Optimising Adsense: Ignore irrelevant content

Up until the last couple of days I was getting poor click through rates compared with SoftTester. Although I can't be certain I've made improvements that will stick in the longer term, my Adsense has recently improved by a factor of 5 in terms of clicks and earnings.

What I had noticed was that the ads shown on my site were pretty generic. They were mainly for free software or DVD downloads. Ignoring the DVD downloads, I can guess that ads for free anything have pretty poor earnings. I'd often only get 3 or 4 cents a click.

After a bit of research, I found you could guide Google into using certain content on which to base ads. I found that if you put these sections around your content in the page, it might help make ads more relevant:

<!- google_ad_section_start ->

... the real content ...

<!- google_ad_section_end ->

I did this on my site but didn't really notice a big improvement. Then I noticed that you could also tell Google to IGNORE content too using these sections:

<!- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ->

... content to ignore ...

<!- google_ad_section_end ->

I also read tips on how/ where to place content on a page to make it noticeable for the Google Ads spider. The advice included:

1. Keep the content near the top of the page.
2. Bold keywords you want to highlight.

After reading this, I took a look at my pages. A typical page had a line of navigation links at the top of a page:

Free Software Downloads / Business & Finance / XXXX

This gave me a clue. Maybe my handy navigation links (for the user) were getting picked up by the Google Ads system. Maybe my bold "Free Software Downloads" link was making Google Ads show ads for free software. So I put in the "ignore" section around the line of hyperlinks and hey presto! In the last 2 days I've made about 5 times the income I was making before and the ads seem much more relevant to the page.