I got an e-mail this weekend that Adsense would no longer be serving ads to some of my sites.
Specifically, blog.matthewmiller.net and a Blog I manage for a friend. Both sites are hosted by Blogger, and when I go to the Adsense "Site Diagnostics" page I learn the reason for the sites are blocked is because of a problem with the robots.txt file.
The thing is, blogger users don't have the ability to edit their robots.txt unless they host their site themselves.
What has Blogger done? Simple, they've changed the robots.txt to reduce the search engine ranking of blogger hosted sites, and broken adsense in the process. Specifically, the Adsense Crawler is being blocked from indexing the site, which in turn causes Google Adsense to block the site, as it can no longer produce targeted ads.
Inexplicably, adds sometimes appear on this Blog, and the Adsense Site Diagnostic Page is erratic in when if it even lists blocked sites, sometimes claiming that I have no blocked sites. And yes, before you ask, I DID clear the browser cache.
Inside AdSense: Run, don't crawl, to the new Site Diagnostics page
2 comments:
I'm having this same issue.
I'm don't understand all the terminology but I've been doing a lot of SEO lately and ran across this today. I'm so frustrated.
First I noticed while using Google's Webmaster Tools that my labels are blocked.
Then I noticed my adsense was irrelevant so I went to my adsense account and I ran into this robot.txt whatever thingy. How do I fix it? Will Google/Blogger fix it?
I'm upset because I've spent a lot of time working on my site so my PR will go up this time around. Won't breaking labels affect that?
I was also starting to make at least some pocket change with adsense and now that's broken, too :/
I've got two blogger blogs. One of them got fabulous traffic in December. I went into Adsense to check out my account, and it turns out that only ONE of my blogs has been blocked because of the robots.txt file. What's up? Can we fix it?
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