Recently, Google anounced support for “section targeting” in AdSense.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

So it seems that you can use Google section targeting to essentially pick which Adsense keywords will be used. This could mean choosing the ones that pay the most per click, the highest conversion rate or experimenting with split run testing to maximize ROI.

In split-run testing, you create different versions of a your pages and change certain variables to test the pages effectiveness. When users enters your site, they’re shown one version or the other. Once you do this enough times you can see which version generated the most revenue per visitor. Generally, you need a sample size of more than 1000 unique visitors before coming to any conclusions.

I’m not yet sure how to abuse section targeting for Black Hat SEO. Our pages are already microtargeted to key word phrases. And going through an entire scraper site by hand is simply out of the question. So, if you can think how quickly gain an advantage by dynamically applying section targeting to a 30,000 page site – please share.