Yeah, I've had several in the last 10 years since I've been using AdSense. Most of them pertain to content that Google does not permit, mostly adult content in my case. However, I was always a little bit irritated by their definition of adult content. However, they've got you by the short and curly's so if they give somebody a warning then you got to act upon it.

Strangely, I actually had one of my websites banned from showing Google ads altogether. Basically, they don't like some of the jokes that were on the website and gave me an ultimatum, over move the jokes or the site would get banned. I refused to remove the jokes because at the time these particular jokes were bringing in shed loads of hits. Anyway, the only thing that happened was that the site cannot show Google ads any more. It didn't affect any of the other sites in my account though, they are still able to show Google. I suppose I was lucky, I've known of people who got banned for a lot less, or even sometimes for no apparent reason.

Bottom line is the rest of the world is gaining on Google.

Yes, well business news today, Google revenue up 20%.. I guessing that I know where they got some of that net profit increase.

yea... YoY I'm 30% down in Adsense, but they grown 20% a year

But, because of that I finally started putting some serious work in, using different strategies, and I will be soon at double of my all time earnings with G

Really #*$!ty cpc yesterday and today aint looking too good.

I asked a friend yesterday on Skype to just go through my website and tell me what kind of ads were displaying on my website. Even though I don't see many [widget] -related adverts myself, they actually were served up quite a lot of fish keeping adverts. And I have noticed of late that my big 300 x 600 unit is displaying quite nicely at times.

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:44 am (utc) on Nov 10, 2016]
[edit reason] Removed specifics for YOUR protection. Competitors like to get you banned etc. [/edit]

October started out pretty bad, but by now it's the best month of the year. Didn't see that coming.

@Ironside: I think I've said it before, but more paragraphs and headers would make your text so much easier to read (and not scream MFA as much). It may cost you a few ad clicks (maybe not; you could A/B test it), but your users will be grateful.

I think the point that is being made is that users tend to prefer articles that are easier to read and skim through. Breaking long paragraph into smaller ones and adding headings goes towards achieving this goal. Here is a tool that allows you to check the readability of your content and then provides tips to improve it.
[hemingwayapp.com...]

I think what is being suggested is that many browsers are 'scared away' by large blocks of text, large paragraphs and a lack of obvious information architecture. I can vouch for this too. Years ago lot of my content was straight essays. I noticed a significant increase in traffic (and a decline in bounce rate) when I restructured it.

October has been a reasonable month. RPM is up about 8% on August and September. The next two months on the Adsense rollercoaster should be interesting.

Yeah, I understand where you're coming from guys. I think I give the information needed, but probably a bit too much waffle, if you can see you are coming from. I downloaded that Hemingway program which looks very useful indeed. It's given me a good grade on my writing, but obviously it's given me quite a few tips on how I can improve things.

I will have a mess around with a few articles and see if anything improves after following the advice from the Hemingway program.

Now what exactly is an adverb? :-) :-)

@Frank Mobile is not going to replace Desktop. Mobile has simply carved out its own little niche. Both can and will co-exist forever.

People will always need desktop computers for work and school and thus they will always use those devices to access the internet. You can't get any serious work done on a tiny little screen without a keyboard.

I think it all depends on your niche as to how many people will be accessing your site using whatever device. Like you say, if you need to actually do something that involves a lot of typing then nobody will want to mess around on a silly little mobile device screen. However, my niche definitely falls into the mobile user category because apart from actually looking for information quickly, people will also be using the forum. The people who use my website will probably be sitting in their living rooms using their mobile devices. There's a lot of software and apps available now that allow people to use forums really easily from a mobile phone.

It's a shame, if I had as many people using my site from a desktop as I do a mobile, I would be raking it in because desktop traffic is a much better earner than mobile. And actually, I don't do too bad from tablets either, but the amount of people who use tablets as a lockdown than those who use desktop and mobile. I think as time goes on more and more people will be using mobile devices, especially as the technology gets better. But mobile devices are never going to get any bigger than they are at the moment so there is always going to be the need for desktop computers.

No complaints. Though subscriptions are now my bread and butter.

But mobile devices are never going to get any bigger than they are at the moment so there is always going to be the need for desktop computers.

Ok then, hands up who is using Continuum around here besides me?

[microsoft.com...]

It's not perfect by a long way however I feel it's one idea of the next generation of phones/tablets/pcs and Acer's Continuum is by far a more conventional docking station.

I've been messing around with that Hemingway program is brought up some interesting thoughts. To be honest, I think that being far too critical about the content. Take JK Rowling's Harry Potter for instance. I tested the program using some extracts from some of her books. There wasn't a single incident where the programme didn't find a lot of thoughts. For instance, out of 10 sentences, it found four of them hard to read, and two of them very hard to read. One would have thought that JK Rowling has a proofreader who has a good knowledge of the English language working for her. I been using it to help rewrite some of my articles, however it does seem to find fault quite easily.

