HOWTO: Redirect Blogger to a Country Domain

Recently a reader sent me a question asking how a Blogger blog can be re-directed to a custom domain representing a country domain. This post is about how this blog, The Blogger Guide, was moved in to its current address in the .lk domain.

Basically, there are two steps.

Firstly, you should configure a CNAME (or Canonical Name) record with your country domain registry. (Additionally you can provide an A-record as well, but that is optional). Let's look at this in a bit more detail.

When a visitor want to reach www.bloggerguide.lk from a browser, the program will first contact a .lk domain registry through the DNS (Domain Name Service) system. Technically, this is called a DNS look-up. A DNS look-up simply maps a domain name (or URL) to a physical web hosting server which actually hosts the web site (or blog, or any Internet service for that matter) corresponding to that domain name. In this instance, the domain name www.bloggerguide.lk is hosted by Blogger and, the .lk domain registry should return the Blogger's hosting service as the reply to the DNS look-up. A CNAME entry is, in fact, an alias to another server which actually hosts the given URL

For example, the CNAME entry given to the .lk domain registry for this blog is given below.

www.bloggerguide.lk. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

Once this CNAME entry is configured, for every look-up request for www.bloggerguide.lk, the .lk domain registry (or the name server) will return ghs.google.com (technically, that's another domain name which needs to be resolved, but that is not relevant for this post).

Secondly, you have to tell Blogger that you will be hosting the blog on a custom domain. This step will link your blog with the custom domain name. When that is done, Blogger will know that a request asking, for example www.bloggerguide.lk, is actually looking for this blog which is running inside its servers.

The way to configure the custom domain in Blogger is very simple.

• Go to Settings : Basic : Publishing
• Click "Switch to advanced settings"
• Enter the custom domain name and click Save

Once the above two steps are completed, you are done with moving your Blogger blog to a custom domain. Of course, the DNS system might take about 24 hours to properly start resolving this new name.

See the Blogger's help article on custom domains for more details.

Using CSS Web Design

Finding the right website hosting company is a crucial step in designing your own website online. With a professional hosting company such as Network Solutions supporting you, you can have access to a number of invaluable features that can make your website easier to manage, more simple to navigate, and just generally more professional. Of course, professionalism may not be your goal if you are simply experimenting or if your website is only meant for a certain select audience; but, if you are working on putting a business online, or if you are hoping to generate a large amount of web traffic, you will benefit greatly from a smoothly running and easy to manage website. One feature offered by some website hosting platforms that can contribute to giving you this type of smoothly functional website is CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.


Cascading Style Sheets, for all intents and purposes, can best be defined as a web design language that helps to save you time and effort in the management of your website. There are multiple alternatives for web design out there, but CSS is becoming the preferred method of many website owners, and is particularly useful for those who wish to simplify the design process. One of the most useful benefits you can receive from using CSS language is the ability to change every page of your website simply by changing one CSS style sheet; think of this as a sort of template. If you want to alter the format of your site, on every one of its pages, you simply make the appropriate change on the template, and it automatically applies to all of your website’s pages, saving you valuable time and effort. There are numerous other benefits as well, all of which you can find on the Network Solutions website.


While many people enjoy the use of CSS when setting up business websites, it can also be useful for simpler websites such as personal blogs. Generally, CSS is said to improve your success at drawing traffic from search engines and also improve the visual quality of your website, in addition to the aforementioned perks of saving you time and money. Therefore, you can have an efficiently run, easy to find, and aesthetically enjoyable web page whether you are attempting to run a business, or whether you are simply looking to enhance your blog and attract new readers. The range of benefits made possible by CSS design language make it well worth looking into during your web design process.

(This post was brought to you by Network Solutions)

Related Posts

• CSS Basics - Part 1

HOWTO: Link to All Posts of a Given Day

If you have several posts written on a given day and want to create one link to all of them, here's a little tip that will help you to achieve that.

Even though there is no direct way of getting this done, you can use Blogger's Archive feature as a workaround. All you should do is to set your archive frequency to Daily. (Settings -> Archiving -> Archive Frequency). Then the Archive widget will show a breakdown up to a single day. (see figure below)

Each day in the widget carries a link to a page that lists all the posts in that day. That's the reference you need to use to link to all posts of a given day. Even if you don't have the Archive widget, you can still make up the URL for a given day. It has the format http://<your blog address>/YYYY_MM_DD_archive.html.

