Implemented google adsense staff tip and getting punished for it?

Long time reader here, always been using these forums as a good reference point for anything related to my website(s). Thanks for all the great info

I have adsense running on my website which is pretty popular if I may say so for a long time already (since 2007) but my adsense income never really impressed me when I compared it to how popular my site is (7 - 8 mln pageviews each month with 200k + unique visitors).
But a few weeks ago the adsense staff contacted me (on my adsense account email) and told me my ads could perform a lot better if I set up my robots.txt correcty. It seems I was blocking the adsense crawler on my site so no real relevant ads could be displayed.
I immediatly changed that and at first nothing changed but than a few days later I started to notice different kind of ads as well as the number of clicks on the ads were increasing.

Right now the number of clicks and impressions actually make sense and I am earning a lot more money now.....................until google comes in.

Every hour adsense is correcting my income, not with a few euros, but by a lot. And with a lot I mean..........really a lot.
Like this morning (after 09:00 CET) I logged in to check earnings and was all like.......wowowy, than 1 hour later google has taken off 50%.

I checked my analitics, I checked my server and nothing fishy is going on and nope, I do not click my own ads neither, dont ask my friends, dont ask my visitors, nothing of that. This all started to happen after I fixed my robots.txt.

So, adsense is in fact punishing me for performing an optimization of my website which they themselves suggested.

I have been invited to an adsense meeting in my area and I surely am going to have a chat with the adsense staff member during the 1 on 1 chat about this and I hope he can shine a light on this for me as I am really stumped and have no idea what to do.

I am posting this cause I wanted to know wether others have experienced the same? Anyone else had lot more income after fixing the robots.txt? And if so how did it go? Is this normal what is happening here?

 

google does adjust the revenue and thats why the revenue they show on the stat page is called estimated revenue. not sure why there will be a 50% adjustment unless there are lot of invalid clicks. if yuo get a change to go 1 on 1 with this one with google, i;m sure you will get an explanation. keep us posted

 

Never look at your today's earnings, that way you'll be fine.
At the end of the month there is also a correction, always at our expense. This month the difference for me is only $15, that's ok

 

As the others said, there is always a correction at the end of the month and sometimes more frequently. Are you seeing more than the normal adjustments since you made this modification?

One suggestion would be to "undo" the modification and see if things go back to the way they were before, unless you are still seeing more income in the end.

 

My earnings are corrected by every 15 minutes it looks like. This is going on since I applied this robots.txt change, being february 19 I think. This means that since february 19 adsense has found tens of thoussands of clicks invalid for my account, if that really was the case they would have banned me within a few hours.

One day (after I applied the robots.txt change) I checked my earnings and they were 250 euros (at 23:00), I refreshed the page 15 minutes later and all was gone, only 15 euros left.
When I saw that I decided to simply stay logged in a check all the time.........they seem to be removing all my earned money all the time.

Removing the adsense crawler to allow having acces to my site makes not much sense, thats the only change I applied. I dont see the use of blocking the crawler as thats what adsense told me was stopping me from getting good ads.

They take away roughly 200 - 300 euro during the day (every day nowadays) and last month final earnings they took away 100 euro on top of all earlier corrections as well. Before it was never more than 15 - 20 euro at the end of the month.

Again, if they are taking away all my earnings it means they seem to think all clicks are invalid, but if thats the case why dont they ban me? I already know the answer........cause they are not invalid clicks but simply more usefull ads are being showed and people started to click them.

Not getting banned, even getting invited to an exclusive meeting but not getting my hard earned money ........... I really can not wait to hear from them how they will defend those actions.

