Yahoo, MSN penalising adsense sites?
I run a couple of "white hat" adsense sites that (now) rank very in Google and earn in excess of $20 per day. Both of the sites started out well in MSN and then a few months later picked up well in Yahoo with Google lagging well behind as seems to be the usual pattern these days.
I worked on the sites, improved the Google position markedly and also loaded adsense into the mix. Oddly, as the Google rankings continued to improve, the Yahoo and MSN rankings dropped away rapidly - pretty much within a few weeks of adding adsense. I don't see this trend across a number of other sites I run (without adsense).
I'm doing quite nicely from the Google hits but it would be nice to recover the progress in MSN and Yahoo.
Perhaps I'm overly cynical, SEO paranoid or whatever but it does seem odd that these sites demised in MSN and Yahoo very rapidly as soon as I included adsense. Anyone else seen similar?
Dave J
Comment by gary — April 25, 2007 @ 8:28 am
How would Yahoo/MSN know that you are running Adsense? Can their spider "sense" that your site has Adsense…if so, why not _not_show_ adsense if the spider is determined to be anything other than Google-bot..
Comment by Oli Allen — April 25, 2007 @ 12:48 pm
They could just look for a line that they *know* to be Adsense related in your code when they index your site… Would be interesting to see the results of hiding it from Y!/MSN
Comment by James — April 25, 2007 @ 7:12 pm
Another cynical possibility: Google could be raising the ranking of sites with Adsense. It would be to their advantage.
This would be against nearly everything though.
Comment by gary — April 25, 2007 @ 9:46 pm
Some time back I came up with some code to remove the SID in oscommerce if the "visitor" was a spider. It would be quite easy to take that code and amend it a bit to show (or not show) adsense based on User Agent settings.