All that is needed is this piece of code which essentially modifies the SQL statement being generated. Note that the argument assigned to orderby is the column name, hence it is case sensitive (I found out that ID breaks the naming conversion on the post table);

<?php
   if (is_category(array($myCatId))){
      query_posts($query_string . "&orderby=ID&order=DESC");
   }
?>

Code needs to be placed before this line

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); update_post_caches($posts); ?>

A simple effective work around is a header redirect (permalink friendly) on the main site index which can be prefixed to the wordpress index.php in your wordpress top level directory.

<?php

// set $redirectHome = false to disable the redirect

$redirectHome = true;
if ($redirectHome){
        // Redirects index page
        $uriStr = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        if (($uriStr == '/') || ($uriStr == '')){
                header('Location: /?index',true,301);
                die();
        }
        // Makes sure pages off the main index are not renamed
        $matchAry = array();
        if (preg_match('/(\/page\/\d+\/)\?index/',$uriStr,$matchAry)){
                header('Location: ' . $matchAry[1],true,301);
                die();
        }
}

/**
 * Original WordPress index.php goes here
 */

This works because Google thinks “/?index” is a new page (it’s not though, it’s the main index with a query string attached) and the media bot crawls it and targets it accordingly as a new page. And as long as you’ve made your amendments to your previously incorrect content, in my case the “tagline” then this time around your ads should be accurately targeted…hopefully

The curious thing is, it seems no matter what only my original main index is targeted incorrectly still months later. I’ve seen other posts relating to incorrect ad targeting on the main index only. It seems like Google’s media crawler doesn’t like something about WordPress, I would like to hear from others that have experienced this.