We have done this test before in Test #377 and we did indeed discover that the two sites we put AdSense on ranked lower than our control sites with no AdSense.
Unlike the previous test which involved two different sites that had Adsense on all of the pages, we narrow the test down to the page level to see if it would affect just a page that had AdSense on a site.
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I was joking with Dori on this one and said I'm to tell to everyone that I should put AdSense on their site. I'm going to skip to the bottom – the exciting part and they put AdSense on there and it tanked the page.
The page started out... It doesn't say when it started out. I'm going to assume that it started out in the middle but they put it on there and it tanked it. This is the second time that we've seen that where adding AdSense actually dropped the rankings.
I was theorizing in my head why in the heck Google would do that? Why would they punish you for having AdSense on there. Why would the algorithm do that?
Here's my theory, and this is probably something that will be verified and we have to run this test a few times and then just let it sit. I think that the processes taught so that they don't want AdSense sites back in the day it was AdSense only sniper sites is what we call them, that you created specifically for the purposes of AdSense.
You create a whole bunch of them, optimize the sites for specific keywords. There are AdSense on there. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.
The sniper sites worked like gangbusters but then the AdSense crew went out there and started canceling people's AdSense accounts. They weren't paying people anymore, etc. I think... And then this is just an educated guess.
I think what they did was there's a penalty here that says when you put AdSense on your site at first rather than this manually checking it we're going to tank you and then we're going to wait just like this cooking period to see how your site does, see if you get real clicks and all that other stuff and then I'm expecting after some period of time that that ranking is going to change and it's going to shoot it back up to at least where it was if not higher.
So, how do we verify that is to create some more tests like pages like this and just let them sit and then check every day and see if there's a period in there.
I'm thinking because 60 days seems like to be the Google sandbox period theory that 60 days might actually be on or around where this ranking changes.
That being said, if you have a really good site and it's getting a whole bunch of traffic and you put AdSense on it and all your stuff drops don't freak out. Let it sit for a little bit and see what happens.
If you want to you can wait for all that testing and the reviews of this test to complete and see what turns out for you but that's what I think was really happening here.
In the meantime, if you have some competitors that you don't like just tell them to put AdSense on their site because it was ranking really high and watch them all fall, make your money and then ~. I wouldn't do that. I'm just saying.