Google ads or your ecpm that got you pandalised.

[stevelibby]

Just a quick thought after reading many posts with reference to google ads. I can't for one second believe that one side of google being the search side would wage war against the adsense model, simply because that's self destruction.
What I think is should we be taking a closer look at click through rates? What I'm saying is those with high conversion rates maybe deemed as poor content? Id be interested to hear if those that have dropped traffic whether the overall adsense click through were high?

[tedster]

I'm going to be a lot more fierce in my response than I usually would be, because I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU WASTING YOUR TIME.

And if your goal is organic improvement, then looking at Adsense performance is a total waste of time. You said you were offering was "just a quick thought". Google's game plan is far from just a quick thought - and the separation between the advertising side and organic search is an essential feature of Google's long term business plan.

Panda did not "wage war" on Adsense - even though a lot of MFA pages were definitely casualties. But that's far from the actual target of the new algorithm. We've even seen the Adsense division come out with new guidelines, and Panda casualties included pages with no Adsense whatsoever.

[edited by: tedster at 11:14 pm (utc) on Apr 24, 2011]

[johnhh]

Oh that was fierce

Adsense is not a factor - nor is the number of affiliate links on a page - nor is the number of links going to external sites

It is a lot more subtle than that

No I don't have a solution yet - still A/B testing

[wanderingmind]

Ads (not necessarily adsense) in some positions could be a factor for some sites; if we look at the new announced guidelines as an admission that the earlier guidelines were a culprit.

[incrediBILL]

AdSense CTR and Panda penalties are mutually exclusive.

If you don't have any content above the fold, which is ill-defined, you may have been Pandalized, but for any over zealous ad implementation, not just AdSense.

Google has been saying for years to build you site for visitors, not for ads, and now they seem to mean it.

[tedster]

Now that I'm reading the opening post again, I can see what you might be getting at - that a very high conversion rate might be a sign that there's nothing of real value on the page itself, so the visitors are going to the ads.

I can see how that train of thinking gets started, but the idea that the new Panda quality score is actually using Adsense CTR in an inverse way (assuming that a page even has Adsense at all) still strikes me as extremely unlikely.

If you, as the site owner, want to look at your highest click-through ad pages with suspicion, that's certainly your prerogative. But I don't even remotely think that Google organic would be doing that. To start with, it would be an indirect metric in the extreme - and there are much more direct signals that can be used and that would be measurable for every page on every site.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

pssst - if you're looking at your sites overall duplicate content percentage take a gander at it's titles and round up a percentage on how duplicate they are online too.

Every widget site has a page called "big blue widgets" so does your content really outrank them all for that title? (hint: only 10 of the bazillion can say yes). If your sites titles are a verbatim list of keywords right out of Google's keyword tool with only minimal differences or 1-3 extra words you've got some studying to do.(hint: on how you can help a visitor know more about why your page is better than others.)