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http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4447973.htm [webmasterworld.com] by incredibill - 1:43 pm on May 12, 2012
(PST -8)
I really believe Google's recent updates to the SERPs have had an impact on AdSense. Statistics are now showing that Google is losing search traffic (down 5 percent from the same period last year), and that has to be having an impact on sites running AdSense.
I know Google has said that the revenue part of the company and the search part of the company don't influence each other, but as a public company, Google has an obligation to show a profit. How long before someone picks up the phone and tells search to fix whatever is going on, as they're losing market share?
The typical searcher doesn't care about a site's backlink profile, whether or not links are nofollow, or if that site posts on blogs deemed to be of poor quality. They just want the information they're seeking. It's annoying to find what you want one day, then return the next with the same search and find that page gone, or buried so deep it can't be easily found. That's a bad user experience. I'm all for getting rid of pages that don't offer any value, but it seems to me that recent updates have also removed pages that many would find helpful.
When they go to Bing or Yahoo and then find exactly what they were looking for, it certainly erodes any loyalty that person has had to Google in the past. I wonder if this partially explains the reduction so many have seen in AdSense performance. There's more to the Internet than big brand sites and sites with large advertising budgets. If Google is attempting to hold on to searchers longer within their own properties, it seems that idea isn't working out very well.
