Learning it the Hard Way
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?
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