Well after a year of using the exact same template and generating 6 figures in income Google finally banned me. Note that I said EXACT same template. I got a warning about a week ago and immediately inserted a line between the site images and the ads. It dropped my CPM by about 2% but they banned me anyway. They've paid me a lot of money, my earnings this month were around $200-$300 a day (which would be 10x that in the glory days). So I won't say anything bad about them. I'm obviously disappointed, all of my sites were arguably a value add. People voted by hitting topics and pushing them to the top of the listings and were able to blog on any of those topics. We had hundreds of conversations going on any given day. A site that started with 200 keyphrases would quickly rise to a thousand phrases all of which were keyed by users. The page created included top image results, search results, blog feeds, and news for the topic. People then comment on any of those aspects. So here's another warning. They are cracking down.
when they gaved you the warning you got into their attention, a line between images and ads don't makes any difference
OMT - Now that I'm forced into the dark side of publishing I'm willing to entertain offers to license my software. PM me. Like I said 6 distinct sites in 1.5 hours. Each consisting of 200^200 (if you make a reasonable offer I will explain the ^) pages+.
you're right. The problem is I'd have to remove the images altogether to get them far enough away from the large rectangle and have them all above the fold. That would make my site UGLY. It really boils down to a judgement call on their part as to the value of my site. I guess a bunch of kids talking about teeney bopper stars doesn't qualify as good content.
IMHO, I would tell them what you are posting here, you made an attempt to comply, and need further help. A very polite letter, stating that you didn't blow off their warning, just that the steps you had taken seemed not enough. Good luck, tom
Thanks for caring. I have YPN. YPN was producing $20 CPMs until about April when it dropped often to below $1. My system lets me rotate YPN and Google at whatever percentage I like. I put SearchFeed in instead which frees me up to implement with much less constraint. Ie... "the darkside"... Reminds me of a song: "The darkside is calling now nothing is real..." In case anyone is wondering my account balance was $4500 for this month. If they do what I expect I'll get last month's earnings but the $4500 will magically vanish into thin air. When YPN was paying well I would split them 50/50, but not lately. :-\
Maybe it is. It's not contextual so it does not violate their TOS. I have a ton of traffic and I allow folks to buy links on the "sponsors" sections. Pretty typical practice. That's been there for a year. Lots of folks point at affiliate ads and such. BTW - It doesn't say "Buy Hits Cheap" on any of my sites. LOL. It would be pretty hypocritical of them to have a problem with that wouldn't it?
Thanks for asking. I'm still paranoid about it. Maybe i'll put up a screenshot if there's interest. I've already transferred all the sites out of google so I'd have to tweak the screenshot to show what google looked like anyway. My system rocks. I was able to change thousands of pages to any of my other providers in just a few clicks. However, it does use caching so it takes a few days for the change to fully propagate. When you get 50,000+ impressions a day and have just one server you have to optimize things.
Well, I had one site left without a border added and I just added it. they said this was acceptible..
Problems with Google and images-next-to-ads have been popping up for months now, with example after example, and you people still insist on doing it. If you want to take the risk, take the consequences.
it's true jackburton. I had actually read that a line between them would work. Some guys that have been around for a really long time still do it. It's one of those grey areas. I'll try to post a screen shot soon.
Okay... here's the screenshot of my template. Ironically the page shows how completely stupid Google is. My domain has the word express in it, but I use google_ad_section tags to show it what exactly the specific page is about. So what does the all-knowing googlebot do? Puts "expresso" ads. ROFL! Nice algorithm. www.veracitek.com/img/sample.jpg
man you using PORN PICS if this is the website you are telling.. it is against the TOS and it is acceptable to you get banned..
is this another joke? that looks like porn or something close to it. no wonder you got banned, i would ban you too if i were them