AdSense publishers that complain about mis-targeted ads on new content pages are often the culprits of their ad targeting problems. Although the problem will sort itself out in a day or two, publishers can take some simple steps to avoid initial ad mis-targeting.

Always Have Content

Displaying AdSense ads on a page with no content not only contravenes the AdSense program policies, it also confuses the contextual ad selection algorithm used by AdSense. Without content, AdSense is forced to rely on other information in order to select ads to display, including:

• Keywords in the URL of the new page
• The content of other pages (already analyzed by AdSense) on the site
• The content of external sites that link to the site

In most cases these clues are enough to select the right kind of ads, especially on small niche sites. But if your site spans multiple topics, the ads might be very off-target for the content you intend to place on that particular page.

Always Have On-Topic Content

Having content isn't enough, however, because it has to be on-topic content in order to properly target the ads. It's not uncommon for website owners to create new pages of content based on older pages, but temporarily leaving off-topic content on a page is a sure way to get mis-targeted ads.

The mis-targeted ads may not even show up right away, oddly enough. The first few times ads are shown, AdSense has no information on the content of the page and so uses the clues mentioned above to select the ads. But shortly after ads are first displayed on a page, the AdSense crawler is dispatched to read the content of the page and select ads based on that content. If the content is way off base, ads that were perfectly fine may suddenly be replaced with mis-targeted ads!

Don't Display Ads Until You're Ready

Of course, the easy solution to initial mis-targeting is to simply not display any AdSense ads on a particular page until you've fine-tuned the content of the page. Making sure the page is complete before enabling AdSense avoids initial ad mis-targeting altogether.

And even if the initial mis-targeting does occur, it's not the end of the world. In a day or two the AdSense crawler will return and notice that the page content has changed and adjust the ads accordingly. Don't lose any sleep over it -- a few days of bad ads just isn't worth the hassle.