 

I said it and will repeat it, never talk about your today's earnings. Those are simply estimates. Many people are opening threads to talk about their today's earnings, this is a total waste of time. If you want you can talk about your yesterday's earnings, since those are not subject to change. Once it's yesterday's earnings they will not change. Only at the end of the month there is another correction (means always less than monthly estimates, or equal, but never more)

I wouldn't even waste anymore second thinking about your today's earnings and what happens everytime you refresh the page. but yes you can talk about it when you're at the exclusive meeting, but then why not make a screen capture in video (or screenshots with timestamp), so you can show to the person you'll be talking to. Because it's true that the fluctuation is exceptionally large as you reported in the daily earnings, but once again it's better not to waste anytime talking about today's earnings before they become yesterday's.

 

I agree with many here, at the end of the month google's adjusted amount wll most likely be lower than your estimated amount. When I do check 2-3 times a day (out of curiosity sake), it sometimes get adjusted as well.

 

I fully understand that and I am well aware of that. Thats not the point of my topic.


But ok, lets talk about yesterdays earnings:
Adsense is not taking away the clicks, they are taking away the money I earn with the clicks.........meaning the next day I have say 1000 clicks but hardly anything earned (so CPC must be like 0.00001)
Before all this I had like 25% of these clicks and earned 50 - 100% more.........

Example:
1000 clicks x 15 days == 15000 illegal clicks according to those earnings.............why am I still with adsense?


Understand me right.........I do not want to get banned but I can not help my users clicking the ads served by adsense which they like. Sure, I can ban all million+ visitors in a year for clicking my ads or remove all adsense code from my pages to prevent this............but thats logic which makes no sense.
In the meantime I am already reading about other ad companies preparing myself for a ban caused by an adsense tip. Still a few days to go till the meeting so I hope I am still with them during that visit

 

What is the famous adsense tip you mention in robots.txt ? Is it the automated email we all receive prompting us to add two lines to robots.txt so that their bot will be able to access any page?
In that case, try removing those two lines and probably there will be no difference.
Maybe it's just a coincidence and you are subject to a click bombing, which happens to have started at about the same time you apply the two lines recommended in the automated email?

Or if it's not that tip, then maybe you could expand on that point, just to spice up the conversation, because about your specific problem, I guess you'll have to wait until the meeting in person, since I don't think you'll get anything good out of this thread, regarding your problem.

 

Adsense is not at all stable.

 

Uhm, I already wrote that a few times. My robots.txt was blocking the adsense crawler by accident. I think during a website upgrade we forgot to update our robots.txt file with the correct file. And yes, this is what the adsense team contacted me about.

There is no increase in avarage time on site (checked that to see maybe if a person trying to get me banned is simply connected all day clicking ads) but the avarage does not indicate that.
I checked my raw acces logs and there is no exceptional behaviour from a specific IP.
I check my connections all day and I do not see a certain IP in that list all the time.

One thing I noticed though in my raw acces log is that the adsense crawler is browsing my entire site all day long visiting page after page (we have like 15000 pages i think).

My clicks were always the same, at a certain avarage. Since they spiked up they are also around the same (but higher) avarage.
So unless some moron is really bored all day and likes counting to xxxx thoussand for 15 days in a row already to the exact same number I really do not think these are illegal clicks.

But, yeah, I know there is nothing I can do right now. I hope during the meeting I will be able to get some answers from the adsense team.

 

Just posting the follow up here.

Spoke with the adsense team during the meeting and they assured me I should not be worried to get banned over the click difference. She ensured me as a good publisher they would first contact me and let me know such was happening and than try to prevent it.

Why the CPC is lower than ever and whats going on exactly she could not say...........or "would not"


Anyway, I got some good tips from them which I implemented, maybe that way I can increase the CPC while maintaining this better CTR. If I manage to bring it up back to my old level I will not have to worry about needing a job in the future. With between 7 - 8mln pageviews a month (200k UV) that should not be wishfull thinking.

 

I hope it turns out good for you, and that you can increase your CPC or that it suddenly goes up again, who knows it's maybe temporary, with so many things to manage, the time is different for adsense, where we wait for a 24hours reply or update, it can takes days or weeks for them.