Google Announces Purge Of Ad-heavy Web Sites

[eyedomainous]

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES PURGE OF AD-HEAVY WEB SITES
BizReport.com quote: "Some online publishers may get an unwelcome jolt on June 1st. Google, which provides thousands of ads to websites through it's AdSense program, will shut off adds to certain websites beginning Friday."

 

[lzy]

Hmm, so if I didn't receive anything from Google, means I'm safe?

 

[astroman]

I don't think Google is required to let the websites know if they plan on pulling ads from them.

I wonder if SEDO will be affected.

 

[ApeXX]

I would assume Google would send you some sort of termination email like they do normally.

 

[whitebark]

From the article - "The search giant has notified a number of Web publishers in the last few days that they will be dropped from its popular "AdSense" program starting June 1."

Seems like you will be notified - some people at least. Wonder how far they are going to take it?

And, "In some cases, violations of our program policies will result in termination from AdSense," Google said in a statement. Now that's the line people with MFA sites should sit up and take notice of - it's in their terms of service to not allow such websites on their service. It was only a matter of time before they acted upon it. They'll probably start with the big fish and move their way down the pecking order. If you value your domains - change your websites if it is an MFA! Getting it listed again if they also drop the website from the search results can be a long painful process with zero guarantee that your domain will be listed again.

 

[cache]

scared. What kind of site is an ad heavy site?

 

[.jd.]

YPN conquers?.... MSN??? Publishers move.. Domainers move.. make sence?

 

[enlytend]

They have sent notes to those whose accounts will be terminated 6/1. To paraphrase, the notes tell the recipient that your business model is not a good fit for Adsense and that they will be disabling your account effective 6/1. All outstanding balances are being paid.

Current affected group seems to be people doing Adwords/Adsense arbitrage to low quality "MFA" sites. There is some speculation that that "thin content" sites (esp. those running adsense) are on their radar in general - that's nothing new, but their recent action is. There's also talk of revising their Adwords quality score to punish thin-content sites.

Comments by a Google rep on another forum suggest that this has been in the works for a long time... I suspect we'll hear more after 6/1.

 

[movingconcierge]

Good. Maybe they be able to raise payouts. I'm about 20% G and 78% YPN and 2% Kontera where I have contextual ads.

 

[enlytend]

A lot of quality advertisers opt out of the content network (Adsense) because of traffic quality. Weeding out the MFAs may bring them back. Long-term, that could definitely raise Adsense revenue for the remaining publishers.

This quote, from an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt last October ( for Time magazine) has been brought up as possibly holding clues as to what's going on:

"Another example of a question that we are debating right now is: we have this amazing product called AdSense for content, where we're monetizing the Web. If you're a publisher we run our ads against your content. It's phenomenal. How do we make that product produce better content, not just lots of content?"

Food for thought ...

 

[movingconcierge]

G is going to buy pay per post?

 

[htmlindex]

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES PURGE OF AD-HEAVY WEB SITES
BizReport.com quote: "Some online publishers may get an unwelcome jolt on June 1st. Google, which provides thousands of ads to websites through it's AdSense program, will shut off adds to certain websites beginning Friday."

I wonder if this is going to affect proxy sites

 

[Dave_Z]

I would assume Google would send you some sort of termination email like they do normally.

You're fired!

Bound to happen sooner or later. In this case, sooner.

 

[The Stealthy One]

Thanks for sharing! That's the first I had heard of that.

 

[RogueWriter]

Interesting. If nothing else it will simply force MFA sites to develop more canned content in order to appear as if they are contributing value in some way. Once you are on G's radar, though, I am not sure how hard it is to slip back off.

I do not advertise on MFA sites, myself, because I question the quality of a lot of the hits.

 

[tetrapak]

Hallelujjah, been waiting for this!

 

[whitebark]

I do not advertise on MFA sites, myself, because I question the quality of a lot of the hits.

And that may just be the single largest thing driving google to do this. $'s.

 

[cache]

is mini-site included?

 

[harkster]

I currently have around 40 sites which have use Adsense. They run from 1 pagers through 100's of pages. Here is what big G sends me monthly.

Here is your optimization report for the month of May. After an automatic review of your sites, we think you might be able to improve your monetization using the following tips:

Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.
Many of your sites only contain one ad unit.
How can I fix this? This tip will no longer be shown in your optimization reports [undo]

We hope these tips are helpful, and encourage you to experiment using different layouts and formats--no two sites monetize the same way!

Big G speaking out of both sides?

I am also noticing something odd. My sites with only 1 ad seems to be paying better than the ones with 2 or 3.

Going to cut back on a few and see what happens.

 

[whitebark]

I am also noticing something odd. My sites with only 1 ad seems to be paying better than the ones with 2 or 3.

Going to cut back on a few and see what happens.

Sshh! That was supposed to remain a secret!
:hehe:

And indeed, on some websites you will notice a marked CTR with fewer ads. Most people when they see the top eight inches of a website as nothing but ads there is usually one thing that they click - the back button. They don't read your website, they don't bookmark it, and they certainly don't tell anyone about it. When people spend more time on a website by my experience, they click more ads. And getting those people to come back is the real key to adsense imho.