Having trouble with ads not appearing to be targeted or public service ads on your site?

There can be many reasons why a website may display less targeted ads or public service ads. Below is a list of the most common issues.

Our system has not yet crawled all the pages of your website.
You may notice that after you place the AdSense ad code on a web page, you do not receive the most relevant ads. If Google has not previously crawled your site, it may take up to 48 hours or more before our crawlers gather content from that page. In the meantime, the ads you see may be public service ads, for which you will not receive earnings. Or, you may see only slightly relevant ads. The relevance will increase over time.

Your page may contain sensitive content for which relevant paying ads will not be displayed.
Our system has certain filters in place to protect our advertisers from advertising on pages that could be construed as potentially negative, non-family safe or even offensive. Although the nature of your some content really may not fit into any of these categories, at times, emphasis of some sensitive subject matters on a page can flag our servers to deliver public service ads to a page.

Your website is using session ID's in the URL.
If your web pages use session ID's, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID – and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be in the index and will be queued to be crawled. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are never in the index. You will need to remove the session ID's in order to display targeted ads.

Your site has restricted access using a robots.txt exclusion.
If your site is using a robots.txt file, the AdSense crawler maybe be blocked from crawling your web pages. Therefore, we may not be able to serve you the most relevant ads based on the content of your website. On pages where we are unable to crawl or understand the content of a page, public service ads may be displayed for which you will not receive any earnings.

If you would like to grant our crawler access your pages, you can do so without granting permission to any other bots. Simply add the following two lines to the top of your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

This change will allow our bot to crawl the content of your site and provide you with the most relevant AdWords ads for your pages.

For more information on the robots protocol, please visit http://www.robots.org.

We are having trouble crawling your web pages.
At times, our crawlers may not be able to access your web pages due to errors with your web server or connecting to your website. If we receive an unexpected server error message when attempting to retrieve your robots.txt, your pages will display untargeted or public service ads until this error is resolved.

If our system receives an error from your web server, our crawlers will periodically attempt to access that page to see if it is working. Until that page is accessible by our crawlers your site may display untargeted ads or public service ads.

Your website is using frames.
In order for our system to serve better targeted ads to the content on your website, select the Framed page checkbox from the Ad layout code page when generating your ad code. This will tell our crawler to gather the content from your frame, and will allow us to serve ads targeted to your content.

The AdSense code was placed within an IFRAME.
Our targeting technology is not optimized to serve ads within an IFRAME. If you placed the AdSense code in an IFRAME, your site may display less targeted ads or public service ads. For better results please implement our ad code directly into the source of your web page. Once you make these changes, relevant ads may not appear immediately. Until we are able to re-crawl your site, which may take up to 30 minutes or more, you page may continue to display untargeted or public service ads.

Your web pages are behind a login.
At this time, pages that require a log in can not be easily visited by our crawlers. Additionally, since these types of pages are not easily visited for approval and it is difficult for our AdSense Specialists to verify that pages behind a log in follow Google AdSense policies, we are unable to offer support for these pages.

There are too many URLs added to your account filter list.
At times, if you add too many URLs to your filter list, we may no longer have other ads available to target to your content. As a result, you may begin seeing less relevant or public service ads on your web pages.

Your web page may not contain enough content.
There may not be enough information on your site for our crawlers to determine the content of your pages. Therefore, we could be having difficulty identifying relevant ads to show on your pages. Please note that our crawlers are unable to derive meaning from:

* audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
* mp3 files (.mp3)
* images (.jpeg, .bmp)
* Macromedia Flash movies
* Java Applets

In such cases, we recommend that you include more content other than the above files on your website to assist our crawlers in gathering information about your site to display relevant ads.