Does Panda like Adsense?

[danijelzi]

I publish a couple of news items daily and noticed that MFA sites rank instantly above me as soon as they publish a rewritten version of my news. Some of these MFAs have large 336x and 728x Adsense units above the fold, pushing the content 800px or more down. On the other side I have only 1 Adsense unit below the fold, but there's a 728x unit by an ad network above the fold, as well as their 300x and 160x600 units below the fold. The 728x unit I use is in line with site's logo, so it doesn't push the content down.

I know there are other ranking factors, but would like to hear your opinion about this. Is Adsense considered as good content on a page and excluded from ads/content ratio calculation for rankings? Is use of ads other than Adsense cause for de-rankings? Should I push my content down with Adsense to regain rankings, like MFAs do?

[goodroi]

I am curious how many keywords you have been tracking and for how many months you have been monitoring them. Based on my research I have seen the opposite. Sites that are too heavy in Adsense and/or affiliate ads seem to suffer.

I have found several hundred keywords that have heavy adsense sites ranking high but then I have also found thousands of other keywords where the top ranking sites have minimal or no adsense present.

Personally I do not think there is a direct connection between Adsense and rankings. IMHO I think very high adsense usage on a website is more common among webmasters looking to exploit short term profits. Webmasters that are focusing more on establishing long term properties tend to use less adsense & affiliate ads on their pages and have a higher percentage of content.

[danijelzi]

I am curious how many keywords you have been tracking and for how many months you have been monitoring them.

I monitor keywords for products I write about, 2 posts per day on average, since I started to notice the problem after the Panda 1.0 (I had some pauses in monitoring because I got bored with that, but the things remained the same all the time since February). On Sept 28th things improved regarding this, but after 2-3 days the problem occurred again.

So, I was tracking almost all of my keywords, trying to figure out why MFA re-writers rank better, but couldn't figure out why. They reason could be that they have "better" ads than I do, because the content is almost the same as mine, with minor changes. I always get natural links from respectable sources in my niche, and newer saw any of these MFAs mentioned on any site. Used backlink checker tools to determine if tey have quality inbound links - they have not.

I think that there could be some logic in favoring Adsense by Google, because they claim their ads are "relevant and engaging", so why would they de-rank someone if uses relevant and engaging text with links to relevant sites. On the other side, they can't guarantee that ads by other sources are relevant and engaging, so their use could be a problem. After all, in Analytics Google lists Adsense data under "Content" section, so they probably consider their ads to be content.

This is all speculation of course, but I can't see any other reason why a MFA website which only re-writes others' content outranks the original source.

[netmeg]

This is all speculation of course, but I can't see any other reason why a MFA website which only re-writes others' content outranks the original source.

Personally, I think it's because they're still working on that.

[walkman]

This is all speculation of course, but I can't see any other reason why a MFA website which only re-writes others' content outranks the original source.

Because the original is penalized and this one hasn't yet. It makes no sense but that's how it is: just make sure you penalize and then let the chips fall where they may.

[danijelzi]

Because the original is penalized and this one hasn't yet.

I'm worrying because it's 7th month after the first Panda without significant recovery for me except a small improvement on Sept 28th, and without penalization of these MFAs.

The only thing that left unchanged on my cleaned-up site are these non-adsense ads. I think I'll remove 2 out of 3 of these units (and halve my income, but if I recover Google traffic I'll be in plus after all.)

[walkman]

I'm worrying because it's 7th month after the first Panda without significant recovery for me except a small improvement on Sept 28th, and without penalization of these MFAs.

I feel you, and with 12% (plus more on other Pandas) of SERPs being effected you are likely one of the hundreds of thousands. Google doesn't seem to be worried or care, or at least until this week when influential people started to ask questions. They managed Panda with lies so far, but no one is buying them now on month 7.