Kevin's Weblog

JenSense just posted something perpetuating the idea that some types of rotation between AdSense and YPN may “confuse” the YPN crawler / analyser. From the inside developer perspective, there’s no reason to believe this ought to be the case. Unfortunately, this rumor seems to have been started by a support engineer here, although it’s been disclaimed by Paul, both in his blog and in comments to Tim Flight.

Jen’s suggestion that there might be an issue with how he was rotating (per-view) compared to how she and others are rotating (per-user), doesn’t really hold up, since the crawler looks like a new user every time it visits. Most likely, the reason that Tim saw more RON ads was simply that the semantically targeted ads for his content are not as high value as those for the SEM/SEO crowd, so RON ads are more likely to get swapped in.