Google Adsense Section Targeting

• By: admin on May 27th, 2010
• Internet Marketing

In my last post, I touched upon something which I had learned from John Chow’s book, Make Money Online and that is, section targeting.  Section targeting is relevant to anyone who uses Google Adsense to earn money and that includes me!  In fact, I have been making money from Adsense pretty much from the day they launched the service which was way back in 2003 (I started using it in July,I think they launched in June).  I therefore thought that I knew everything there was to know about Adsense but it turns out that not only was I wrong but I was not aware of a fairly major feature!  I don’t know when they brought section targeting in but I bet not using it has cost me moolah!

In simple terms, when you put Adsense ads on your web pages, Google crawls the pages to see what the content is about and then displays adverts which are relevant to this content.  For example, if you have a page about weight loss, chances are the ads Google displays will be for weight loss products/supplements and so on.  The thing is though that Google isn’t always that good at knowing which information on your page it should take the most notice of and sometimes it gets it wrong.  In other words, Google might pick up on a couple of ‘rogue’ keywords which throws it’s normally excellent choice of adverts way off.  Section targeting allows you to tell the Google robot which content it needs to pay most attention to and it is soooo simple to use!

If you want to use section targeting, all you need to do is add the following HTML tag at the start of the content you want Google to take note of:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

and then add the following tag to the end of the content:

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you wish, you can also tell Google to ignore certain sections of your page by using  a (weight=ignore) comment in the starting tag as follows:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

Google say that it can take up to 2 weeks before they take notice of these tags but my advice is start using them today.  If you use WordPress there are a number of free plugins which will automatically apply these tags to your article/post pages – just use the Plugin search in the admin panel to look for ‘section targeting’.

And don’t worry, this isn’t a sneaky blackhat trick to fool Google, used correctly it is perfectly within the terms and conditions of the Google Adsense programme – here is their official FAQ on the subject.

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