Brian at Caydel’s SEO Blog has written a post today revealing that Google AdSense is Beta-Testing Keyword-based Ad Filtering that allows publishers to nominate keywords that they don’t want ads about on their sites – a sort of ‘negative’ keyword targeting.
This would help publishers who are getting mis-targeted and irrelevant ads on their sites.
This ‘negative’ keyword targetting has to my knowledge been available to premium publishers for some time now but perhaps this is an indication that it is going to be made available to everyone.
Positive Keyword Targeting
The other type of AdSense keyword targeting that many publishers would like is ‘positive’ targeting where they would be able to submit keywords that their site is about that they would like ads about. Once again this is a feature that I’ve seen AdSense offer to some larger publishers (not just ‘premium’ publishers) who are struggling with ad relevancy however it is not something that I’ve heard they are offering (or planning to offer) other publishers at this point.
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About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
This would be great because all to often adsense displays ads for Pens or office supplies even though my blog is about hockey. It would be nice to eliminate them as keywords.
So now you can target the highest paying keywords?
Thank God.
My personal finance site is constantly bombarded by ads for get-rich-quick scams. I hate it. I’m trying to teach people sound money skills, and instead I expose them to ads meant to circumvent this. My Adsense blacklist is full. I’ve tried to contact Google before, but they’ve told me there’s nothing they can do. This is a step in the right direction…
The ‘negative’ keyword targeting is way better than blocking sites altogether. One question though, isn’t this one of the distinguishing factors that set other monetization sites like AdBrite, TLA etc from AdSense?
I could see Google offering negative keyword targeting, but I think it’ll be a long time before positive keyword targeting gets offered to more than the bigger, trusted publishers.
http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/01/03/will-google-let-regular-publishers-ban-adsense-keywords/
I think while it may improve the bottom line, features like this can also do you a disservice, in particular – the adsense targeting can be a nice clear indicator of what Google thinks your page is about in general. In my opinion you can learn a lot from the adsense bots targeting, and learn to correct your pages yourself – gaining extra search traffic in the process.
Of course if you’ve got a lot of user generated content then thats not very controllable, and you might just want to slap some correctional tags on your adsense units in that case.
Matt
This would be great for articles like this – http://www.management-college.net/71/5-reasons-why-you-should-treat-your-employees-like-dogs/ that venture a little too far from the main topic of the blog and give adsense trouble picking the correct ads. I look forward to being able to use this.
This would be great for my blog! I write about academic parapsychology, and I’m trying to keep it professional. Every day, I have to block ads from telephone psychics and other phonies. It’s making me crazy! If I could block the word ‘psychic’, I would get to shave at least 10 minutes off of my daily routine. I can’t wait until it’s launched.
I am glad to hear this, even if I have yet to set up adsense on my blog.
I don’t think that we will ever see positive targeting from adsense, since it would make it extremely easy for spammers to only use high-paying keywords on their sites….
Is there any way filter out ads based on a set of keywords for a given adsense-powered site ?
Right now most of my ads are on domains, web hosting and blogging and my site doesnt really revolve around these three.