Google Adsense displaying wrong ads

I have mentioned before that I am a small contractor in Arizona. I have a website for my business and recently decided to display Google Adsense ads to help offset the costs of advertising on Google Adwords.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I decided I would also setup a blog related to my website and figured I would display more Adsense ads there as well. I have been finding that Google has been pretty good at displaying relevant ads on my website and other blogs, but today the weirdest thing happened.

I went to my contracting blog to edit some of my posts and Google Adsense was displaying ads on travel and cooking?

I am not kidding. At the top of my Blog, Google Adsense was displaying ads on how to prepare Turkey, with my banner ads displaying ads for travelling to Turkey?

Well, being the quick study that I am, I quickly determined that Google Adsense was probably displaying the wrong ads because I did not have enough content on my post for it to know which ads to display.

To prove my theory I tested a couple of other posts with only a couple of paragraphs of content and there it was again - I got the same ads.

Now, I have no idea what tripped Adsense to display this content, but I do know that after I went to my posts and added/edited them properly the correct ads began to show. So, I guess the moral of this story once again is to make sure you post not only relevant content, but enough of it.

Whoops! After posting this article the Turkey ads have shown up here! I am absolutely laughing right now. I guess I am not quite as smart as I thought.

I have sent an email to the Adsense team and will let you know how they responded.

Here is the response from Adsense which basically just pointed me back to Adsense Help -

Since the ability for us to serve ads on your site depends on a number of factors, such as our ability to crawl your site, the content of each of your webpages, and the availability of related Google ads, Google does not guarantee that we'll always have relevant ads to display. If we don't have relevant ads for a given page, or if we haven't yet crawled your site, we may display public service ads or your specified Alternate Ads, for which you will not accrue any AdSense earnings.
Similarly, if Google does not have ads for an Adsense for search query, or if the query will return non-family-safe advertisements, we will not show ads.

So, maybe my posts just haven't been crawled, as this seems the most logical explanation -- although in some other posts as soon as I published the content the Adsense ads changed immediately.

Well, the verdict is in -- I just needed to be a bit more patient. I checked back to my post 15 minutes later and all the ads were displaying correctly again! Man, Google has it going on!