scattrbrain

After wading through the google documentation I finally found out why the adsense ads on my blog don’t match the content.

The relevant document

What it says is, you can tag your HTML content

• to emphasize or
• to ignore regions.

Aha. So what that meant was my sidebar was screwing google’s keyword selector resulting in sub-optimal ads. Armed with that knowledge, I quickly hacked my typo install to have google ignore sidebar content.

The tags

To emphasize:

<!--google_ad_section_start-->
<!--google_ad_section_end-->

To ignore:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

The change to typo:

cd typodir/themes/mytheme/layouts/

Edit the default.rhtml file so that you put the ignore comments from above around the sidebar rendering. Your default.rhtml should look like

...
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<%= render_sidebars %>
<!-- google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) -->
...