Adsense
 

can someone tell me in plain english exactly how adsense works from google.
I have adsense at the top of every new thread that is made on my forum but the adverts are never specific to my forum and go so far off the beaten track that no one clicks them.

How can i make it so i only get a certain lot of adverts or do i have to put up with what google automatically gives me.

An Adsense bot (apparently different from the normal Google one) needs to crawl your pages to locate keywords it thinks are relevant for ads. Given how often new threads crop up (and therefore new URLs that haven't been indexed), it will take some time until relevant ads show up.

I have a private board, members only access. Will the Adsense bot be able to crawl it. If not is there anything I can do to let it?

It is possible for adsense to target your content even if its members only access.

Google can't crawl what Google can't see.

Google will however build up a base of results based on what it can see and what else it can spider on your site. If you show first posts to guests, forums with titles, articles or anything similar it will help. However, at the end of the day, if you want relevant ads, you need to let their bot see the posts.

Which can be done with .htaccess from what I understand.

.htaccess won't let bots access forums/ threads that guests can't view; only vb controls that. Doing that means either opening content up to guests or installing a hack that allows bots to act as members.

Showing google something that is not visible to guests will get you banned for cloaking. Not a good idea to try and find ways to let them in.

That greatly depends on how it's done, what is done, and if the site is letting Google see more versus showing Google something different to manipulate the results. Google spiders many news and other reputable sites that normal users can not, and they appear just fine in the results. Google has also been working on a tool (reportadly) that can login to sites to spider content that it normally can't get to.

That said, letting Google's adsense spider access a website that guests can not is a far cry from their search bot. And of course, you can always email them about it before doing anything.

Let me just say that I have not yet been banned for Cloaking, I have made a good amount from Adsense and my techniques are one of a kind. I communicate directly with Google a lot of the time and they seem to have no problem with it. Why? Simply because Google takes their fare share out of the big fat check they send me each month.