At the last Google Webinar, there was some discussion about Section Targeting. I haven't seen much discussion of this topic on the forums so I guess that means that either everyone is using it and understands what it can do... or that most people are ignoring it and missing an opportunity.

I suspect that lots of people are ignoring it.

For those who aren't familiar with Section Targeting, adding a couple of lines of HTML to your page can tell Google's crawlers which sections contain the most important phrases for contextualizing your ads.

You simply place at the beginning of the paragraph, and

at the end. The lines tell the crawler to give extra weight to the text in between. The crawler won't ignore the rest of the text though. To do that, you can use

and

At the Webinar we were told that you need to target a fair amount of text for the crawler to analyze -- as much as 20 percent -- otherwise you could get irrelevant ads or PSAs.

I can't help but wonder though what would happen if you targeted keywords instead of sections. The AdSense makes it clear that deliberately bringing up irrelevant ads is a breach of the TOS but if the keywords were relevant, then I don't see how Google could complain (although you might if you got bad ads).

They also made it clear that it can take as long as two weeks for your page to be crawled again. So if you did target keywords and got rotten ads, you could be stuck with them for a couple of weeks. I'm not THAT curious!

I've played around with Section Targeting a little bit but on the whole I've been pret

ty happy with the sorts of ads I've been receiving without it. They've been well contextualized and my CTRs have been nice and high. But I can certainly see how Section Targeting could be useful for sites with long pages that cover lots of different subjects. On a blog for example, you could make sure that only your articles affected ads and not responses or only some articles and not others.

I still think that if you've got a page that covers lots of different topics, you'll be better off breaking it into separate pages -- that will give you more ads and better targeted visitors-- but if you don't want to do that, Section Targeting could be a good alternative. What have been your experiences with Section Targeting?

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