Every once in a while I come across an AdSense site displaying public service ads. A public service ad (PSA) is a generic non-paying ad that Google displays when it can’t find a suitable ad to display from its giant inventory of AdWords ads. PSAs promote charitable causes like the Red Cross. They don’t make the AdSense publisher any money and they don’t look that great, either. A site with PSAs sticks out like a sore thumb, IMHO.

There are no excuses for displaying PSAs. If your site is displaying PSAs, you’re doing something wrong. Here are some quick tips on avoiding PSAs:

• Make sure you’re not blocking the AdSense crawler. Verify that your robots.txt file is letting in all the right crawlers. You can do this easily using Google’s Webmaster Tools. (If you have no robots.txt file, the crawler can visit without any problems.)
• Put keywords in the URLs! If you don’t have your primary keywod in your domain name (I certainly don’t on this site) then try to make sure it’s in the rest of the URL. If you’re running a blog, this means making sure the post slug includes a keyword or two. It’s usually pretty easy to do. This trick lets me develop websites locally on my own machine and still see relevant ads on my “draft” website without having to deploy the site to a real domain.
• Put relevant keywords in the content. Sounds dumb, but obviously some people don’t do this. Use standard SEO (search engine optimization) techniques: keywords in title, headings, main body text… bold one or two, italicize maybe… the usual stuff. Not only will this help your targeting, it will also help your search engine traffic!

But let’s say you’ve done everything possible and PSAs are still showing up. Maybe your topic doesn’t have enough advertisers. Maybe you pissed someone off at Google. If you see PSAs on some of your pages, use the alternate URL feature to display your own content (could be an ad from another ad network, or maybe just a nice image you created) in place of the PSAs.

Or just remove AdSense entirely