Is Google Adsense serving up ads based mostly on keywords in the URL?
I guess I’ve always assumed that Google AdSense used some magically sophisticated algorithm when serving up AdSense ads, but it might be relatively simple to get certain kinds of ads on to appear via Google Adsense:
If you append the URL with some keywords, you can actually control what kinds of ads appear on the page.
For example:
http://m.iscellaneo.us currently displays ads about blogging, ringtones, etc., along with some ads relevant to the content.
But if I put some extra keywords into the address bar, such as:
http://m.iscellaneo.us/?mesothelioma
I get ads all about mesothelioma. Some thing for:
http://m.iscellaneo.us/?caterpillar which gives me ads about caterpillars, even though I’ve never written anything about caterpillars.
I thought maybe it has something to do with PageRank, so I tested it on another site with considerably more presence than mine, Matt from Metafilter’s Whole Lotta Nothing. Here’s what I typed into the address bar:
Sure enough, his Google ads began to display ads for Mesothelioma. It took more keywords in the URL to get it to work than it did for my site, but it still works.
So…. How is this useful? Well, it wouldn’t take much modifying to a blog to ensure that every page contains certain keywords, and subsequently all ads are based on a given subject (regardless of the content). Certain types of ads are more profitable that others, and with this easy hack it appears that you can control what ads appear on your site.
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