Hi all, so.. a month ago my earning dropped with about 75% and I suspect something's wrong on my site... I have this page on my site.. let's call it X.php, where appear search results made through the adsense for search form.. in the time my earnings were normal x.php had almost the same number of times accessed in AwStats as in the adsense account at queries.. now, in AwStats I see the page was accessed N times and in adsense account shows me N/10 queries (and even those might be from another site where I have adsense for search installed) my first thought was that somebody/something replaces somehow my pub-id so I checked all my tpl files and everything is ok.. x.php is not linked from nowhere so search engines don't really know about it, and even if they would.. it has no content unless somebody uses the adsense for search form anyone has any idea what else could it be? should I write Google and tell them to do something and if on my site is not present my pub-id not to display ads..? wrote them a couple of times so far and told them to verify my account since my earnings dropped like crap.. and they said everytime that everything is ok.
And... you haven't changed the "search" position, or placed any additional ads or anything in the site?
yes, there are adunits in the x.php, should I remove them all and let only the search results? yes, the CTR (for adsense for content) dropped from 7% to 1.5% at the time the earnings dropped I haven't done nothing, it was just over night.. one site was making $25/day like yesterday and today dropped to 2-3/day
Sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes... I originally thought that you should filter some competition (poorly paying sites), but since the problem is getting less page downloads that cannot be it. It also can't be that "removing ads on the search" page would help getting more pageloads (as you told that that was the first problem, right?). It could help CTR but it still doesn't explain why you get less search results. Could it simply be temporal drop... which get backs to normal after a week? Have you got these type of spikes/drops earlier?