However, the background to this post is that I felt that there might be some benefit to getting some small advertising revenue utilizing Google Adsense with this blog. Considering my traffic was running nearly 1000 visits a day this seemed like a good option based on the content and history of this blog.
I've used Adsense for quite a few years now in my earlier web work and have found it to be beneficial for high volume web pages. At one point some years ago I was able to make $10-$50 a day in revenue - that was a very unique case due to a popular surge online for a specific topic. In this case I was expecting about $1 a day since advertising tied to blogging is not a very competitive space. Ads such as hosting centers or blogger tools don't drive significant payout revenue as do some of these top paying Adsense keywords.
Some people make a living on Adsense revenue but it takes some significant savvy with deep traffic knowledge to do that. Others try to scam Google by building false links back to fake sites that have the high paying keywords just smattered throughout the site to generate profits. This aggravates Google and gives honest online workers a bad name.
Adsense Penalty
On December 16th I decided to implement Adsense on Blogger Tips Pro having not paid much attention to what was going on with it in the last two years. Within one day I dropped from 943 visits to 757 - not really much concern since I do get traffic dips. By day 2 I was down to 682 visits falling down to 534 by day 4. That is when the alarm sounded for me!!What I hadn't realized was that as a result of the Adsense scammers, Google has been been penalizing web site search rankings based on their usage of Adsense to try and remove false content sites from the search results that rolled out in 2012. However, the impact was high as noted by Aaron Wall of Seobook.
I really didn't think that I had a lot of ads above the fold but felt that my traffic was much more important that a few dollars a month in revenue. I removed the ads on December 24th. But, the real question is just how much my traffic will be hurt from this point on when I went from a growing 900-1000 visits a day now down to 600-700 a day as you can see here:
Clearly, the Google Adsense penalty is real and can hurt your traffic. Don't believe me? Read this statement and take a look at Google Page Layout Algorithm & Penalty.
If anyone else has experienced this effect I would love to hear from you - especially if you were able to revive the traffic back either by ad placement or removing Adsense all together. Also, if you're from Google please chime in - I think all of my readers would like to know more.
