Comment on AdSense Contextual Ads by SEO Dave.

AdSense Ads Think about all the content within menus, footers etc… with a diverse site it takes away from the main content targeting. Now if all your pages are highly related and your menu helps out most of your sites pages then I can see the menu as a positive factor in both Google SERPs and Google AdSense ad targeting (from experience sites like those tend to be quite small anyway and cover a very small niche).

The WordPress themes I use on my sites have been edited in a way that menus, footers and even the header on many pages (like this one the header is NOT a H1 on this page, but is a H1 on the home page) are given no extra SEO relevance (for example I use no header tags in the menu area) so that Google will not rank a page based on the menu (it still uses this content, but I don’t want it treated as overly important).

Yes sometimes a menu content is themed the same as the main content, but more often than not it isn’t. Taking the name of this post as the main target for this page-

Targeting AdSense Ads

Currently the menu has those words the following times-

Targeting – 1
AdSense – 6
Ads – 1

Other than the word AdSense that menu is not particularly well optimized for the main keywords for this page and is terrible for the main search phrase (see it once).

Compare that to the main content and you can see if I want Google the search engine and Google the ad supplier to use the best content related to this pages SERPs it’s not the menu.

David