Eliminating PSAs on Google AdSense
Rarely do you find a publisher that is happy to find Google AdSense serving up PSA (Public Service Announcements) instead of those high paying real ads. So how does one eliminate those PSAs from coming up? A member at WebmasterWorld, incrediBILL, started a thread on how to help eliminate these PSAs.
He describes that you first need to track when the PSAs come up. He says that by installing the “alternate ad code in AdSense you can detect PSAs loading this code from your servers which will show up in your log files and you can determine just how serious this problem is on your web site.” An other method is to track by channel, so if you have one channel that is making close to $0 you know its serving lots of PSAs (keep in mind traffic). And of course, those stop words (i.e. guns, porn, pills, casinos, etc.) trip PSAs all the time. Eliminating the PSAs:
* Copy the page to a temporary file name like temp1.html, remove any potentially offensive words, upload to the server and display the page. You should initially see some default ads on the page. Now wait for the mediabot to come check the page, usually within the hour, and redisplay the page in your browser. If you continue to get actual ads on this page for a whole day you’ve probably fixed the problem.
* If the ads disappear and PSAs show up, try chopping up the page content into sections and put them on the server as temp2.html, temp3.html, etc. Then display each page and wait for the mediabot as before. Note – consider your navigation, page title and possibly even meta tags are causing problems so you may need to peel it down.
* Once you’ve determined which part of the page is causing the problem further narrow down the specific sentences, etc. as temp10.html, temp11.html, etc. and again load those pages and wait for a verdict from the mediabot.
* When you know what’s causing the PSAs, try assembling everything left as maybe temp20.html and see if that page will work. You know the drill, load the pages from your domain in the browser and wait for a verdict from the mediabot.
* With a clean page, replace your original page with the corrected content and wait for Google to reindex, could take a couple of weeks. If you’re impatient just redirect the old page name to a new corrected page name and get immediate results, but this could impact your SERPS so be careful.
One last set of notes – GET RID OF ALL THE TEMPXX.HTML FILES WHEN YOU’RE DONE as you don’t want Google indexing these. Also, use a different set of file names with each test as mediabot seems to remember page names with offending content so keep using new page file names to test with and don’t use names you might actually want to use as that name could get stuck in Google’s memory, not a good thing to happen.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Barry Schwartz is the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.
