I have had it with adsense. My visitors are increasing, but earnings are dropping. Probably I go back to affiliate marketing. But if I put a limited amount of affiliate links on my site (2-3 per page), will I loose traffic? I wouldn't be surprised if I would. Once I added an affiliate shop at my content site, and within a few days my traffic dropped like a rock. After removing the shop, my traffic came back. Once I had a discussion with someone who had the same. So my questions is not about if adsense is good or not, but will my traffic drop if I abandon adsense? The content will not change.
what makes you think, the removin adsense ads can make your traffic low. do you have a theory for that?
Pjotter, I read a comment once on increasing adsense earnings which involved removing publisher ID code for a week or so and then replacing it. You can see the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=323433 I never tried it myself so can't tell you if that really works... About losing traffic if you take adsense off altogether, I don't see how that would affect traffic at all, but what might have a negative impact is if you then go to obvious with the affiliate shop. If your site is heavy on content with affiliate links added then you should be alright. Perhaps it was that particular affiliate you used before that had the problem. If you want to mention the name here, others can tell you if they have experienced serp problems when using that affy.
no way, your traffic doesn;t know you have adsense until they come to the site. if you remove adsense code or make any major changes in the site content, your SERP might bounce back and forth for few days but that wil not impact your overall traffic.
Actually, remove AdSense makes your Google indexing less effective. Matt Cutts has already stated that along with Mediapartners-Google (Googles AdSense User Agent) crawling your page to find relevant ads to display it also helps GoogleBot (Google's Crawler) index and find new pages. The difference isn't known to me or anyone I would trust the information from, but it does have some effect. Line from section 16 of Google Adsense Terms of Services It would be silly if Google didn't use this crawler to also crawl and index web pages, considering vast size of the web it's an effective way to kill two birds with one stone, remember Mediapartners-Google can be controled just like GoogleBot in the robots.txt
maybe you need to use section targeting to have better targeted ads. Not relevant ads maybe the reason you're visitors are not clicking them also you might want to take a look at the ads that adsense is showing to see if some need to be filtered.