Monthly Archives: December 2013

New Google AdSense Features That Strengthens Strategy

Google shared some product updates with new features for responsive ad units and a multi-screen optimization score to complement and strengthen your strategy.

Google-Adsense

Following are the new features for responsive ad units:

  • Product manager says “If your responsive page changes its layout following a screen orientation change, we’ll request and load a new ad to fit the new page layout.”
  • Smart sizing based on the space available: The ad code will automatically adapt all newly created responsive ad units to fit your page layout.
  • Your ad unit reports can now be broken out by the size of the ad served.
  • Multi-screen optimization score in publisher score card: A new multi-screen category –for example, if a user need to zoom and/or scroll often, this may negatively impact their experience. Your score will measure what percentage of your pages are multi-screen optimized and compare this percentage to that of other AdSense publishers.

Note: You may not see this category in your scorecard if you have a low percentage of mobile traffic on your site. This new score will be visible in the scorecard on your AdSense home page.

Webmaster Help Video On How To Recover From Google Penalty

Google has provided few suggestions in a new webmaster help video regarding how to recover from Google penalty due to spammy links.

Matt Cutts answered to the question

“How did Interflora turn their ban in 11 days? Can you explain what kind of penalty they had, how they fixed it, as some of us have spent months trying to clean things up after an unclear GWT notification?”

Interflora is a major UK flower site that was hit by a Google penalty early this year, but Google didn’t call out this company publicly, after the reports of penalty came out, the company wrote a blog post warning people not to engage in the “buying and selling of links.”

Matt Cutts proceeds to try and answer the question in more general terms “Google tends to looking at buying and selling links that pass page rank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times then the action that we take more and more severe. We’re more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeat violation.”

Cutts says “It’s not something that I would typically recommend for everybody to disavow every link that you’ve gotten for a period of years-but certainly when people start over with completely new websites they have bought-we have seen a few cases where people will disavow every single link because they truly want to get a fresh start.”

In other words, if you’re willing to go to such great lengths and eliminate such a big number of links, Google is going to notice.

If you’ve got links from some very spammy forum or something like that, rather than trying to identify the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to da a ‘domain:’ . So if you’ve got a lot of links that you think are bad from a particular site, just go ahead and do ‘domain:’ and the name of that domain.  Don’t try to pick the individual links because you might be missing a lot