Since around the time I tweaked the Adsense on my software downloads site the page impressions have been dropping. The number of pages in Google’s main index has also been declining in the last month or so. I can’t pin the drop in impressions down to the exact date when I changed the Adsense but it’s within a week or so. I’m now making about a quarter of the Adsense income I was. This isn’t a big loss, since the amount of money involved wasn’t great anyway but I’d still like to get back to where I was.
I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out whether I’ve triggered some sort of Google penalty or whether, since the site is only 7 months old, the site is still doing the usual new site dance in SERPs.
I went and read Google’s terms of service for Adsense and couldn’t really see anything that I was doing wrong. There is a vague warning about breaking the terms of service if the site is purely constructed for the purposes of showing Adsense. If this was my problem though, every download site would have the same issue.
The clause that caught my eye though was one saying you shouldn’t have more than 3 ads per page. I had upped the ads/ page to 3 but on my work computer I sometimes got a strange “can’t show page” panel appearing below the ad tower on the left of the page. I didn’t see this at all on my home computer so I thought it was just a firewall issue or some other weird problem. The company I work for is a large American corporation with big paranoia about security and spends more on firewall protection than they do on the server. Quite often Google ads won’t show at all on some websites.
However, it suddenly occurred to me that there might be a bug in my PHP script. I took a look and found a cutdown Google ad script sitting below the proper ad script for the tower. This might have been taken as a 4th Google ad on the page and may have triggered a penalty of some kind. I’ve now removed the script fragment. With any luck my traffic will return over the coming weeks as the Adsense robot reindexes the pages.
