Hi there,
I run a pretty popular forum. Forum has 1 million posts and serves about a million pages per month. Been around for 10 years so lots of incoming links.
For a long time we have run adsense on the forum and other parts of the site. We make pretty good revenue from it, especially this last winter.
We have an affiliate gear engine that has been doing really well, and the adsense ads were doing well. However, after doing some A/B testing we found that having ads resulting in lower conversions so we removed them. Around this time we also saw a decrease in traffic to those gear pages, maybe about 30%. However, this was at the end of February and could have been doing to the Xmas credit card hangover.
I had an ad agency buy all of our above the fold advertising starting on April 11th, which resulted in us removing all of our higher performing above the fold adsense ads, leaving only the ones in the footer. On that very day we started seeing another decrease of traffic to our gear engine between ~30-50%.
I know that there was an update done to Panda around this time, and while our gear system survived the first rollout, we might have gotten caught up in an update. However, I can't help but thinking this is related to adsense. It seems strange the day I remove it things start to nosedive. I know there has been a lot of discussion in the past about whether adsense is a ranking factor, and the consensus has always been no. But my evidence suggests it might be.
Again these aren't controlled experiments by any means, and the timing corresponds with other factors. I'm hoping to get someones input on this on whether there was another update on or around April 11, or whether other people have suggested that pulling Google ads has effect their traffic.
TIA.
