Eric has a recent post in which, talking about the completion of his Invisible Fence case study (very interesting reading, by the way - I’ve mentioned it before), he also mentions a nice trick: using different directories to test the relevance of AdSense ads in different configurations.
Google “reads” the content of a page and displays mostly revelant ads quite quickly (you put the AdSense code in a page, then load it a couple of times, and the ads will probably be relevant); however, if you change the content, it can take weeks for the ads to update their subject to the new content. A consequence of this is that your initial tests may “stick” for a long time - even though you’ve updated the content, or keywords, or section targeting, or whatever, the ads are still related to what that page was like when you first loaded it up, after adding the AdSense code to it.
So, Eric suggests testing it in other places - instead of www.something.com, what about www.something.com/test1 , then, after a couple of changes, www.something.com/test2 … and so on. Each new address means Google will “learn” what your page is about, anew. Only when it’s exactly as you want should you move the files to the root directory.
This, of course, applies more to “normal” sites and mini-sites than to blogs, but can still be of use in blogging.
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Sorry, forgot to trackback, so I’m leaving a comment instead: my follow-up posting Testing your ad targeting by changing the URL shows you how to use a similar technique for testing blog postings before they go “live”.