Adsense gaming penalty

[LuckyShima]

someone I know set up a page to game adsense so the page ranked high and had nothing much on it except adsense ads which would have appeared attractive even to users who might not usually click them. This was just one page on a popular site with useful information.

page ranked high as expected and result was 28% click through rate for that page.

4 weeks of this and then the site got whalloped by google. now the rankings for the exact text of the internal menu (all the popular phrases) are all down around 300, while variations still rank top 3.

anyone heard of a sort of adsense gaming penalty? maybe it is something else but the site has been rock solid for a while, that is why the person thought he could fool around with it in this way.

[moonshield]

No. using AdSense does not affect your rankings + or -. Google is not going to play games like that.

[Chris]

Google would just kick someone out of adsense rather than penalize their SERP positions (or maybe they'd do both, but they'd certainly not penalize SERP positions without kicking out of adsense).

[James]

If they're able to be kicked out of AdSense because of something on their site, it's probably in violation of their webmaster guidelines and therefore would have its rank penalized.

[Chris]

Unless it is abuse of adsense terms specifically, like putting 5 creatives on a page, trying to manipulate the adsense ads for better keywords, or something like that.

[moonshield]

yea but he would be banned from AdSense, the original poster did not mention such.

[Torito]

I find it very normal that Google penalizes its ranking since they want to offer better search results .... and doesn't want to be fooled

[James]

They don't like penalizing by going through and doing it manually; they want their algorithms to evolve so that it Google can live and breathe on its own.