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When Google Changes the RulesGoogle is GOING to change the rules. Business is like that, nothing is constant. Google less so! As long as people try to find ways to cheat the system, Google has to keep finding ways to try to stop them. Unfortunately, in the effort to reduce fraud, life is made more difficult for people who didn't do anything wrong. AdSense Income can be affected by two factors that originate from Google: Changes to Search Engine Indexing policies. When Google changes how they index pages, and what factors they consider to be legit for SEO, your traffic may be affected. That, in turn, directly changes your income, since ad revenue is directly relevant to traffic. Changes to AdSense and AdWords policies and procedures. AdSense and AdWords are two sides of the same coin. AdSense is the program for publishers who earn from ads, and AdWords is the program that businesses use to buy advertising. Google frequently changes how businesses can purchase ads, and how they pay publishers. Over the long term, those changes have tended to increase costs for advertisers, and decrease profits for publishers. The thing is, Google doesn't talk about how they change things. They may make a change and never inform publishers, because they have NEVER published how they calculate your earnings anyway. If they reduce all your earnings by 1%, you will never be able to track it, because your earnings results just show that you got so many clicks, and they paid you so much - and since the price of a click is not stable, each one is a different price, you cannot know if they change that. Recent changes to Google's AdWords program have certainly affected publisher earnings, but again, it is difficult to track. When you tally your averages, you can rarely pinpoint the full reasons for certain income changes. In August, my income jumped - by about 40%. Then in September, it dropped down, by more than it had risen. Toward the end of September, it started to recover, but not entirely. In October, it stayed sort of sluggish, until I made some changes to my pages, and it leaped up astronomically. Hard to tell just what caused some of those results. Traffic stayed fairly stable during those months, it had been on a slow, steady growth trend, which pretty much continued. When Search Engine results are responsible for changes, you'll notice corresponding changes to traffic numbers. But when Google changes something about AdSense or AdWords without mentioning it, you'll just see fluxuations for which you may not have an explanation. For the most part, when you make changes to your pages, you'll see results within a few days. Google is fairly quick about indexing changes for AdSense. If the results are subtle though, and coincide with seasonal trends or changes from Google, you may never be able to pin down how well your strategies really work. It means that AdSense sites will never be an exact science. As the site owner, you will simply lack the full information to develop an intelligent equation by which to measure results. You'll always be able to see dramatic effects from changes though, and you'll be able to tell long term whether your income is rising or falling, and that is enough by which to develop strategies to successfully earn, and to make it worth the effort. Written by Laura Wheeler |
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