Check Your Adsense Ads

posted in Strategies |

Unfortunately I only found the cause of my strange Adsense ads behaviour months after it started… with the equally unfortunate effect of a rather LARGE downward spiral in my earnings from that site (from $570 to $125 a month).

Did you see the clue on the previous page to the cause of this?

Well if you thought the security at my old web host was the issue, then pat yourself on the back!!! Well done.

I use include files for page headers and footers (hence the shtml pages) and some lowlife had got into my footer - the site-wide footer - and added a nice tidy piece of nifty code.

They added a tiny 1pixel by 1 pixel sized marquee right at the bottom of the footer - something that YOU would NOT see, but search engines certainly did. And in that marquee were over FIFTY links - with alt/title text - nicely optimized - pointing to pages on a certain university server with ringtone links on them.

Now obviously there was no direct traffic benefit to be gained from this exercise… it was purely page rank pilfering (from over 7000 of MY pages).

Despite being located in the footer - and outside of the <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –> tags (which are designed to tell the adsense spider where to look for relevant content) - it had the desired effect, with the vast majority of ads being served related to the content of the fifty links in that marquee.

Question for Google here… Are the <!– google_ad_section_start/end –> tags really taken into account by your spider???

Now as that site was NOT about ringtones, the ads just weren’t appropriate to my audience, with a very negative impact on my earnings… one which I am still trying to recover from! And I think I lost a lot of pages from Google’s index too because of this.

So if you ever notice something strange happening on your web site, START your investigations by doing a quick check of your templated files to see if they’ve been hacked.

It may save you months of pulling your hair out in frustration - something my head can’t really afford at all

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1 On February 9th, 2009, Pitambharadharaya said:

It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.

Response by Stephen

First up.. I have removed the URL you submitted - I don’t want to link to your domain when it is “For Sale” Good luck with that tactic!

Secondly, you said I’m creating problems for myself by
1. trying to solve the issue
INSTEAD OF
2. looking at why their (sic) is a problem in the first place

Sorry mate, but aren’t they the one and the same thing??? Until you find out what the “real” problem is, it can’t be fixed!

In the mean time, you’ll “waste time” fiddling with other possible causes to the problem… Seems pretty normal problem solving process to me!

And as someone who HAS been on the net for longer than most, I published this post and the “solution” to save people like you the hassle of trying to solve a problem that even a “veteran” had difficulty with.

You might actually thank me one day