Wait.....so google will penlize publishers that use their exact same ad placement model? Say it ain't so!
my normal way of placing ads is one square in line with the text.. (so actual content is placed next to it.. ) .. guess that's the way to go from now on ..
I wonder if this applies to having a single 336x280 square block between the title and content - that's the layout I'm using for almost all my sites.
Despite this algo change, I feel comfortable with having multiple ads above the fold as long as the article title and some of the actual article itself is showing. Time will tel whether that's a good way to do things or not...
i have seen a site disappear from rankings (from page 2 to nowhere). It was top heavy in Ads. I am wondering if it is due to this update. Would be nice to hear from others too.
The key is to have enough content to be able to distribute a reasonable selection of Ads around the page... If you have 600-700 words, then it's quite easy to stagger ads down the page, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the end near the 'Action' or next click zone, plus 1-2 link units at appropriate navigation points. A well laid out page can have all these ads plus CPA, and still look quite natural.
Google is so hypocritical. It pisses me off. I got that same message about adding more Adsense blocks on my site. I hate Google.
The most annoying thing is you get a message in your dashboard and an email from the sales team saying you haven't used enough Ad units; and you should put on more... ...and then you simultaneously get messages from the quality team about reducing them! Still... Whoever said that Google's companies/subsidiaries talk to each other!
i am planning to kill off ALL Ads from my sites which used to equate to a max of $1500 a month. I wonder how much money they will loose by others killing their Ads too. See if you can't rank high with the Ads making you the most money then whats the point o havong them? The ads above the fold are the higher converters so G will definitely see a loss, but probably not enough for them to notice?
Don't shoot yourself in the foot! But cross-monetise and multi-monetise via different methods. You can get CPA/lead-gen/Amazon/ClickBank variation etc all on a page/site if done strategically, so that you get multiple stabs at income. I would personally NEVER rely on any form of Google income; you can make good money, but you're always under the shadow of them changing their minds. It's not the greatest situation that the company you want to rank with organically and remain low-profile, is also the company that you have to wave a flag at to get paid advertising. aaah... the wonders of Google!
luckily, i have monetized other sites as "real" offline businesses and i will do the same with the sites from where i am removing (in fact already have) adsense. The initial reason why they had adsense was lack of time to develop them into "proper" offline businesses so i added adsense to make them pay something as opposed to nothing at all. The way i see it now though, if they don't rank then the income is naturally low so better to remove a ranking inhibitor and rank again and set up offline income streams. the way i have seen it, anyone who can make $1000 to $2000 a month from product based sites will make MUCH more if it was a proper business set up/ offline JV. i hope that explains my logic.
Absolutely. I make a big chunk of my money from 'real' businesses and use SEO and IM as a huge source of lead-gen. But I also have very successful online businesses too; none of which rely on AdSense. I can see why with a starting site you monetised it with AdSense to let it develop; But it's definitely a smart strategy to avoid using Google as your entire business model! Good luck!
I don't believe they can check too many sites manually, so if they rely on an algo - there is a way of changing the sequence of blocks within the page code, I'd have to check my notes...so basically the main article shows on the top in the code, but not on the actual page. BTW - I don't use "adcents" but got penalized (I think) for too many CB ads above the fold
Yeah... You can position blocks with Div CSS tags.... That way the the code order can be completely different to the display order. But I think Google will probably be smarter than that and may even 'render' the screen image and check for footprint. It wouldn't be that hard to have a bunch of bots running that 24x7 with Google's processing power. And of course... it would fail any manual review.