Blogger Stats

Blogger has announced a feature which was long overdue, visitor stats. This will bring in an integrated Stats tab to the Blogger admin console that provides an analytics-type visitor statistics service. This will eliminate the need to install third party visitor meters such as Analytics, SiteMeter etc. in your blog.

The feature is currently in beta. Login to draft.blogger.com to experience it.

Template Designer is Live

The Template Designer which I blogged about a couple of months ago when it was in beta, has gone live!

This brings in a powerful WYSIWYG editor to tweak your templates in many beautiful ways. The features include the ability to pick from professionally designed templates, option to select professional images as background images, ability to select many different layouts such as two-column, three-column etc in a snap and much more. The Template Designer is truly a wonder tool for the non-technical bloggers who were afraid of meddling around with the HTML, CSS etc to customize their templates.

With the introduction of this new remarkable feature, Blogger has revised the buttons on the admin console as well. The former Layout button has gone out and a new button called Design has taken its place. The sub-menu for this section has also been revised with the old Fonts and Colors and Pick New Template buttons being replaced with a single Template Designer button. (see figure below)

The Edit HTML option still remains allowing the more technically inclined bloggers to dig deep. However, the template structure seems to have gone through drastic changes in order to support the new Template Designer. Don't worry, Blogger will take care of migrating your existing template to this new format if and when you modify your template using this option. One thing to note, however, is that you will lose any existing customizations on top of the current default templates.

See the official Blogger Buzz announcement for more details.

A Review of the Domain Transition

Towards the latter part of last year, I wrote few articles discussing about Blogger custom domains, some factors one need to consider when moving to a custom domain and also a checklist of things to do when moving to a custom domain.

These articles were the result of some learning I went through myself to evaluate the pros and cons of moving to a custom domain. In fact, I was convinced of the value of an independent domain, but was afraid of loosing traffic and most importantly the Google PageRank (PR) earned by the blogspot domain! As stated in the Moving to a Custom Domain article, a Google employee had confirmed that the PR values will be transferred within a couple of weeks, so after all, it was not very difficult to make the decision to go ahead with the domain transition, which was fully affected in January this year.

The transition was not really difficult. I had no issues with my AdSense account as it is not setup to limit the ad publishing URLs. My subscriber feed (via FeedBurner) also worked without a problem as it was named after the logical name of this blog (i.e. The Blogger Guide) and not the blogspot URL. The two visitor meters, namely Google Analytics and SiteMeter also did not require any changes as they are linked up using unique IDs, which do not depend on the domain name.

I did not see any drop in visitor counts after the transition. However, it took a considerable amount of time to recover my Alexa rank and also for the green PageRank bar to appear in places such as the Google Toolbar.

At the time of transition, my Alexa rank was somewhere around 230,000. Immediately after the transition, I had to resubmit the new domain as there is no way in Alexa to transfer the ranks from one domain to another. However, the rank for the new domain (www.bloggerguide.lk) quickly improved from several millions to something below 400,000 in a couple of weeks. And now, after about three months, it has reached the level it was at the time of the change.

The Google PageRank (of 4/10) which I had at the time of transition re-appeared on the toolbar only this week, a good three months later. I think the reason for the delay is this. There are two types of page ranks; one is a static value displayed in place such as the Google Toolbar, which Google updates from time to time. The other is a very dynamic value, which is calculated continuously and used to rank search results internally. So I think what gets restored in a couple of weeks of a domain transition are these internal PR values and not the externally displayed ones. It seems that even for transferred domains, the published PR values will only get restored in the periodic updates.

Finally, I can say that the decision to move to a custom domain did work! After a lapse of about 3 months, the blog has restored its rankings in addition to the pluses of the new independent domain.

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Moving to a Custom Domain

The Template Designer

Blogger has developed another very exciting feature called the Template Designer. With it, you can create custom template designs using an extremely user-friendly interface without having to worry about meddling with HTML code! Yes, that's right, you don't have to go through the Layout -> Edit HTML interface to get another sidebar to your template, or to add a nice background image to your blog or to do many more template tweaks.

