Yahoo! and Google AdSense

Has Yahoo! ever "banned" a site due to AdSense?

[CharlesZ]

A colleague of mine insists that Yahoo! "banned" one of our operating groups from Yahoo!'s organic SERs specifically because this operating group had just added Google AdSense contextual ads on its site. The comment from her Yahoo! rep. -- "We won't do anything in our business practices that promotes Google in any way."

When he recounted this story to me, I must have looked at him like he had three heads. My opinion is that this scenario could never (and has never) happened and that he must be mistaken. His response: "Oh no, I saw it happen with my own eyes last November. We are still being penalized by Yahoo! as a result of our flirtation with AdSense."

Can I tell this guy he's nuts? ...or am I just being naive?

Thanks -- if anyone else knows of real-world examples in support of either side of this argument, I'd sure appreciate your mentioning them in your reply.

[martinibuster]

I just took random snippets from your post (Can I tell this guy he's nuts? ...) and entered them as queries on Yahoo search. Most of the number one results featured websites with adsense on them.

I then did a search on some competitive consumer information phrases and saw adsense on those, too.

[BillyS]

I rank relatively well in Yahoo and I have always run adsense.

[incrediBILL]

I too have a high ranking site in Yahoo with Adsense.

Not only is he nuts, I'd guess something in the cashew family.

[mahoogle]

I am wondering the same thing. I recently added adsense to about half of my pages...about four weeks ago. Several pages in my site (that don't even have ads) have dropped significantly in rank.

However, in some not so competitive spaces my pages with adsense are doing well.

I'm not sure what to make of it.

[soapystar]

it would be a little simplistic if it really was a case of adding adsense and getting penalized...i would imagine the scenario being adding adsense and it being weighed against other factors...it may not even be as specific as adsense..it could be the way yahoo sees the adsense content....

[markus007]

You can bet yahoo has filters in place when it sees a site with adsense... If they didn't scrapper sites would be all over yahoo

[diddlydazz]

top slot for comp (commercial) term (27,100,000) with adsense, another site has top slot for less comp term (11,700,000) with adsense.

Yahoo! would be very stupid indeed to place any adsense filter in their algo.

in fact Yahoo! seems to like the pages more than Google at the moment ;o)

[incrediBILL]

As a matter of fact, if I were Yahoo I'd change the algo to promote the best of all those AdSense sites to boost their Yahoo traffic and then encourage them heavily to switch to YPN when it rolls out wide.

[sdsugrad]

I had been at the number one spot on Yahoo for my main keyword now for over 4 years. One week after I added adsense to my site, my site dropped to about 50th. The sites that replaced me are all spammy and some are even listed twice in the top ten. Sure it may be just a coindidence, but the timing of it all just strikes me as weird. Now two months into adsense, and my traffic from yahoo has slowed to a crawl. Personal websites that are linking to me are now sending more traffic to my site than Yahoo. Will just have to see what happens, but it appears I'm not the only one who has seen this happen.

[incrediBILL]

In my top keyword one of my lesser competitors scored a #1 on Yahoo and I score #3, both of our sites are filthy with AdSense

[robotsdobetter]

I find this hard to believe, I have four web sites with Google AdSense that rank number one for their keywords, in fact one of them went to the number one spot after we added Google AdSense to the site.

[jdhuk]

Up until recently my site was starting to bring some steady traffic from Y and of course i was pleased. I decided to add Google Adsense to the home page and a handful of other pages that were ranking well also. Within this 1 week period nothing was changed on the home page and nothing major on the other pages apart from adding the code.

Within 1 week every page excluding the root has disappeared completely. Its impossible to say if Adsense was the reason and further more, at least half of my competitors have Adsense and rank well in Y which confuses the issue further.

I haven't removed the code yet as i think its best to at least give it a month to see what happens.

[BillyS]

In this most recent update, I moved up nicely for a large number of keyphrases I target. Many in the top 5 results. I run adsense on all the pages. If there is a penalty, then it does not hurt me (at least from what I can tell.)