Did you recently encounter a sudden decrease in your Adsense earnings and site traffic? Well, I did. And that line graph’s downward slope didn’t paint a pretty picture. I’m referring to what happened to my niche blogs that I’ve been nurturing for a time now. I’m highly relying on my monthly Adsense income, which isn’t really much, but enough to send me into panic mode when one day I discovered that the clicks and page impressions of my sites have dropped significantly.
The first time I noticed the drop, I thought it wasn’t something that I should be worried about. But it went on for two, three, then four days! I figured it must be because I haven’t been updating those sites as often as I initially intended to, or that I haven’t been building links, or maybe there was another Google update that affected the rankings — but the fact that the “change” happened all at once to all my sites was a bit suspicious. I must have done something terrible to set Google off!
Desperate and confused, I googled (ironically) for a solution to my problem. I went back to read the Google Adsense Program Policies, explored the Google Adsense blog for clarifications, and landed on this page. I was guilty of violating guideline #1:
1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads. For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content. The example below shows a placement that does not follow this guideline.
Right after I read that post I immediately removed the ads I placed just below the post titles of my blogs. Then I checked if my sites are violating any other policy, crossed my fingers, and went to bed. It was more of a “trial and error” thing so I was surprised to see that a day after I made those changes, my sites’ figures went back to normal.
I’ve known about this ad placement guideline before yet I never thought Google would actually flag my sites! What a dork. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wished I could get away with it. Lesson learned: Do not undermine Google!
Of course I’m not entirely sure if what caused the “drop” was indeed the ad placement policy violation, however, removing those ads did help my sites get back on track. If my theory is right, then it’s apparent that Google is in the business of correcting the way Adsense publishers behave.
Has this happened to you?
Thanks a lot for this Joni! I had a similar issue with my earnings and page impressions for one of my sites and it happens to have ads under the post titles. But I got lazy and did not even try to find out why… hehe. Thankees!
I neither have AdSense on my blog nor do I see any on the very page I’m typing this on
Thanks, AdBlock Plus!
I’m being a troll, yes. :-P jk heheh
haha i’m one of the violators…
Good to hear that your rankings have gone back to normal. And your post does make me think why my other niche blogs get so small payouts per click. Darn, Google is so powerful. Haha.
Google is always changing these rules concerning adsense. its difficult to keep up, especially when you have a lot of blogs.
its true that these adsense dont bring in that much every month, still its a nice extra!
Hahahaha, after months of bitching about my PR dropping from 4 to 0, I finally sent a “ticket” to google about this. They got back to me after a few days and said I had violated an adsense policy because my ads were under an “*Ahem*” header in my sidebar XD
Holy crap. I’m paranoid.
the problem was actually not in adsense placement, recently there’s sudden google update even my non-adsense site decrease traffic then back again in a few days. some of the blogger site i known decreased pagerank also and they are not violating adsense TOS and some are violating but not affected by ranking or loss of traffic . Unpredictable talaga si Google!
a friend told me about this few days ago.. so i decided to remove the ads below my post entries. i still cannot say the difference since i just started my ads placement, but i think its a good move for me as a starter. your post highlighted me more about the subject.
eligio: I think you may be right, coz it happened to me again. Why are they doing this to us?? :(
I don’t know if my problem is related to yours in any way but my page rank suddenly dropped to 0 after I did a paid post from PayPerPost. :( It’s sad, really. I looked around and the sites I found suggested to use a nofollow tag on the links, something like that. A friend then told me that I shouldn’t categorize paid posts under the obvious ‘tag’ name category because that adds to the PR lowering. :S
I hope I can get my PR back, it used to be PR3 but it means a lot. :(
Oh, guideline #1 pa ang violation :D
I don’t have much earnings with Adsense kaya I do those posts that pay. More people are monetizing now, can’t blame them, sayang ang opportunities to have some extra.
Ako I’ve been lazy doing adsense pa hehehe… Google has been doing more frequent updates now than ever before… It’s hard to keep track kahit sa organic side.
Hey i placed my ads just above the tile…you can see it here:
http://pcgameslinks.blogspot.com/
or
http://mydownloads4u.blogspot.com/
Can u please tell me if it the reason for pr decrease……..or if it is a voilation …as usually people click on titles in my main page…:)
Waiting for ur reply..:)