Mysterious Adsense Drop

Last month I started seeing a small dip in my daily Adsense earnings. No biggie, I thought. I assumed it was just a fluke that would even out at the end of the month. But holy crap… the end of April showed a pretty serious earnings drop for me.

It didn’t occur to me to actually dig around and find out WHY my earnings were declining during April. (Exerting effort is not my strong suit.) I spent some time the other day investigating and realized that the Adsense ads on my main income producing site were totally unrelated to the site’s topic! I mean, they had absolutely nothing to do with anything. No wonder no one clicked on the ads!

Don’t ask me what happened, or why, or what the heck I did to cause the problem. (I swear I did nothing. This particular site is a blog that I rarely update yet continues to make a pretty decent daily profit.)

So now that I’ve identified the issue, I’m freaking out, trying to get it corrected. So far, nothing is working. I’ll spend a little more time on it and report back if something resolves.

So here’s my tip for the day: If you are using Google’s Adsense ads as a profit stream (and you should be doing this already, as it really is a nice effortless income), be sure to monitor your earnings/sites at least every few days in case you run into this weird occurrence.

Semi-Update: Although I still haven’t seen an improvement on the ads showing on my blog, I have devoured a bunch of information. I still can’t figure out WHY these totally irreverent ads decided to suddenly show up (and can’t find any good answer), but I have read that if you use the following invisible tags in between a paragraph or a set of keywords that are applicable to your site’s topic, it may correct things within a day or two (after Google re-spiders your site/blog):

Here’s where your content or keywords should go, telling Google what your site/blog topic is about, so the ads are more targeted. Don’t forget to end the paragraph with the END tag, coming up.

Hopefully that might help. I put the tags on my blog and will report back how it goes. If you’re experiencing the same issue, give it a try.

Another Semi-Update:  Whoa! After putting in the code I mentioned above, I figured I’d sorta update a few of the pages at the site.  I was poking around some of the pages with Wordpress’ Theme Editor and - holy hell! I’ve been hacked! My (file name removed for security purposes) file contained a HUGE, HUGE amount of invisible text and links not entered there by myself.

I’m guessing it was someone trying to attain a better Google search engine ranking for their keyword terms (in this case, it was Debt and Credit Card, which were the exact unrelated ads that were relentlessly appearing on the site).  I have no idea how they got into my site but I know I’ll be checking these files frequently to be sure it doesn’t happen again.