Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site with +30 penalty does not have a single affiliate link on it but it's literally covered all over with AdSense to the max number of blocks allowed by them per page. That did not stop them from dropping the penalty on me and maybe even triggered that because on some pages the area used by content is smaller that that of covered with AdSense. We have a helpdesk on our site and some questions and answers are literally two sentences long with the rest of the page taken by what's on the template - and AdSense is a large area of the template.
Now, maybe 1script's "thin AdSense" pages weren't responsible for the rankings drop, but then again, who knows? GoogleGuy has said on previous occasions that Google isn't enthusiastic about "thin affiliate" sites that add little or no value for the user, so it's reasonable to assume that the Google Search team might not take a charitable view of "thin AdSense" sites, either.
If your pages have only token content surrounded by multiple AdSense ad units, you might want to think about whether you're taking an unnecessary risk (at least, if you hope to profit from Google Search traffic).
A site could have been created for other reasons, as in 1script's example of his company's support-desk site. In such cases, a site that was made to serve users might get hit with a penalty because of the way AdSense was integrated into the pages.
The difference between a "thin" site and an MFA would be what
Too bad we can't post urls. Obviously there's degrees, but certainly I'd think a lot of thin sites ARE MFA's. They aren't the same as the sites that have NO content (bestblahblah.com), but neither do they have much value for most visitors.
Take a site that has pictures of a sporting event. It purports to provide reviews of those kinds of sporting events. It has a line of pictures (4), followed by a leaderboard, another line, another leaderboard, another line, another leaderboard.
The "review" is placed at the bottom of each page and is clearly bogus and there for the keywords (this is actually a real example, and the webmaster has publicly explained and congratulated himself on his "technique" to essentially trick search engines and adsense targeting.
It sort of goes like this as a content example:
"It was a clear day at the blahbla stadium and people gathered to watch bla bla and bla bla, do blah bla. The competition between bla bla and bla bla was intense, as they blah blahed. At the end of the day blah blah was victorious and the crowd at blahbla was pleased."
..replace blah blah with key words. The site reviews never change, content is never updated but who cares since it's worthless anyway.
The web owner would never think that his site was an MFA (although he's been told by a lot of people). In fact he's said he thinks it's great, so either he has no standards at all, or is pretty misguided in the rationalizations (he got QS'ed severely for adwords).Guess he'd call it thin.
As for EVV's questions. I don't know. A lot of these thin sites or MFA sites are relying on CPC ads to drive traffic to it, but I don't know if that's because they are being properly penalized in search results, OR they simply don't have the patience to build better content, and wait for the benefits.
It may be that these thin sites are worse than the plain MFA's, because they rely much more on deception.
I think that's a valid distinction because you can have very valid but "thin" pages with Adsense on them and not have any trouble at all. Of course that might mean not having more than a single Adsense block, or even just a Adlinks link unit on the page, probably not more than one of each in most cases.
Well going by the decription 1script provided I wouldn't call that a "thin Adsense" (not much real content) page as much as an "excessive Adsense" (too many adssense blocks) situation.
The subhead in this thread's title reads, "Can a high ad-to-content ratio hurt search rankings and traffic?" That's what publishers who use multiple ad units on pages with limited content might want to think about--whether or not they choose to use the term "thin AdSense site."
I thought that AdSense was separate from search. Has something changed or where they always working together. Or at least sharing info?
Seems to me, that a site (or page) can be 'thin' but still be able to give the user a good and worthy experience. Okay I might be naïve...
You need visitors. You need ways of monetizing those visits. Clearly there's a relationship between your ability to make money, your ability to have visits, etc.
When you start thinking in terms of systems and how everything inter-relates, life truly gets a lot easier.
Thin sites don't generate incoming links, they don't keep visitors coming back, they don't build site credibility, they aren't sticky, they don't build your personal reputation, and on and on.
The good thing is that there are so many thin sites, that it does make it easier to stand out in the crowd. I think you'll find that many of the most long term successful site owners with adsense do a lot of things well, and have fat sites, that are much more useful than the other sites in their topic area.
PS. the adsense bot and the google search engine bot actually DO share information and cache.
Thin sites are pages that simply "front" for another site; the most obvious is an affiliate site that adds little or no original content beyond what it receives in feeds from the affiliate.
It doesn't have to be plastered with ads or affiliate links. Just one link to an affiliate is enough to qualify for the THIN penalty from Google, if that link is the only outside link and the page content material is borrowed from the affiliate. (think AM*ZON). The site might be either good or bad from a user standpoint, it's not necessarily as junky as this thread implies.
I learned this from experience.
I have one page that would probably be considered a "thin page" hanging off my website. It was a page I made last year because I was selling my old car; it contains a description of the car plus maybe a dozen or 15 pictures I took the inside and outside. I sold the car in one day on craigslist, but for some reason, people started coming by the tens and then the hundreds per day to look at these pictures. (Believe me, it's nothing special - just a ten year old sedan in pretty good condition) I took a look, and that silly little page was somehow ranking like #3 for the year, make and model of the car in all three major search engines, not to mention Google images. The page is clearly marked that the car has been sold, but I get so much traffic on it that I tossed up a leaderboard and a search box, and darned if it doesn't generate some income. But it STILL (inexplicably) ranks very high - the only thing I can think of is that I've had my domain (and been using it) since 1994.
There might be something to the original premise, but I think there must also be some other factors, like the elusive "trust" or even the age of the domain that come into play.
That's probably true of most things. Google's ranking algorithms are complex, after all. I'm not suggesting that Google would blow a site out of the water simply because some of its pages had a low content-to-AdSense ratio. However, if a site's overall content-to-AdSense ratio is low and it has few (if any) other redeeming factors, who knows?
If you look at some of the sites in the adsense case studies, they have 2 adsense blocks on the left side of the article, and adsense below the article. The content is only about 500 words....so how 'thin' is 'thin'? hehe
The other point is, what's a low content site doing with a high search ranking anyway? Why would a search engine prioritise a low content site over one with good content? And do they? In my niche I'd say that the search engine rankings are fair, and the content quality of each site is represented in the rankings. OK, it's grossly unfair that I'm only at number 2 of course, but apart from that......
But I'd echo the thoughts of others in that a "Thin site" is most likely to be an MFA. That being the case it seems quite fair to me that showing a high ratio of ads to content deserves a penalty in the majority of cases.
