Google Adsense Penalty - How it Cut My Blog Traffic Nearly in Half

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of Google. This post is by no means a Google bashing or rant about their products and services. I use a lot of the Google products for some very productive work - including Blogger which I do promote significantly. Additionally, I know some of the Google employees and have visited their campus. I believe Google is one of the most exciting places to work in America today.

However, the background to this post is that I felt that there might be some benefit to getting some small advertising revenue utilizing Google Adsense with this blog. Considering my traffic was running nearly 1000 visits a day this seemed like a good option based on the content and history of this blog.

I've used Adsense for quite a few years now in my earlier web work and have found it to be beneficial for high volume web pages. At one point some years ago I was able to make $10-$50 a day in revenue - that was a very unique case due to a popular surge online for a specific topic. In this case I was expecting about $1 a day since advertising tied to blogging is not a very competitive space. Ads such as hosting centers or blogger tools don't drive significant payout revenue as do some of these top paying Adsense keywords.

Some people make a living on Adsense revenue but it takes some significant savvy with deep traffic knowledge to do that. Others try to scam Google by building false links back to fake sites that have the high paying keywords just smattered throughout the site to generate profits. This aggravates Google and gives honest online workers a bad name.

Adsense Penalty

On December 16th I decided to implement Adsense on Blogger Tips Pro having not paid much attention to what was going on with it in the last two years. Within one day I dropped from 943 visits to 757 - not really much concern since I do get traffic dips. By day 2 I was down to 682 visits falling down to 534 by day 4. That is when the alarm sounded for me!!

Adding Related Posts to Blogger Blogs

NOTE: LinkWithin no longer exists. This post will not work any more.

There has been a change in Blogger and LinkWithin. A number of users have found that LinkWithin is not working for them. Be aware you might find some issues. If you find you are having the issue, select Other for your Platform and manually add the script to a HTML Widget. You've probably seen a number of blogs that have related internal blog posts tagged at the end with inter-linking across the site. It's a very nice feature that has been made even easier by a online utility called LinkWithin.com.

The steps to adding this feature are so simple that it only takes a few minutes to get a great looking extra look-and-feel without much effort. Start by navigating to LinkWithin.com. Right away you'll see the starting point by entering your information into the widget form on the main page like this: