Adsterra Review | How our Websites were Banned by Google

Adsterra review is written after a short experience of using it.

But, I do not discourage you to not trying it after reading my experience. But, be cautious with it or any other adnetwork.

If you are looking for an Adsense alternative, you might come across this network.

Besides Adsense, we tried many other networks like ezoic ads, media.net,  valueimpression, etc., for extra income.

And we were not satisfied with many due to reasons like difficulty in getting our sites approved, lack of sufficient payment rates and also inappropriate ads.

We mostly like to use banner ads with CPC and CPM mode, and we do not like popups under ads as they irritate our visitors.

So in search of a decent ad network for sites besides Adsense, we tried media.net, and then we tried adsterra. So with this experience, we will give you more information about it.

Adsterra Review

This network is headquartered in the Limassol city of Cyprus.

Adsterra claims to be a premium ad network with different ad formats. They offer Ad formats like

1. Banner Ads
2. Direct links
3. Interstitial Ads
4. Video banners etc.

The earnings are calculated based on the number of impressions and clicks.

In our experiment, we put a single sidebar Ad below the fold.

Most of the ads were some sort of software download type or online game related.

The results were quite impressive. Unlike regular ads with more clicks, these ads also had better clicks and rates.

See the image below for an idea

Payments

Adsterra offers twice a month payments through PayPal (min. $100), wire (min.$1000) and Paxum, WebMoney (min.$5).

But after use for over ten days, suddenly our website traffic dropped drastically. From 5000 visits per day, they fell to 500 visits per day.

All the important pages with top rankings were not seen on the first page. They went away to more than 100 search engine rankings.

After a day, we received a message from the google search console that our websites had been put on manual spam penalty.

So the site pages were de-indexed from Google and we had to correct them to get them approved back.

The reason for this manual penalty was imposed as there were redirects on mobile pages due to adsterra ads from the search clicks.

That mean the visitors from the search engine was shown different page instead of our site’s pages. That is, they were showing ads first instead of allowing the site pages to be shown by google.

So immediately, we had to disable and remove all the adsterra ad codes from those websites.

After being sure that there were no more impressions on adsterra dashboard from our sites, we applied for reconsideration.

This was approved after three days, which gave us a sigh of relief.

But still, the approval note mentioned that the ranking might not be up to the mark as before.

And as we see, still we have lagged in traffic for those sites.

We have been running websites for eight years by now, and for the first time, we had a penalty action from Google.

That too is a manual spam penalty over the entire site, which is too risky as it could ban our site forever.

Even the ads appearing on the site were of the same type and insisted the visitor click to download the ad.

When someone downloads it, it could be software or even malware.

And sometimes it can affect your whole site or even your computer.

After this experience, we relied on Adsense alone for a lot of time. But, since we wanted to explore other options, we took up different ads like the ezoic, media.net, exmarketplace and even newormedia.

All these other adnetworks seem to be genuine and do not attract penalties from Google.

However, be aware of the site speed as it is a ranking factor. Most ad networks are now using header bidding technology. The intention is to show high-paying ads in place. But, this header bidding is the reason for the decrease in site loading speed.

So we advise being careful in selecting ad networks for monetization.

To keep your website safe, try to use the security services from sucuri firewall, Cloudflare, or wordfence.

If the wrong choice is made, we tend to lose our ranking and also the whole website.

It could be foolish to lose all the years of hard work for nominal dollars.

Update:

It is more than a 5 years now and all-out traffic is normal. Further, the adsterra has improved a lot and seems to be upgraded for better technology.

But we are very skeptical looking at other ad networks as they tend to put some popups or unwanted scripts.

So, we now rely on banner ads from Adsense and ezoic. When the Adsense income changes drastically, try to opt for ezoic ads.

If Adsense bans you, never worry, as you can try valueimpression or which is better than others after the Adsense ad network.