Google Adwords Landing Page policy

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

For years I expected fluctuations with my Adsense income, and I wasn’t let down. I’m used to the idea of the money going up and down “in a range”, but I have to say, July is turning out to be a scary bad month for me. So bad, in fact, that the whole program is about to turn completely useless to me.

I’m not a huge Adsense publisher, but I’m still in the $70-90K annual range, so I feel qualified to complain about the latest changes that have occured for me.

On 6/27/2006, Google made some sort of technical error that causes one of my best websites to go out of their index. A website that usually has 20,000 unique monthly visitors on high paying keywords has been reduced to rubble. The average daily revenue went from $56 to $1.12. Yes, you read those numbers correctly. Without recover, that’s a quick $18K less this year than expected.

Furthermore, the rest of my traffic appears to be hit from Smart Pricing, or the changes to the “Quality Landing Pages” guidelines have done me in. In any event, the entire Adsense program is now completely unviable for me.

For people out there who are building websites with the sole thought of earning Adsense money, I urge you to re-consider. You cannot afford to allow Google search traffic revenue to account for more than 40% of your total revenues, or you’re a dead man when they flip the switch.

Based on last year’s figure I would have predicted a $200K+ year this year. That’s until the year long “Big Daddy” of all lousy updates kicked in. Add in seasonality, changes to Adwords, and continous accusations of click-fraud, and it’s starting to seem like the party’s over.

What have your experiences been with Google in July?

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.