This feature is still not released formerly and is now in testing stage in Blogger in Draft. If you log in to draft.blogger.com, and go to the Layout section of your blog, you will see a new sub section called the Template Designer. (see figure below)


From that interface, you get to choose from a set of expert designed templates, manipulate the column layouts with a snap, apply many different background images and also customize the fonts and colors. You get a real-time preview as well, making it easier to experiment.

Go on and try it at Blogger in Draft and I'm sure you will love it!

Note:
Even if you have applied any customizations such as three-columns or wider-blogs from The Blogger Guide tutorials, the Template Designer will still work. It will recognize that the template is customized, but still its changes will work.

Over 100,000 Visits!

The Blogger Guide passed another milestone today; the unique visits count crossed the one hundred thousand mark!

It's just over two years since the inception, and given the relatively little amount of time I put in, this is a great achievement for me. It's been a slow but steady growth.

Thanks for all the help in spreading the word about The Blogger Guide.

Blogazines

The blogosphere is evolving! This post is about one such evolution which I happened to stumble upon today.

Most of today's blogs are of a traditional columnar layout with one main (or post) column and one or more sidebars. This layout is what you get in pretty much every post. However, the print industry, especially the magazines, have been making good use of the basic design principles such as balance, color and fonts, to add variety to individual articles.

Some very creative bloggers out there have drawn upon this idea of varied article layouts, on to the blog posts and the result is termed blogazines. Read more about this at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/ and also some tips for creative blog post design at http://line25.com/articles/tips-for-designing-unique-and-attractive-blog-posts.

This is definitely not for the average blogger as it requires lot of design skills and also effort to finish each article layout from scratch. However, I found the idea very interesting and thought you would like it too.

Pages coming to Blogger!

Update: 2010 Feb 20
The pages feature has graduated from Blogger in Draft and now is a regular service.

It is just a little over a month ago that I wrote that we cannot have pages in Blogger. However, the test bed of Blogger, Blogger in Draft, has recently announced a pages feature in Blogger.

This, no doubt, will be an exciting news for most of the Blogger users out there. With pages one can easily create static pages such as About Us or Contact Us to hold information that don't change as often, but which needs to be easily accessed by visitors to a blog. This feature will be accompanied by a widget which helps to manage pages and display them easily either as a tabbed navigation bar or sidebar links.

It is still in beta stage and hopefully will be available in the primary Blogger service soon. You can try out the feature by logging in to draft.blogger.com.

Domain Transition Complete

This is to inform you that I have completed the domain name transition from bguide.blogspot.com to www.bloggerguide.lk.

The FeedBurner feeds should work without a problem, as I have not changed the feed address.

Thank you,
ids.

Announcement : Custom Domain Transition

The purpose of this post is to let all the subscribed readers know that The Blogger Guide will switch to a custom domain starting next week. The new URL is www.bloggerguide.lk and I hope to complete the transition during the course of the next week.

Hopefully the transition will be smooth, but there can be some unexpected hiccups, especially with my feeds. Once all the configurations are complete, I will do another post on the week starting Jan 4th, 2010. If you come across any problems in receiving feeds after the transition, please drop me a mail on bloggerguide@gmail.com.

Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience that you might come across.

Add Pages in Blogger

"How can I add pages to my Blogger blog?"; this is a frequent question on Blogger Help forums, which I think comes from bloggers who have used other blogging platforms such as Wordpress.

The simple answer is that you cannot add pages to Blogger blogs. But, of course, there are workarounds.

Most people who ask about pages have a requirement to direct the readers to some key pages in their blogs such as an About page or a Contact page.

There are some simple workarounds to achieve the desired effect. In all cases, you would need to write normal posts with the content that you want in your pages. Once you publish those posts, one way to get the pages effect is to add a simple navigation bar at the top and link to your relevant posts from there. (for example, see the navigation bar for this blog)

Another alternative is to use a Link List widget or an HTML/Javascript widget in your sidebar and linking to the required posts from that widget. Placing such a widget at the top of your sidebar with a suitable caption can catch enough attention from your readers.

Grow Traffic with Page Title Tweak

This post is about a pretty simple modification to your template to tweak the appearance of the page titles of your blog, which will result in a traffic growth of 10% (or perhaps more). The steps for this customization was referred to me by Mark, who is a frequent visitor to my blog.

