shri - 9:09 am on Jan 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

@universetoday - did you notice a ranking drop on the 19th which you feel came from this new algorithm component?

We lost a lot of rankings on the 19th on a site that had three adsense units above the fold.

Our ranks have been solid for the last couple of years on this site.

Unique content (maintained by a Hollywood script writer .. ) and pretty engaging in my opinion as we average about 5-6 pageviews per visitor and the bounce rate is usually 30-40%. Dwell time was and remains about 3 mins per user.

There is one page which answers a specific question and the bounce rate on that page is about 90% - to be honest, I don't care much about that page anyways as it does not add much value to the site other than give us exposure within this niche.

Unfortunately this has happened right as we go into what is usually a high revenue month for us in Feb.

Have made some tweaks (moved the ads a fair bit, although we do see the leaderboard and the other units above the folks - there is a fair bit of content there too ) - lets see how well Google responds. Hopefully this is not a long term filter and something that ensures that the penalty is revaluated on a weekly or per crawl basis.

Time will tell ....