Ok, I am in a rather tight situation with my ads.

I have a website about a Japanese band called 'the pillows', and as Google's ads are content based, I get lots of ads about pillows. I want them to be more to do with bands, Japan, music and stuff.

How can I do this? I don't want to have to go around my paragraphs seeing how many music related words I can throw into an update, because that's messy.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any tips?

If the ads are new to your site it could just take a few days for Google to present more relevant ads. They should in time start to understand the site is about music and not 'pillows' and begin to send more relevant ads.

Some things you can do though are to make sure your page titles and headings use more music related keywords. The text too, though I wouldn't go back either and change things around just to get extra keywords in there. Keep it in mind though as you write new content to try to use music related words more.

You can also use something called section tageting to let Google know which parts of your content to ignore and which to include for presenting ads.

One thing i have noticed, I don't know how much influence this has over the long term, But when adverts are new to a page adsense pays close attention to the URL of the page displaying the adverts, Specifically the words used in the page name.

Like those guys said, just try and add more keywords specific to music. You could also try that competitive ad-blocking thing for the pillow ads, perhaps it'll filter through to more music ads.

Could you use a graphical image to display 'The Pillows' rather than using straight text? That way, the end user could read it but Google couldn't....

Just an idea - may be too techincally complex.

Or, write it as ThePillows (with no space) and this may well confuse Google.