The default Page Title in Blogger blogs appear in the order of [Blog Title] : [Post Title]. What this modification does is simply to reverse this order such that it becomes [Post Title] : [Blog Title]. With the Post Title in front, your blog's posts get a higher relevance score to keyword searches than when it is at the back.

I applied this tip at the beginning of last October and I can confirm that I saw an overall traffic increase of approximately 10% in the past two months (see figure below from my actual SiteMeter stats). My posting frequency remained almost the same, and I didn't to any other optimization during this period. So I can safely attribute this traffic growth to this neat tip introduced by Mark.

I recommend this modification for your Blogger blogs as well. For the details of the conversion please go here.

Minima : Hanging Sidebar on the Left

This article presents an interesting modification to give you a non-conventional three column layout. The idea is to add a second sidebar to a default Minima template offered by Blogger, to make it appear as hanging by the side of the blog. The figure below has a preview of the finished modification and visit the Hanging Sidebar Demo blog for an online demo.

The following steps are tested on a default 2 column Minima template but this conversion should also work on Minima Black, Minima Blue and Minima Ochre templates.

1) Add a new CSS id selector for the 2nd sidebar wrapper.

• Go to Layout -> Edit HTML
• Locate the #sidebar-wrapper section (Do a Find using your browser)
• Copy that full section and paste below the existing sidebar section (it doesn't have to be below) and rename it to #left-sidebar-wrapper
• Change the float: $endSide to float:$startSide of this newly copied section (See the code snippet below)

#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
float: $endSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for ... IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long ... float */
}

#left-sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for ... in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long ... float */
}

2) Introduce a new div element, as a child of the content-wrapper, to be the placeholder for the 2nd sidebar

• Locate the <div id='main-wrapper'> element.
• Copy the code shown in red, above that section (this has to be above)
  

<div id='crosscol-wrapper' style='text-align:center'>
<b:section class='crosscol' id='crosscol' showaddelement='no'/>
</div>

<div id='left-sidebar-wrapper'>
<b:section class='sidebar' id='sidebar-two' preferred='yes'>
</b:section>
</div>

<div id='main-wrapper'>
<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'/>
</b:section>
</div>

3) Add a new CSS section for an outer header wrapper which will encompass the existing header wrapper

• Add the following code below the existing #header-wrapper section

#outer-header-wrapper {
width:880px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
}

4) Add a div section as the placeholder for this outer header wrapper

• Locate the section <div id='header-wrapper'>
• Copy the code shown in red, above and below that section
  

<div id='outer-header-wrapper'>
<div id='header-wrapper'>
<b:section class='header' ... >
<b:widget id='Header1' .../>
</b:section>
</div>
<div class='clear'>&#164;</div>
</div>

5) Adjust the other wrappers to accommodate the new sidebar

• Locate the CSS sections called #outer-wrapper, #header-wrapper and #footer
• Do the modifications/additions highlighted in red
  

#outer-wrapper {
width: 880px;
margin: 0 auto;
...
}

#header-wrapper {
width: 664px;
float:$endSide;
margin: 0 auto 10px;
...
}

#footer {
width: 664px;
clear: both;
margin: 0 auto;
...
}

6) Do necessary adjustments to margins, padding etc

• Locate the #main-wrapper section
• Insert a left margin of 12 pixels.
  

#main-wrapper {
width: 410px;
margin-left:12px;
float: $startSide;
...
}

7) Adjust the max width of the header description to center it in the new adjusted header

• Locate the #header .description section
• Change the max-width property to 644 pixels.
  

#header .description {
...
padding:0 20px 15px;
max-width:644px;
...
}

8) Modify the CSS rules for the wire frame layouts editor.

• Locate the end of the skin denoted by "]]>"
• Add the following code above that line.
  

/** Page structure tweaks for layout editor wireframe */

body#layout #outer-wrapper {
padding-top: 0;
width:720px;
}
body#layout #header-wrapper,
body#layout #content-wrapper,
body#layout #footer {
padding: 0;
width:720px;
}

body#layout #main-wrapper {
width:400px;
}

body#layout #sidebar-wrapper,
body#layout #left-sidebar-wrapper {
width:150px;
}

]]></b:skin>

Save the template. Switch to Page Elements view and move some widgets on to the left sidebar. Then view your blog to see the hanging sidebar in full swing!

