Factors That Raise Red Flags To Google

[kidder]

I wanted to get some feedback on what everyone thinks might raise flags when creating new sites. We have just been through a bit of an exercise with a client who went on a bit of an adsense / blog rampage only to have about 75% of their sites banned. Client did not disclose exactly how many sites they did but I found evidence of at least 40.... The common ground here was of course the adsense account but for some reason they did not hit all of his sites. One older but very link spammy forum remained untouched while one of their quality clean sites (just purchased - kiss $25,000 goodbye)was banned. We came to the conclusion rightly or wrongly that adsense, haste and the blogs using wordpress flagged them. So recently I've setup a couple of new (probably a little thin) non blog sites with some well known affiliate links in them as a test, today I see two consecutive visits from Google / Mountain View on the logs so it will be interesting to see if we get filtered. After talking to my adwords support rep on the phone they gave me a percentage of screen area that was ok for affiliate products / advertising, if you exceed this percentage then your site is deemed to be thin and they apply the QS hammer and your out of business. I suspect they might apply a similar ratio to the organics as part of a manual review.

[whitenight]

It's not wordpress.
It's not haste.
It's not "thin" sites.
It's ....

ADSENSE!

Ironic, that our discussion about TBPR referenced the thread where I talked about Adsense being one of the worst monetization programs around.

Adsense is good for ONE purpose in monetization...
I'll let you figure that out.

As you've learned, don't put Adsense on any site you don't want Goog looking over with a finely biased eye.
There are better affiliate programs anyways.

[HuskyPup]

Adsense being one of the worst monetization programs around.

Not necessarily so for small businesses with a very limited or even no marketing department. It can be a very efficient and effective monetisation programme...and not having to chase unpaid accounts has to be #1 on the list followed by not having to even source advertisers.

There are better affiliate programs anyways.

This can depend entirely on the widget's subject and country location, many publishers outside of the USA simply do not have access to many programmes.

[tedster]

Looking for the potential red flags, Adsense may have caused the brushfire to spread -- but I'll bet it didn't set the initial spark. What kind of "rampage" is involved here might well be the key factor, especially if the client went for the easy path in getting backlinks for weak content.

[whitenight]

Not necessarily so for small businesses with a very limited or even no marketing department. It can be a very efficient and effective monetisation programme...and not having to chase unpaid accounts has to be #1 on the list followed by not having to even source advertisers.

Hehe, i didn't say it wasn't easy to place on a site.
It's easy.
But you'd have a hard time convincing me it's 1/20 as profitable than putting in the man hours to set up one's site monetization properly.

Laziness is never an excuse.

Speaking of...

Looking for the potential red flags, Adsense may have caused the brushfire to spread -- but I'll bet it didn't set the initial spark.

Come on, kidder.
We're kinda being nice here and talking around the issue.

If you're client is going to be lazy and/or going for the easy buck, than even my attempt to blame adsense is weak. ;)

As above, if (s)he's obviously got the money ($25k), what the heck is she doing running around throwing adsense on sites for?!

Put in the manhours/outsource it,
to both "fool" Goog into thinking the sites are legit
AND/or
work with programs who's monetization methods don't attract Goog's flies.

You can get away with all kinds of nonsense WITHOUT adsense, and very little WITH it.

This isn't 2003-2005.
All the webmasters complaining about adsense being used
by low quality sites HAS had an impact on how they run that aspect of their business now.

[edited by: whitenight at 1:27 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2009]

[cls_wired]

Irrespective of how much advertisment blocks the site keeps on, Google gives the same ranking. However advertisment could affect rancing indirectly, cause webpage navigation could be complicated and user's behavior factors could be lower for this documents.

[HuskyPup]

one of their quality clean sites (just purchased - kiss $25,000 goodbye)was banned.

Are you sure this was clean? Why would AdSense ban a clean site?

$25k creates a very nice site from scratch, what volume of traffic (not AdSense income) are you talking about?

[Samanthatouch]

After talking to my adwords support rep on the phone they gave me a percentage of screen area that was ok for affiliate products / advertising, if you exceed this percentage then your site is deemed to be thin and they apply the QS hammer and your out of business.

What was the percentage? Was it for the whole page or just for above the fold?

[kidder]

From memory it was about the 30% mark without scrolling. Certainly no more than that and they quoted me a base screen resolution as well, at that point it was all getting too hard and I was tuning out.

Huskypup - the site was doing about 1500 uniques per day. I'm not sure if it got link blasted after handover but I suspect it probably did, in this case I'm not sure I was given all of the facts.

[edited by: tedster at 8:43 am (utc) on Nov. 10, 2009]