Successful AdSense advertising is really all about control. Its about controlling the look and location of your ads and making them as attractive as possible to your users. Its also about controlling the ads shown on your pages so that you get the highest possible revenues when users click.

That first element is much easier to control than the second.

Google gives advertisers very little control over the ads that are served on their sites. While we can pick the font and background colors for our ad units from a palette that would have made Michelangelo blush, when it comes to the ads themselves, we have to accept what were given and be grateful.

Sure we can play around with keywords and site topics to try to get those high-paying ads but thats about where our control ends. Whatever is happening out there in the world of advertising and bidding has nothing to do with us... until the ads appear on our pages.

One control we do have though is to block ads we dont want. But with a limit of only 25 URLs to block, that really wasnt much of a bonus. It pretty much came down to keeping out sites that readers might have found offensive or which promoted the sort of thing your blog entry had just been blasting. Readers of a right-wing blog that had been criticizing the behavior of a Democrat politician, for example, are unlikely to click on an ad for the Democratic party website!

But now Google has increased the limit to 500 ads! Thats a huge increase which takes you beyond keeping out undesirable sites.

It lets you keep out low-paying sites too. As well as sites that have been set up specifically for AdSense or which contain more ads than content or pretty much anything else you dont want.

This means that youre actually going to have to check the ads that are on your site (and without getting banned for clicking on your own ads), then block out all the ones that you think your users wont like.

It also means keeping a close eye on your stats so that you dont accidentally block any high-paying ads.

But the result should be more high-paying ads on your site as well as more ads that you know your users will like and trust. Thats the sort of control I want!