(Note: This modification was applied to a default Minima template and was tested on Firefox 3, IE 8 and Chrome 3)

Moving to a Custom Domain

When you decide for sure that you will switch for a custom domain, the next thing is to plan and implement the move. Given below is a brief checklist for the domain transition process.

1. Purchase the Domain (if you don’t own already) – If you use the Blogger wizard the purchase (and setup) is quite trivial. But if the top level domain you want is not provided by the wizard, then you will have to purchase it from an external registrar.
2. Reconfigure External Services – It is most likely that you will have several external services such as visitor meters, feeds etc installed on your blog. Update the respective accounts of those services to reflect the change of blog URL. Some examples for such services are:
1. AdSense (if you have limited the URLs which can publish ads)
2. Google Webmaster Tools – re-submit the blog and sitemaps
3. FeedBurner or such feeds
4. Technorati, Alexa and other such rating services
5. Google Analytics, SiteMeter, Cluster Maps and similar visitor meters
3. Inform your Readers – Even after you switch to a custom domain, Blogger ensures that your previous BlogSpot URL will be redirected to the new domain. Nevertheless, inform your readers about the forthcoming change, say, by writing a post in advance.
4. Effect the Transition – Go the Settings -> Publishing section on your blog’s admin console and enable the custom domain. If you purchase the custom domain via Blogger, setting up your blog to use it is a no-brainer as Blogger will do the required technical configurations for you. However, if you buy it from a third party, then you will have to manage it yourself.
   

Last, but certainly not least, is the most important question; what will happen to your existing PageRank (PR) because of this move? You will have a temporary drop in PageRank as your custom domain is new to Google. But the good news is that you will very quickly recover the PR as Blogger will setup a 301 Redirect – Moved Permanently on its servers. (Update: See this review of an actual domain change to learn more about PR recovery)

The transfer of PR can happen as quickly as within a couple of weeks as confirmed by a Google employee on the Google Webmaster Help forum.

References:
Custom Domains - The Real Blogger Status

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Experiences of an Actual Domain Transfer

Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain

If you are starting a fresh blog, then publishing it on a custom domain straight-away is not much of a problem. If you already own a domain or do not want to use the blogspot.com domain, then switching to a custom domain right at the beginning is a safer and simpler method.

If, however, your blog has been running for a while under blogspot.com and has incoming links, some PageRank and also installed third party widgets, then moving to a custom domain needs some planning.

First, let’s have a look at some reasons that will make going for a custom domain worthwhile.

• Independent domain – Unlike a yourblogname.blogspot.com URL which is just a sub-domain under BlogSpot, a custom domain gives the chance to publish at an independent domain
• Ability to integrate with an existing domain – If you already have a web site, say at www.mydomain.com, then a custom domain gives the chance to integrate your blog to the same domain, say at blog.mydomain.com
• Intangible asset – In this information age, a popular domain is a valuable asset. So if you own a custom domain and your blog ramps up in popularity, that is added value for you
• Good for branding – If you are using the blog for some business/freelance activity, then a custom domain related to your business brand is better than a blogspot.com URL
  

Once you decide that you want to go for a custom domain, the next step is to prepare a checklist of things to do for the transition, which is going to be the focus of the next article in this series.

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Moving to a Custom Domain

Custom Domains for BlogSpot

Starting your own blog on Blogger is pretty simple. Just follow three steps and you are ready to go. You post some interesting entries and then you want to share it with your friends and family. That’s when you fire an email saying “hey, check out my new blog at http://yourblogname.blogspot.com”.

Did you ever wonder why is it that your blog URL ends with blogspot.com and not just .com? Did you ever wonder why is it that some of your friends have blog URLs that looks like http://www.yourfriendsname.com? In this post, we’ll see why.

The default URL assigned by Blogger when you create a blog lies in the blogspot.com domain. A domain in Internet jargon here is a set of names. For example, the .com domain is the entire set of Internet names that end with .com and the domain blogspot.com represents a sub set of this bigger set. In technical terms, blogspot.com is called a sub-domain. (Each sub-domain can be further sub divided into smaller sub-domain.) This system of names used on the Internet is called the Domain Name System or the DNS in short. The DNS is a distributed, hierarchical system that governs the way Internet names (or domain names) are assigned and also how computers work with those names.

