A couple months back now there was an update done by Google that affected the rank of your niche site or regular site based on where you placed your ads (particularly Google Adsense) on our website. If your website content was pushed down too much by ads above the fold you will get penalized in the rankings of Google and have to limit the number of ads to your site to get its rank back. I unfortunately learnt this the hard way when all of a sudden one day my niche site wasn’t ranking in Google anymore and I was wondering what I changed to my site. The answer was the ads. I had an ad at the top (large block – 336×280) and also had an ad in the sidebar. Those two ads alone above the fold pushed my content too far down the page making it a page that Google no longer liked. Since Google didn’t like the page it dropped and rank and therefore traffic. Once the traffic was gone to the niche site the earnings went as well. After doing some research and playing around with my ad placement I found that my website started to rank again in Google. It only took about a week or two after changing it back that the sites rank came back to normal. So when creating a niche website be very careful not to put too many ads above the fold (above the fold means what people can see on the screen without scrolling down) or you’ll see a significant decrease in you Google rank. It is also always very important when watching your niche sites to know how it ranks in Google for your particular keyword you are looking to rank. The old school way of doing this would be to go into Google and search for the keyword. However this won’t work if you are searching from a country where you aren’t targeting the keyword. Meaning that if you are trying to rank the site in the United States (which you should always be doing for the most part) and you are searching in Google from say the United Kingdom you won’t be getting the same results. However you can get around this by using Google’s keyword tool analyzer (for Adwords). Within that tool you can go to Tools And Analysis > Ad Placement and Diagnosis. In here you can select the country to search from and the domain (which you want .com). Then you can see where your site actually ranks. The problem with this method though is if your website is really badly ranked in Google you won’t find it for a very long time. However there is a solution to this. Instead of using the free Google method you can use a paid program called Longtail Pro which allows you to put a keyword in and select a country and figure out its rank. Longtail Pro is not only good for checking your rank [...]
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