How Penguin Affected Me

According to Google, the algorithm went into affect on April 24th. Well, I’ve got to say that I noticed a change in my earnings on the last day of March and my earnings have been steadily declining since then.

My decline didn’t have much to do with the Penguin, my issues had to do with tons and tons of error messages generated by the Google AdSense code. For some reason, my sites suddenly started to generate errors and the odd thing about it was I hadn’t touched those sites in months.

Culprit of the Error Messages

The first wave of messages occurred because the code suddenly wanted to find a file located in a folder called doubleclick in my blogs’ root directory. In an attempt to correct the problem, I created a folder called doubleclick and searched Google to download the missing file the code needed.

Whew! All was good for about 24 to 48 hours until the same error messages started appearing again. The error messages weren’t so bad but they had an affect on my income. You see, the 404 “File not Found” errors were generated after someone clicked on an AdSense ad and the subsequent page wouldn’t load.

The subsequent page was the advertiser’s page, but somehow the AdSense code looked for the page on my sites. Of course they wouldn’t find the pages on my site because I don’t have the advertiser’s pages physically located on my blogs.

After further investigation, it seems these errors were generated by image ads. So, to put an end to the nonsense, I modified my code so AdSense would only display text ads. Problem solved (or work around implemented).

Back to the Penguin

It took me a few weeks to figure out my error problem, so by then Penguin waddled into my life. After doing a little reading up on Penguin I made one change to my websites. I moved the 300 x 250 ad from within the top of my posts to the right sidebar.

Somewhere on the Google AdSense Webmaster blog, there was information about the ratio of ads to text above the fold. By moving the ad to the sidebar, more of my content appeared above the fold and the ad still had a prominent place.

When penguin was first implemented I noticed a momentary drop in traffic and search engine ranking, but things seem to be balancing out and the traffic and page rank have normalized (whatever normal is).

Penguin and My Online Strategy

My online strategy is still the same now as it was when I first started 5 years ago. Write quality content. I’m sure social networking and good backlinks help, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a social networker and I don’t actively seek backlinks.

Maybe my time as an active online writer is drawing to an end. I’ve found what makes me happy as an online writer and my “style” may be obsolete. I like to write about certain subjects and I like to write in a fashion to help people. That’s it.

I don’t like to worry about hats (whether black or white), popularity, gaming the system, backlinking strategies and the like. I’m quite selfish in that I want to write about what excites me and hopefully it will help someone else. Sometimes its lucrative and sometimes not.

So, when Google rolls out the Otter, the Hyena, the Cheetah or the Petunia, my writing style and strategy will remain the same. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

In reviewing my numbers I see that my overall traffic is down. I did a quick analysis of my top 6 sites and have found an average decrease in page views of 15% and a 17% decrease in visitors.

The lower traffic could be a result of the Panda algorithm change or it could be the result of old content. I haven’t spent much time posting new content on my sites this month. As a matter of fact, I’ve added 19 new pieces of content to my sites. 15 of the new pieces of content were posts here on NJFM, and I’ve shared in the past that NJFM is not my road to riches (far from it).

I’ve been spending my time working on projects that will help to shield me and my income from Panda fluctuations and other search engine modifications.

Effects of Less Traffic

Now that I’ve analyzed the lack of traffic and the cause thereof, it’s time for me to look at the income from my top 6 sites to see if the income trended accordingly.

Much to my surprise, the income didn’t follow the traffic. The income from my top 6 online properties is up 14% over last month’s. To what do I attribute this? Well, I believe a large portion can be attributed to adding the authorized sites to my AdSense account.

The rest I’ve got to attribute to changing some of the AdSense ad blocks. The first modification (authorized sites) took a total of 5 minutes or less to implement. The ad block changes took a little longer because I had to change each site. In total, it took a couple of hours to implement.

Sharpening the Sword

I’m reading several books by Dr. Steven R. Covey. If you have time, I strongly suggest you pick up his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve got to warn you, this book is not mental candy. It will cause you to think, reflect and change.

In his books he talks about sharpening the sword, which means retooling, sharpening your skills, learning new tools and taking care of the items/tools used on your journey to success.

Although it is my goal to reduce my reliance on Google and Google AdSense, it is a tool in my online writing arsenal. While I’m creating new venues and working on new projects, it is to my advantage to sharpen my AdSense tool to make it work better for me. I truly believe that if it were not for the sharpening of the sword, November would have been much worse. Instead, it’s my best month for online residual earnings.

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I had always shied away from large AdSense blocks because I never wanted them to take up too much of the screen real estate. However, the change in real estate from 300×250 to 336×280 is barely noticeable.

Results of Changing Ad Size

Since I had made other AdSense changes right around the same time, I had to pay attention to the click through rate (CTR) instead of the overall change in income.

Comparing this month’s CTR prior to the change and the CTR after the change, my CTR average increased by a little over 3%. That may not sound like much, but a 3% increase over time ads up.

