It’s so common for new websites with low content to see Public Service Ads or PSA as Adsense likes to call them. These ads are displayed because AdSense has not been able to find suitable ads for your page. Without committing these 15 Adsense mistakes, here are some ways to remove PSA and get targetted contextual ads back on your website.
Why Public Service Ads are bad?
The most
important fact is that there are no payments for clicks on PSA’s. So even if you have a good CTR (click-through ratio), it is of no use!
It spoils the look and design of your site. Let’s say you decided to place a big 160×600 vertical banner on your site and no ad showed, then the PSA ads will have big font ad there, and since one big ad will be shown instead of 5 ads there, it will look bad to the site visitor.
How to remove Public Service Ads?
- Develop sufficient good content with keywords on your webpage related to the topic of interest. Google is a great fan of good content websites.
- Ensure that META tags like ‘title’ & ‘description’ and the headings tags like h1, h2, etc. have content that matches the rest of your site. They are the main way google judges the content of your pages.
- Add specific keywords in your text which will help the google bot to determine and understand the content of your website. Repeat related keywords which will better help to understand site content. Do not fill your page with similar keywords, it might work against your favor.
- Try to keep the entire website focussed on a particular theme, so that even if the content on a particular page is lesser, the ads will show.
- Do not place multiple ad units if there are not sufficient ads to display on all of them. Also, Google TOS does not allow placing more than 3 ad units on a page.
- Use section targeting – you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.
Is your site Still showing Public Service Ads?
- Have Patience – Google may take time to crawl your site. Although most of the time the ads show immediately, at times it takes up to 48-72 hours for google to assess the content of the newly created webpage. This usually occurs if your site has not been indexed before by Google. The time is reduced on newer pages of a site already running AdSense. Google claims the ads will get better and more focused to your pages with time.
- Your page may contain objectionable content. This may be against Google Adsense policies. If you feel your page has no such content, then look for any objectionable keywords or phrases which may be present accidentally. Removing such content can cause PSA’s to disappear.
- Your site may be using a robots.txt file, which will not be properly set up and prevent the AdSense crawler from crawling your web pages. Add the following two lines to the top of your robots.txt file –
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: - Frames may occasionally cause difficulty in indexing your page. Always remember to tick the Framed page checkbox from the Ad layout code page when generating your ad code. Similarly, IFRAME’s also prevented effective indexing and cause PSA’s
- There may not be any ads configured to show in your region. Let’s say that these ads may be working in the United States, but maybe showing PSA is Zambia. This is because Google Adwords payers can select regions where to display their ads, where they believe their target surfers are. After all, why should an eye surgeon in the US want to promote his service in Zambia? Try using the Google Adsense Preview Tool (works on IE only) which helps to determine probable ads in different regions.
- Recheck your Adsense code was inserted properly on your webpage. Do not attempt to modify the code in any way, as it is against their terms of service. Adsense gives enough options to customize the ad colors and sizes to suit your site. Use only the official code available from their site.
- Remove session IDs from URLs – they change every time a different user views a page, and the URL will not be in indexed every time.
- Reduce your filter blocked URLs. This feature is in place to allow you to block competitors’ ads from showing on your pages. If you block too many such URLs, there may not be any advertisers left to display ads.
- Use the Google Adsense Sandbox tool Simply enter the URL or keywords in the box below, and you will see up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords.
Official ways to hide Public Service Ads (PSA)
- Suggest an alternate color to display instead of your PSA. This will show an empty space with the background color you suggest.
- Suggest an alternate ad to display instead of your PSA. Your ad will show in that space instead of the PSA if there is insufficient content.
- Place a collapsible ad. This ad will collapse and not show any PSA at all.
- Now Google Adsense allows users to hide unfilled ads using CSS, or even show alternate ads.