You cannot arbitrarily pick a domain name and use it because that name must first be registered with an authority that controls the particular domain or sub-domain. The .com is called a Generic Top Level Domain and it is controlled by an organization called the ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Similarly, we can say that blogspot.com is a sub-domain (under .com) for which Blogger has acquired the right to use and maintain. Therefore, while Blogger has no problem in assigning the URL yourblogname.blogspot.com as the default URL, they cannot assign the name yourblogname.com because they have no authority over the .com domain. This is where the custom domains come in to play.

What Blogger refers to as a custom domain is a domain that does NOT end with blogspot.com. If you want your blog to have the URL yourblogname.com, first you must acquire the right to use that domain name. For Blogger blogs this can be done via Blogger itself as described here. Otherwise you can purchase it from a third party domain registrar. Domain registrars are organization accredited by the ICANN to manage Generic Top Level Domains on its behalf. (There is another type of top level domains called County Code Top Level Domains which are managed by the naming authorities in those respective countries)

Once you purchase a custom domain such as yourblogname.com, then you can instruct Blogger to publish your blog using that custom domain. But before you decide to go for a custom domain, make sure that you analyze the pros and cons of custom domains. In follow up articles we’ll take a look at why you should use custom domains and what things you should worry about.

Related Posts

• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Moving to a Custom Domain

HOWTO: Customize Post Page Labels

This is an answer to a question I got from a reader. The question had two things; firstly "How do I change the 'comments' label to something like 'reviews'?" and secondly "How can I change the label 'Posted by' to something different?"

There's something common about both of these questions. They both are Post Page labels (the word labels is used to mean string literals and not the labels used to categorize posts). Customizing these strings to something of your own is pretty simple. Just open the Blog widgets configuration dialog and change the strings as you like.

The illustration below is about how you can change the default comments label to "reactions".

AdSense FAQ

Here is a list of some common questions I get from readers regarding AdSense ads.

How do you place AdSense ads on Blogger?

Four methods are available to place AdSense ads on Blogger blogs. They are:

1. The AdSense Gadget - From the Page Elements view, if you select an Add Gadget option in any of the sections, the list of gadgets provide an AdSense gadget. You can easily configure the ad options from the dialog box and place the ad unit in any place where gadgets can be dragged and dropped. (See How to Add More Gadgets to increase the ad placement options)
2. Ads Between Posts - The Posts gadget has an option to display ads between posts. From the Page Elements window, go to Blog Posts -> Edit and select Show Ads Between Posts.
3. The Monetize Tab - This is more recent addition which offers a convenient way of adding ads. Go to the Monetize tab on your blog's admin console and select the required display option
4. HTML/Javascript Widgets - This is the most flexible method of adding ads which gives you more control over how to place them. Simply copy the ad code from your AdSense accout and use an HTML/Javascript widget to place it anywhere you want.

How many adds can I display at a time?

AdSense has a limitation of only 3 ads of one type per page. That means you can have up to 3 ad units and 3 link units per page.

I enabled Ads Between Posts. Now my sidebar ads are gone?

This can happen due to the limit of 3 ads of one type per page. If you have configured your Posts widget to show 4 or more posts on the homepage, then the Ads Between Posts option will consume the maximum of 3 ad units on the home page. If the sidebar loads after the posts column (which is usually the case when the sidebar is on the right), then the ads on the sidebar will not be loaded ad they will exceed the ad limit per page.

My blog shows irrelevant ads. Why?

There can be several reasons for this.

Firstly, if your blog is new, then it takes some time for Google to properly index it and understand the relevant type of ads.

Secondly, if your blog is not focussed on a particular topic, it becomes hard for AdSense to decide which type of ads are relevant.

Thirdly, even if your blogs is focused on a particular niche, that niche may not have enough relevant ads. The focus of this blog itself is an example for such a case.

Fourthly, due to the geo-targeting of ads (i.e. serving ads based on the locality of visitors), you might not see relevants ads on your blog. But visitors from the other parts of the world miget see more relevant ads than what you see.

There can be more reasons. But the above are the most common ones for irrelevant ads.

My earnings are random. Why?

See Fluctuations in AdSense Earnings

How can I optimze my ads?

See AdSense Tips for some useful tipe on making more out of your ads.