Good morning all. Recently, after i was banned from adsense, i started using bidtraffic. I noticed that they pay very high for gambling and drug keywords, so i was using those keywords on my site, but few weeks later, i noticed a 29 percent drop in my visits from search engines on my site www.jobsfornaija.com where the ads are placed. does google penalise for gambling and drug links? thanks
I don't think there is any conclusive evidence that they penalize, but I'm fairly certain that they do. I don't know how bidtraffic forms the links in their ads but if they are standard html links then it is pretty much a guarantee that it is hurting you. There's lots of info around on "linking to a bad neighborhood" and I would think that those types of sites would be considered borderline 'bad' at least. If there is no direct penalty and clear-cut bad neighborhood issue, I would think that those ads would be at least a 'poor quality website' signal. A few weeks back, poor-quality sites got hit hard. So, that might very well be the reason in your case.
They don't necessarily "penalize" for just those types of ads... But, if you have too many ads being displayed on any given website or page, then you could definitely lose some of your rankings in Google, which results in less traffic. Another thing that could be happening to the loss of your traffic is displaying irrelevant ads on your site as well. You site is about "Jobs in Nigeria" not about "Gambling"... I'm pretty confident that the above 2 issues I have mentioned are the problems you are facing with the 29% loss in traffic. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you have about 5 different ad boxes being displayed on your site... If I were you, I would limit it to about 3, no more than that. Why were you banned from Google adsense?