WARNING: Google may be stripping out your ads & there's only one solution...

I don't want to be an alarmist, but this needs to be known -- Google has increasingly made changes geared to improving user experience that could not only affect your website's presentation and functionality, but also the ability to monetize mobile traffic from certain countries (presumably the entire world).

You can read the longer and detailed post here (including a wordpress plugin solution) or read my long-ish summary below.

Basically Google has been pushing for better and faster user experiences when delivering content to mobile users. As part of this, they've requested webmasters to create a mobile website to ensure mobile search users are presented with a version they can use (and this has become a criteria in ranking sites).

But even earlier than that algorithm change, which happened in April 2015, Google had offered a tool that would automatically make websites mobile friendly by attempting to strip out images and parsing content across multiple pages. If you used Gmail's mobile website (instead of the app) and clicked a link in an email, you most likely saw this in action - it would take a page and strip it of its content.

With the big push to mobile and Google signaling that they get more mobile searches than desktop, they've attempted to take more control over the experience of users by detecting the user's connection speed and if they deem it to be slow, they will basically attempt to proxy web pages they deem to be slow-loading, and strip it of content (including javascript, css, images) and display it to the user.

You can see an example of what this could look like - here's the New York Times' mobile site through Google's proxy, compare it against the NYT's actual mobile site. Ads are stripped out, as is the design and functionality.

Right now Google is testing this in markets with slower connections, which are mostly in Asia - but they want to release this to the entire world, whenever slow connections occur. They define what a slow connection is and they display a message saying the site was slow, so they proxied it. They currently allow Adsense ads to be displayed, and claim they are working on supporting other ad networks (but there's no guarantee of which ones will be supported and which won't).

What's the solution?
I applaud the effort and what they're trying to achieve is a faster experience, but the approach is flawed since it bypasses the webmaster and (in some form) unlawfully copies their content. To stop Google from doing this, you need to send a cache control HTTP header on all pages you want to block Google from doing this. You can download a Wordpress plugin created for this, which will send the header and prevent Google from pulling your content. Google might display a message in search results saying the site may load slower, but the alternative is letting Google control the presentation and display of your content - which isn't really an option to me.

 

I guess my post was a bit too long - but tl/dr version of this is Google has a new feature that will strip out ads and other content it deems unnecessary for mobile users. Adding a special header tag will prevent Google from doing this, including preventing it from stripping out your non-Adsense ads (e.g., Bidvertiser, Clicksor, etc.).