Google Adsense targeting trick

I've been reading a lot about Findory's Adsense targeting. Some are alternately impressed and upset that they can't feed their own keywords into Google Adsense ads. (See here and here.) A few weeks ago I discovered a way to accomplish this sort of thing without having a premium Adsense account. I ran it by Google and they've OK'd it so now I feel compelled to share. Let me take you on a magical journey of nerdiness...

Better targeting

Google may not let regular publishers feed the Adsense ads specific keywords, but there's a neat technique I noticed a few weeks ago on the new Feedtagger.com (a very slick aggregator). I've checked with Google and been told this method isn't a violation of the terms of service, so hopefully the webmaster of Feedtagger won't mind me pointing his clever implementation out.

I noticed when clicking around on the the popular tags list on the left side of Feedtagger.com that a) the ads were refreshing without a page reload and b) the ads were eerily targeted to the keyword you clicked on. Try clicking "politics" or "food" for good examples. Pretty amazing targeting for such a noisy page. Any webmaster who's struggled with Adsense relevancy would be intrigued.

How it works

Curious, I looked through the source and found that the Google ad itself was in an IFRAME that's dynamically refreshed with Javascript. The default URL displayed in the IFRAME is:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=null

Which displays a blank page with "null" in the title. When you click on, say the "food" tag, however, it refreshes that IFRAME to:

http://www.feedtagger.com/search.php?search=food

Which puts the word 'food' in the title and a Google ad on an otherwise blank page. The ad is then perfectly targeted to the word in the title. Replace the word "food" in the URL with any keyword and you'll see relevant ads (as long as relevant ads exist).

This is pretty cool. And obviously, extending this out, if you wanted to clone Findory's behavior you could dynamically load personalized keywords into the title tags of the IFRAME as the user clicks around the site so that the ads would be customized to the user's profile. I have no idea how Google would feel about that, though.

Warning

As I said, I did ask Google about this technique of forcing the relevancy of Adsense ads and they said it was "not a violation of any program policies". But they added:

However, please keep in mind that AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages that include the use of excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of their pages.

I assume they're fine with FeedTagger's usage because it's very good about only using this technique to increase the relevancy of the ads rather than trying to hit high value keywords or other shady practices. Using this to scam your way into more money will probably get you kicked out.

businessBrad Turcottetech Comments
Full text RSS feed

So until Scoble posted about a boycott I had no idea that the issue of excerpts versus full text in feeds was so huge. I've been using RSS aggregators for a couple of years now and have always preferred headings and decent excerpts. I've unsubscribed from more feeds for having too much text than I have too little. I don't really want to switch my main feeds for that reason, but I've made a full text feed here for the people who want it:

http://www.bradsucks.net/rss2/fulltext/

I have no plans to add RSS ads because I think they're dumb and gross.

Also for any Wordpress hackers out there looking to do this on their own blogs, I've described what I did to make this work here.

newsBrad Turcotteblogging, sitenews, tech Comments
Yahoo! Music vulnerability

So allegedly there's a Yahoo! Music hack that lets you get DRM-free songs. I've been wondering how long it was going to be until there was some sort of issue like this. I thought it might take the form of sales misreporting from digital download services, but this one would work too.

So is Yahoo! liable for damages to musicians if there's a security hole and their songs get downloaded without DRM?

business, musicBrad Turcotte Comments
Keynote

I'm always interested in the software people use to help their creativity, so I thought I should write up one of my favorites that gets very little attention. It's Keynote by Tranglos software and it's an open-source Windows-based tabbed notebook. Check out some screenshots here. Keynote sits in my system tray and I can hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12 at any time to call it up and start writing. Escape sends it back to the tray. Inside of Keynote, my first tab is a Notepad that I use for writing anything or saving temporary scraps of information. Then I have other tabs such as a "music" tab where I can enter potential song titles or ideas. It's a tree view so all I have to do when I have an idea is hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12, select the music tab, hit enter to create a new tree node, type my idea + enter and I'm done. I can also enter data in that node as well, such as lyrics or chords or whatever I'd like.

I've tried a lot of these programs and even though there have ben no updates to Keynote since late 2003, I haven't found anything that's as fast, feature-rich and simple to use. I'd recommend to anyone looking to capture their ideas or is just an information packrat.

softwareBrad TurcottereviewComment