Does anybody have an informed opinion on whether running some adsense helps your website in the search engines. I say this because my site, which is very conservative education site, kept rising in the search engines (and page rank) until last spring when I was getting half a million visitors per month (and had a home page rank of 7). At that point, I was making enough money from my subscription business that I decided to take down the adsense ads since they seemed cheesy to me, might have been hurting my conversion rate, and they didn't make that much anyway. At that same point, my traffic started slipping, my page rank went down to 6, and my position on some key terms that I follow slipped lower. I've heard that Google likes some outgoing links and that they dislike "Black hole" sites (ie no outgoing links). Could the google adsense ads have been helping me avoid a black mark on this count? Does google just like sites with adsense? Or maybe, this is pure coincidence.
Thanks for posting this! On a much smaller scale I noticed a increase in page rank using adsense. But my scale/hits were nowhere near yours.
Dropping Adsense has nothing to do with your pagerank or your drop in rankings. SERP's and PR fluctuate on their own.
It would be highly immoral for Google to give sites a boost for using adsense. So no I don't think Google would do this. Also the search engines wouldn't notice the javascript links contained in Google AdSense. So that throws out the black hole theory. Did you replace the Google ads with something else? Perhaps you used an affiliate banner without using a nofollow?
I think it does. iam not sure, from your incident it looks like so. but in the same time its not moral to think that way.
I did not replace the ads with any links to outside groups. I did inside advertising promoting other features of my site and service. I do have my service split across two domains: time4learning.net and time4learning.com which is not the brightest thing I've ever done. It had to do with me trying to get a forum up fast but my main site is on windows.... I don't think it's immoral for google to prefer sites with adsense. I think it's heavy handed but within bounds of morality.
There cannot be any relation between AdSense and SE rankings... if there was... Google won't be in business... Thoroughly examine the things you did after removing AdSense... what kind of links associate with your site after that etc...