It's all Greek to your unpublished pages

Recently, a number of concerned publishers have let us know that they're seeing ads in foreign languages in the 'preview mode' of their HTML editors or on pages that haven't been published to the web. We'd like to reassure you that this is normal.

Before our system can display targeted ads on your pages, our crawler first needs to access your pages. While you're building your pages within your HTML editor, your page hasn't yet been crawled, so you may sometimes see less-targeted ads or even ads in foreign languages. However, after you've published a page to the web, you should start seeing ads in the appropriate language. Please also keep in mind that it can sometimes take 1 to 2 weeks for our crawler to revisit your site after you've made any changes, but your ad relevance should improve over time. As always, we appreciate your patience as the crawler continues its work.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Good news for HTML newbies

You've signed up for AdSense. You've activated your account. You've chosen your ad format and colors. Now you're ready to paste your AdSense ad code into your site. Or are you? If you're new to HTML, you might find it a bit challenging to add our code into the HTML source of your pages. ("HTML source--what's that?")

Have no fear - our new Troubleshooting Demo is here! I've worked with other members of our support team to create an HTML Troubleshooting Demo that should help clear up the confusion so you can see the ads on your site without delay. The demo addresses many common issues new publishers face when adding the code to your site, including instructions for pasting the ad code using two common types of design software. It also provides a background on HTML, information on viewing your page source, and tips to address the top four problems faced by new publishers.

If you've used our demo, we welcome your feedback.

Posted by Kristin - AdSense Publisher Support

From the Inside AdSense mail bag

Rowland asks:I signed up for AdSense with my blog URL, but I’d like to paste AdSense on my forum site as well. Do I have to submit a new application?

Inside AdSense says: You don't have to submit a new application to add your code to a new site. As long as your pages comply with our policies, you can put your code on them - whether they share the same domain name as your original site or not. We'll detect the new pages once the code is there, and we'll start serving ads to them almost immediately.

Jackie asks: I added my competitor’s URL to my filter list last week, and ads for this competitor continue to appear on my site. Can you figure out what’s wrong?

Inside AdSense says: Jackie, here are three tips for creating effective filters:

1) Make sure that you have added these URLs to your AdSense for Content filter list rather than your AdSense for Search filter list.

2) As you know, some AdSense ad formats contain a URL within the ad text. However, filtering this URL wouldn’t necessarily block ads from this advertiser. To create effective filters, you should verify that you’re filtering the destination URL of the ad. For instructions on how to determine the destination URL, check out the Competitive Ad Filter Guide.

3) If you're keen on blocking all ads from a particular site, and you've found the destination URL, you can enter simply domainname.com in your filter list (where domainname is, of course, the domain name in their destination URL). Dropping the www. and any folder or file names will ensure that anything coming from that site will be blocked from your pages.

David asks: I recently posted several blog entries about airplanes, but the ads are still targeted to an old post about kites. How can I get AdSense to show ads about airplanes?

Inside AdSense says: Crawling is done automatically by our bots, and we don’t manually control how often your pages get indexed but we’re always trying to improve how quickly we can crawl your pages to display the most relevant ads. When you update a site or add new content, you may have to wait until these changes are reflected in our index before relevant ads appear. During this time, your ads may be targeted to older content.

In the meantime, you may be interested in trying a new feature, section targeting, to improve the relevancy of ads appearing on your blog. Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. Here's more information.

Posted by Suzie