provide some options on how it should handle this situation...


The second option, "Show Non-Google ads from another URL" is perhaps the best choice. It allows you to enter a URL to display ads from another source...


Here's what you do.

First create a new webpage on your server. This webpage should NOT have any of your website's template on it. It should be pure blank. Except, between the BODY tags, paste the advertising code from another advertising network. Make sure that the advertising code will display an ad with the same dimensions you're using with Google Adsense. NOTE: don't center the ad on the page, let it top-left-justify naturally.

Upload this page to your webserver.

Now, enter the URL for this page into the box above.

That's it. When Google decides that it can't find any relevant ads, it will display this instead.

You can also get creative, and instead of pasting code from another advertising service, you can use links for some affiliate programs, or links to some of your other websites.

Labels: Public Service Ads

I was just reading a post from a guy blogging as "Kirbitz", who said that he switched to using AdSense after some disappointing months with Bidvertiser. The irony is that after viewing five of his webpages, all such AdSense units are displaying public service ads.

Hopefully that will change for him soon.

A "public service ad" (PSA) is what AdSense displays when it can't identify any relevant ads for your website.

These don't generate any income for you.

So the trick is, obviously, to not get any PSAs.

One of the biggest factors I've noticed with determining relevancy, are the filenames, directory names, and domain names. Sometimes, this seems to have such a strong influence, that it even overcomes on-page keyword frequency. Perhaps the best "one-two" combination I can think of towards ensuring relevant ads, is to match your most frequently used on-page keyword with the filename of your webpage.

But that's just my observation, and not gospel from the AdSense team.

There's also in-HTML optimization that you can do. The Meta Keywords tag, and the Title tag also seem to help. It would be best to make sure these also match the on-page keyword and the filename.

Going back to this guy, "Kirbitz", and his blog. His blog is about making money online, which is a subject frought with AdWords. He shouldn't have any trouble attracting relevant ads.

Since AdSense doesn't explain their relevancy algorithm, we can never know exactly what causes a PSA to display. But since my blog is pretty much on a similar topic as his, and AdSense never seems to display PSAs here, it obviously has something to do with the blog itself.

If you happen to see too many PSAs displaying on your site, my best advice is to remove all "template content" until you have nothing left but the unique content itself (the article), and see what displays then. To do this, usually you can create a "test" page. Then, add pieces of the template back one by one and observe how that affects things.

You might just try a new (and simpler) template altogether.

Labels: Public Service Ads