Sites about farm animals, fat people, and casualties of war should not all feature the same ads.  But if they all use the term “cow,” they might.  And so Google’s trying to update AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities for the sake of serving better ads and letting advertisers and you make more money.

A post on the Inside AdSense blog states, “[T]his week, we’ll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages.  You won’t need to update your AdSense account or ad code, as these changes will be applied automatically.  In many ways these types of improvements are par for the course at Google – but I wanted to let you know about the kinds of improvements we’ve been focusing on.”

The post then continues, “Please keep in mind that these changes won’t affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites; for instance, you’ll continue to see placement-targeted ads when advertisers bid to appear specifically on your pages.”

Google’s interested in hearing your feedback if you notice any differences.  And hopefully you will, because misplaced ads of the sort we mentioned earlier really don’t do anybody much good.

This might be a good time to do a little research and make sure (if you haven’t already) that your keywords don’t have multiple meanings, too.

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