Slapped by Google – It’s not the end of the world
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.