What is Section Targeting and How Do I Implement It?

Google has added a great new feature. It is called section targeting. This allows you to add html code to your page to tell the Adsense crawler what section of the page you would like the crawler to pay attention to when choosing the adds for your page. This can be a very important feature especially if you have a large web site. For example I have a large arthritis website. The term arthritis is in my URL. The title of the page has arthritis in it. The shared borders have links with the term arthritis in it. Unfortunately not every page in the site is about arthritis. This is typical of many sites. What happens is that the crawler sees arthritis in the top shared border and in the left shared border and even on pages that are not about arthritis I get arthritis ads.

If you use shared borders or frames you can tell the crawler what section of the page you want it to look at. I begin the code after the tag at the beginning of the content section and before the tag at the end of the content section. This way the crawler looks at the content for that specific page. As a result each page gets more accurate ads distributed to it.

You can also add the code to just a section of the body of the page. If you have one or more paragraphs you want to high light then add the code just before the paragraph and after the paragraph that you want to high light.

Below is from the help pages of Google Adsense. This explains how to add the code.

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those who are at least a little familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

Section targeting

this is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that we can't guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you've made to your site.

In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.