Google Panda and Adsense Income Fall
Since the Google Panda update, traffic on my network of software sites has dropped by a factor of 3. Whereas once I was getting upwards of 10,000 page views a day, I’m now averaging under 3000. Adsense has been badly hit. Once upon a time I was earning enough to pay the mortgage, now I can barely afford a pizza a week.
By their very nature, PAD sites contain a lot of content that is identical to that on other sites. There are hundreds of PAD-enabled websites and the content on a lot of these sites is identical. I used to spend a lot of time filtering spam and writing backend admin software to help me remove submissions I didn’t like or that were obviously looking to get keyword-based backlinks. Typically, only 10% of submissions would make it live on my sites. Even with all this work though, the content was still the same as on 99% of the other PAD sites out there.
Even worse, the Adsense income has dropped by a greater proportion than the traffic. It’s as though Google doesn’t want to give my sites high paying ads anymore. I’ve got a few friends who run PAD sites too and they’ve been seeing the same drop in traffic and income. We’ve all been scratching our heads to see how we might recover. Writing unique content isn’t an option - we’d never get paid back for the amount of work required.
One thing I have noticed is that a new site I’ve been working on for a year has started to do much better in SERPs even though I’ve built almost no links for it. There’s only one difference between this PAD site and the others though - the site has no Adsense. With my other sites, I took great care to put as many Adsense ads on each page as I could, as well as to optimize the layout of the ads to increase the clickthrough rate. I’m guessing that Google may have hit MFA sites harder than most in the Panda update, so I’m going to remove two thirds of the ads and see if the traffic improves. Hopefully, if the traffic improves I may get more clicks on the remaining ads.
Google Panda has made many rethink their content / seo and overall income strategy. For users of the net, Panda could be very good, but for people earning via Adsense and other adshare its terrible news. We have not seen any dips, but our content was unique and goals on site different, plus we have some secret weapons.
Very interesting. I practically experienced the exact same thing, our traffic was slashed by 2/3 - Before Panda, we were getting around 30K Page Views daily, now we are lucky to reach 10K on a weekday. Adsense earnings have really taken a dive due to this.
I’m considering doing the same thing like you, removing excessive ad blocks and just keep 1 or 2 blocks max. Have you experienced any improvements yet ?
Cheers
Hi Vince,
Unfortunately, reducing the number of ads had zero effect on traffic. The page load speed increased considerably which I thought may have helped keep visitors on the site as well but the traffic didn’t increase at all.
this is really bad news for all adsense users.
My Adsense got hit very bad too. Weird thing is, through Awstat, I see that the page impressions have not really changed. But the ad impression showd on my adsense stat shows a significant drop by over 50%. How do you overcome this?