steve8383 - 1:49 am on Jan 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks Rob:
The browsersize tool indicates that the leaderboard ad on my forum would be viewable at the 99% range. It's position is identical to the leaderboard ad here on this forum (pubcon ad at the moment), which is fairly standard forum placement and doesn't interfere with content or ability to navigate the site.

I think I will have to take it down for a while and see if I get the traffic back without it. Of course, it so happens it is also my highest revenue producing ad unit.

What really irks is that it seems to be the forum ad placement that has dragged down the rest of the site which is largely ad free. While there are several hundred handcrafted largely ad free pages of great content on the main site there are tens of thousands of forum pages with the leaderboard ad so I suppose the sheer volume of these that tipped the balance.

I could probably accept it a little more if the penalty was page based rather than site based and it was only the forum pages that suffered.

And while I'm semi ranting, surely Adsense and Search need to talk to each other one day about their conflicting advice.