Record AdSense earnings occuring after being banned from Google?

UK blog reports record adsense earnings despite the ban.

[JS_Harris]

I just read an extremely interesting article on a fairly popular UK blog that was recently banned from the Google index in the UK, apparently for selling links.

You'd think earnings would drop like a stone now that none of her pages are showing up for any search but the article, written by the blogs owner, claims she was shocked to find her adsense income had risen by 2000% since being removed from the serps.

She goes on to say that the income is coming from an adsense for search box. With no pages being returned in the google index, save for her main page which is her name, there are between 10 and 12 google ads on the results page with only 1 actual site result and so people are clicking on the ads and making her money.

Her site, being a blog, has a ton of content on the index page and receives most of her traffic from other sources. I have to say that the story sounds plausible but if its true I don't know what to make of it.

Has anyone else read the article? If so, whats your take on it besides the fact she shouldn't have posted about it for fear of losing adsense too?

[koan]

It seems to be the winning formula of MFA sites: leave no other links or content on the page outside of ads and users will click on them as a way to navigate out of the site, or thinking it is actually content.

I think her EPC will be declining very soon as she gets smart priced.

[AussieWebmaster]

got a link to the blog anyone?

[mikomido]

"save for her main page"

Did you mean "except for her main page"?

[gibbergibber]

-- "save for her main page" Did you mean "except for her main page"? --

"save for" means the same thing as "except for".

[vincevincevince]

Interesting. So, having Adsense for Search limited to our domain is probably shooting us in the back. Perhaps we should spell our domain name incorrectly so that there are deliberately no results apart from ads...

[Lexur]

Some points:

- it's easy to increase your income when you are doing a few dollars; it's easy to move from 2$ to 40$ a day; it's harder to go from 160$ to 3200$ a day

- if the CPM of his search page is above (i.e.) 70$, the whole site will be probably smartpriced

[yanni1974]

Lexur, my site is making around $4 a day. I would appreciate it if you tell me how can I move this into the $40 a day region. Could you point how I can do that?

[Lexur]

This is a classic here: Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]

[meditation]

Thaks for the link to this instructive article!

[WiseWebDude]

If Google banned every site for selling links, they are going to have a LOT of really pissed of webmaster pounding on the Googleplex's plexiglass, LOL. That would be flat out wrong for Google to do. I doubt that was the reason why they were de-indexed.

[loudspeaker]

I had a theory on this before: basically, I noticed that on days when Google sends me less organic traffic, my eCPM is considerably higher.

There are two explanations:

a) Google users are somehow worse as an audience (by the way, I've heard this opinion many times - for example, UI guru Jakob Nielsen recently called Google users "no-value visitors".. but let's not start this argument now).

b) Google automatically adjusts the % split for sharing for traffic coming from its own search engine. The rationale could be "we're sending you this traffic, so you don't deserve to get paid much". In my opinion, this is the most likely scenario.

[europeforvisitors]

Google automatically adjusts the % split for sharing for traffic coming from its own search engine. The rationale could be "we're sending you this traffic, so you don't deserve to get paid much". In my opinion, this is the most likely scenario.

I think it's more likely that Google would adjust the percentage based on whether a visitor was being "flipped" immediately or lingering on the site.