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.