On Friday I noticed throughout the day that my adsense revenue was really low. I then went and checked my rankings and a lot of my sites had fallen. What was going on???
I checked webmaster world, and sure enough, there was a google algorithm update. What was it? Google has decided to penalize websites with mostly advertising above the fold, meaning that if the first thing you see is mostly ads then this goes against their policies. Well, unfortunately most of my sites were extremely aggressive as far as adsense placement, so I got the big slappola.I didn’t get deindexed or anything, but I lost a few places with most of my websites and I’m feeling it big time with my adsense revenue.
Is this the end of the world? No. I’ve recently gone back into each site (51 of them now) and changed the adsense positioning. Apparently after a few weeks I should get my rankings back, but there is no guarantee.
What am I going to do from now on? On all my new sites I’m going to be a little more conservative about my adsense placement. I’m testing out some placements right now, and I’m going to pay attention to which sites gain rankings and which stay penalized or even decrease. I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about the best adsense placement after this algorithm change on the Internet marketing forums.
So, it all could have been a lot worse. I could have woken up with my adsense account canceled. All my sites could have been deindexed. But it’s just a setback. These things happen. I’m learning from it and I’ll move on accordingly from here.
Keep us posteed on where the slapped websites rank in a few weeks!
I will for sure. I think I’ve already begun to get some traffic back, but at the same time another site fell today. Oh well.
IS this just for adsense sites or all sites promoting products?
I’m actually not completely sure. I know that google can tell when a page uses a large percentage of above-the-fold real estate for ads and they can penalize them. However if you are in a very uncompetitive niche then I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Google ‘almost’ took me outta business as well.
Almost all my MFA niche sites went down after their useless update.
They just have to put people in mind when making another updates and as for me, I’ve stopped dancing at google hoping to ‘follow’ em. I’ve decided to get rid of those sites and concentrate on my blog and also build some blogs.
Affiliate marketing rocks and i’ll be considering Amazon sites too.
Sheyi
Hmmm, why do you think your sites got deindexed? Were they all linked together? Were they thin on content? Did they all use the same theme? I’d be interested to hear what you think happened.