Ironside, there is nothing at all wrong with your writing style, it is informative and you write in a way that suggests personal knowledge of the subject matter. Your only problem is that you don't use new paragraphs enough - yours are just too long!

You don't need to look far for examples of this, just look at this forum thread on a reasonably small width tablet or mobile and you will notice your paragraphs are much longer than the average, which for many people makes them hard to read.

Ironside, you can do with a better layout of your ads. For example, on the desktop, a large horizontal banner either above or just below the title will do wonders. In addition, your first ad within the article is too far down. Most of your readers from Google probably wouldn't reach so far down. I would suggest an in-article ad after the first 3-4 paragraphs.

The ads layout does look better on mobile.

Also, you should consider a faster server. You may be outgrowing your package at Siteground.

Thanks for the critique guys, it's all very helpful and I'm certainly changing things slowly. To be honest, I think I'm trying to cut a little bit of the waffle alt of the writing which should cut down quite a lot.

@Rasputin I've tried the banners below and above the title and they really don't do much. Years ago a 336 rectangle below the title and at the very end of the article made a lot of money each month. However, within a couple of months they were doing hardly anything. I think that you guys are absolutely right, if I try and shorten things considerably it may make a difference.

@Kindle paying £72 a month at the moment with site ground for cloud hosting, think that's what it's called if I remember.

Thanks again guys,

Yes, I've tried Siteground in the past and was disappointed. Now I use [inmotionhosting.com...] and Cloudways/WordPress

This is what I am using at the moment


Price $80.00/mo
(Excluding VAT)
2 CPU Cores
4GB Memory
40GB SSD Space
5TB Data Transfer

Have a look at how Google sees your site: [developers.google.com...]

One of the items under "Consider Fixing" is Reduce server response time. The server is slow to respond.

Correction: Siteground is very good. And that's a powerful enough server. But you should consider optimizing your site.

Yeah, I'll have a look at that. It could be the forum database that is fairly slow. I've got 10 years of posts. I don't know why think should be slow, it's not as if the pages are that long or I've got too much on there. But if you think about it, most of us are now using fairly fast broadband connections. But as I understand things, it doesn't matter how fast your broadband connection is, if the server is slow then there's nothing you can do about it, it will still be slow. Like I said before, I'm paying £72 a month for my package, that's more than a not in my opinion. According to Google analytics I'm getting around 85,000 hits a month. If the cloud hosting I'm using then it's obviously not very efficient.

Siteground cloud hosting is excellent in my experience and will not be a problem for you given that configuration and your site visitor numbers.
Having both adsense and media.net on the same page, on the other hand, I have found to be a problem for page speed to the extent that I removed media.net

Maybe Siteground is a lot better if you're willing to spend big monthly bucks on a premium package and/or VPS; my experience with their entry level hosting was being worried to death all the time over bandwidth because they apparently oversell their servers. I lasted 3 months

And no -- all hosts don't behave like that with entry level hosting, the hosts I had before and after them didn't/don't.

This is what I am using at the moment

Price $80.00/mo
(Excluding VAT)
2 CPU Cores
4GB Memory
40GB SSD Space
5TB Data Transfer

Are you using it, though? That's a lot of horsepower for 85,000 hits -- pageviews? sessions? Analytics doesn't track hits -- per month. You're mostly paying a premium for server management, of course. Learn to set up, secure and manage a server yourself (the basics are not very difficult) and you can shave off 75%, even more if you can reduce load times through code optimizations and caching, but even 75% is $720 saved each year. I host a friend's WordPress website with 1M pageviews/month on a $5/month VPS, with plenty of room to spare. And that's WordPress, one of the most bloated systems available. That's not a boast, just evidence to the fact that optimization and self-management can save you having to take a big chunk out of that AdSense money each month. It helps if you're interested in servers and coding, of course; I get a kick out of it, others maybe not so much.

One of the reasons why I use Joomla! as you don't need all that coding knowledge. If something does go wrong then I can normally find the answer and change the code if need be. However, maintaining my server is a different ball game altogether. Up until recently, I kept getting messages telling me that I was nearly up to 100% of my capability on my server which was getting rather frustrating considering what I've got. Since they upgraded to 2 CPU cores, things seem to be a little bit better. What's the best way to optimise my database table so that it loads a lot quicker?

EDIT: I should have added that I have a couple of other websites on the same server, one of which receives around 35,000 hits each month as well. So you can add that to the 85,000 that the Oscar fish site gets.

The best way to optimize your DB is to put a few indexes on the tables that is most used or takes long time. Like if you have a query that have to go thru a lot of data... Another one is to switch to innodb... Or why don't you just use memcached (caches DB requests in a quick memory storage). Really depends on how much traffic you have...

Putting a proper index on your tables if they contain a few thousand rows of data will help no matter what though!..

@Rasputin : about media.net slowing down your site, you can use their async code, it works smoothly.

Midway into November and RPM is identical to that of October. A little disappointing, I was hoping to see some increase. Here's hoping it picks up later in the month.