My hubby refers to golf as a game of inches. Earning money online is very similar. Sometimes (very rarely) you hit a hole in one, but most time it’s tweaking and improving one stroke at a time.

I’m off to tweak the rest of my blogs.

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for NJFM’s Motivation for Writers Newsletter. A dose of motivation will be sent to your inbox every Monday.

If you’re an AdSense publisher, I’m sure you’re familiar with the warning atop of your AdSense account. The warning tells you that your ads are displaying on unauthorized sites. The warning looks like this:

After seeing this warning for years (It seemed like years), I decided to look into it a little further. After all, AdSense had emailed me a few earning increasing tips in the past, I might as well see what this warning is about.

Horse before the Cart

I’m going to back up just a bit for those AdSense publishers who are not aware of the authorized site feature.

To prevent unscrupulous scrapers, spammers or other villainous fiends (sorry, was watching an old cartoon this weekend) from stealing your AdSense code, placing on their sites and clicking the heck out of the links to get your account suspended, AdSense implemented the Authorized Account feature. You can find the feature by clicking on Account Settings  link located on the upper left-hand section of the Home page.

Once on the Account Settings page, scroll down until you see Access and authorization. There is where you set the authorization preferences. I learned the hard way that it really works.

One of my sites consistently received clicks, but I never received earnings. It took me months to realize I had not included it as one of my authorized sites. I lost quite a bit of income for that little oversight.

Unauthorized Sites

If your account is anything like mine, after your list of authorized sites, you’ll see a few sites and IP addresses that are not authorized. The sites look like this:

www.google.com.sg
webcache.googleusercontent.com
translate.googleusercontent.com
www.bing.com
74.6.238.254
74.6.117.48
www.google.ca

These sites are search engine cached pages. I researched the two IP addresses listed and they belong to Inktomi Corpation (aka Yahoo). In other words, they are legitimate cached pages of your blog/website. These are not spammer sites.

I always ignored the warning until I decided to get to the bottom of it all. I found this on the AdSense Known Issue site:

Message for Unauthorized Sites Persists on Homepage
Details: When using the authorized sites feature, any sites that you haven’t authorized will trigger an alert message on your home page. We currently consider any framed or cached pages to be unauthorized, including when a user searches using Google Images and your site is displayed via frame. We encourage you to add framed and cached URLs of sites you trust to your authorized sites list. We’re investigating ways to improve this feature.

After reading that, I decided to add the sites to my authorized list (always check the IP information before adding an IP address to the authorized list).

Results of Adding the Unauthorized Sites

I did this research around midday on Thursday of last week. That means half of my Thursday’s earnings are based on the old authorization list and half on the new. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I waited a couple more days before performing an analysis.

Here’s the scoop. My AdSense earnings from Thursday to Sunday of this past week are 62% higher than they were for the same period of time the week before.

Milk, Spilling, Crying and Such

When I realized how much money I had consistently left on the table I thought about crying over spilt milk, but what good does that do? I’m happy that I made the changes and am encouraging you to do the same if you haven’t done so already.

I love it when small changes yield large results!

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for NJFM’s Motivation for Writers Newsletter. A dose of motivation will be sent to your inbox every Monday.

Anyway, between learning more about consolidating blogs, formatting ebooks for a professional look, formatting books for Kindle and PubIt, I’m also learning quite a bit about newsletters, email lists and Aweber features (not to mention that my brainstorming sessions are never ceasing).

On top of that, I recently came across an ad management tool. This tool, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business is an answer to a growing problem that I seem to be having. You see, increasingly I’m receiving requests to advertise on my blogs/websites. The requests are emails that go something like this:

I’ve recently come across your site and am impressed with the content (they never tell me which site). I have a client who is interested or I am interested in advertising on your site (sometimes it’s a link within the content or a link on the home page).

My client/I have a budget of $XX and would be interested in arranging an advertising partnership.

That’s not the exact text of the emails I’ve been receiving but you get the gist of it. The emails have been coming with increasing frequency, which is good (I guess). The problem is I don’t know how to or want to spend the time with managing ads. That’s why I use Google AdSense. Set it and forget it.

Enter DoubleClick for Publishers

In reading the Inside AdSense blog, there was a recent post entitled Ad Serving Explained. Not that I was interested on how ads were displayed, but the DoubleClick video caught my attention. Check it out for yourself.

The best part of the whole deal is that sign up is free. So, I immediately signed up and realized, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot to learn.” I have no problem with learning, but for some reason I’m in an obsessive learning phase in my freelance writing career. If I could boil everything down into liquid form to drink it or vaporize it to inhale it, I’d be ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately, drinking or inhaling isn’t an option so tacked onto the rest of the things I’m learning, I’ve got to learn how to utilize DoubleClick for Publishers to get the most bang for my buck.

Although this current learning phase seems a little overwhelming, I fully expect that it will pay off in the end. A year from now when I’ve mastered these tools, I’ll be glad that I took the time to grow.

Speaking of growth, what have you been learning lately?