AdSense Tip #9: Use section targeting to exclude stop/poison keywords from your content

This is the next article in my occasional Google AdSense Tips series.

The introduction of section targeting lets AdSense publishers fine-tune the content that the AdSense crawler sees in order to better determine the topic of the content and to choose the ads to display accordingly. However, AdSense was already doing a good job in content determination before section targeting came along. No, the real benefit of section targeting is the ability to exclude content, particularly to exclude specific “stop” or “poison” words and phrases that affect which ads are shown on a specific page.

Excluding content with section targeting is simple. At the beginning of the part you want AdSense to ignore, place this comment in the HTML for the page:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

At the end, place this comment:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

What you may not realize is that you can place these comments right in the middle of your text. Consider the following paragraph:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a multiple-personality disorder, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

As it turns out, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” triggers ads for treatment of narcissism and other psychological problems, which is not at all the topic of this particular content. (Don't believe me? Visit the
permalink page for this tip and see what kind of ads are being shown.) In this context, then, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” is a poison phrase (not generally, just for this particular topic) that needs to be excluded from AdSense's consideration. This is all you do:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->multiple-personality disorder<!-- google_ad_section_end -->, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

The AdSense crawler will then skip over the phrase when determining what the main keywords of the page are and selecting the appropriate ads to display.

Note that you can achieve a similar effect two other ways, by using <span> tags to split problem words into multiple parts:

multiple-personality disorder

Or by inserting the offending words into the content via JavaScript:

<script>document.write("multiple-personality disorders")</script>

Neither solution is as good, however, as AdSense section targeting because they affect how search engines see the page in general. If all you want to do is avoid certain ads, section targeting's the way to go.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.