Google AdSense targets ads by content of web pages from which the ads are served.
Sometimes pages get out of control, exposing irrelevant content for Google bots to analyze for ads selection. It may be an inappropriate comment by a site’s visitor or, a navigation menu item Google happened to adore. Suddenly you start noticing CTR going down (or watch it low from the beginning).
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(or old mail in the Inbox for that matter)
I have outlived a good number of different web browsers already: Netscape Navigator 3.0, Netscape Communicator 4.0, Mozilla, Opera etc. Sometimes I’d transfer the bulk of bookmarks over to a new browser, other times I’d … just forget. And you know what? I never cared.
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Google strives to acquire user data. All those services – Gmail, Earth, Maps, … you name ’em – are geared to harvest personal behavioral information to “better serve ads to the customers”. G doesn’t even hide its intentions and directly states them in ToS (Terms of Service) pages.
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Very long ago I heard a tale (perhaps from Google itself) about how bad (and dangerous from SEO / SE banning point of view) it is to use extremely low contrast text, i.e. bright yellow text on white background or dark-brown on black. It went like you could be banned from the search engine index immediately for that kind of stunt.
It is pretty clear – by this deceptive tactic you could hide irrelevant keywords from human visitors and present them with some unwanted content of your choice. At the same time those keywords presumably are indexed by search engines making your pages findable by wider audience.
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