exitjunction: How to get penalised using adsense (and not know it!)
After a prior “experiment” with exitjuction, I found myself with half the traffic I normally have. This was because search engines don’t like exitjunction somehow.
About a week after I ended the experiment, I noticed something unusual:
Yahoo traffic bounced back to its normal levels immediately, but google traffic only improved slightly.
See the graphs:
Why? Maybe google is a bit slower to respond… but maybe not.
I remember adding 2 youtube video ads to my pages with adsense (one in the sidebar, and one at the bottom of individual posts).
Do I have too many Adsense ad units running at the same time?
I kinda remember that there might have been a limit, so I investigate.
Oops, looks like there is a limit of 3 ad units per page… and I had 4… but after some more searching, I find that there are different limits on different ad units:
- Max of 3 “content” ad units per page
- Max of 3 link ad units per page
- Max of 1 youtube video units per page (oops again!).
- Max of 2 adsense search boxes per page
Weird: you get hit if you have only 2 video units, but its ok if you have 3 + 3 + 1 + 2 = 9 units in the right proportion!
So around the 22 Feb, I removed the second youtube unit, and the results were:
What a relief!
It took over a week for my google traffic to recover, but its now back to normal.
So there you go: you can get penalised by google without even realising it, but by correcting your adsense mistake, google will (eventually) trust you again.
For those of you who might wonder: my (tiny) adsense income also took a huge nosedive during the penalty period.
Good you realised.
I still didn’t get my googlerank back.
And you?
Hi laane,
I “only” got penalised for about 25 days, so my PR didn’t change (I think)… maybe something will happen at the next PR update (due sometime soon).
Besides, the penalty only applied to my blog… my site is different from most blogs, in that my blog is a sub-section… The non-blog parts of my site are actually static HTML pages, which are not part of wordpress, and didn’t get penalised because I only did the “bad stuff” to wordpress.
Both my home page and the main blog page are at PR3, and they have been at that level for over 1 year.
Thank you for sharing this. I wouldn’t know we could be penalized for something like this too. What I observed from setting up Adsense in my site previously was that if I reached the maximum unit allow, Google will automatically remove the additional ad.
Hi BK,
Its funny you should say that.
At one point, I did notice the video ads were showing only a text link that said something like: “click here to view youtube videos”…
I just thought it was either something wrong with my adsense code (I double checked, and it was OK)… or maybe something was wrong with the youtube servers.
Looking back on it now, maybe it was googles clumsy way of telling me I was doing something wrong!
Great output. Did you run that much ads? But if indeed they are on correct proportions no one would notice plus you have this liquid layout and I have a wide screen so what I noticew mostly is the immenseness of your site. ^^
I have a very little earning since I (re)put the ads in my site this year. Well, I used to have robots for experiments sake and I used to do a lot of paid posting. Now that these two are not with me anymore, I am back with GA. I just watched my account yesterday and found out 3 clicks just this week. Not so fequent but I am just glad it is not zero. ^^ And the earning per click is not so disappointing. ^^
I have to agree with BK but maybe it depened also on what platform one uses. I am in blogger and I had the same experience.. If the allowed units are exceeded, blogger would remove it.. I mean, not literally remove but take away the ads itself/themselves but the space consumed is left blank… not that it just disappear: the space is there only that the ads are invisible.