A Google ad penalty halved my side project's revenue — here's the recovery

In April 2024 the ad revenue on my side project got cut in half basically over night. Same traffic, same users, but half the money. It took me a while till I understood what is going on, and the answer changed how I think about running a tool that lives from ads.

I run Scrum Poker Online (https://www.scrumpoker-online.org/en/planning-poker/), a free planning poker tool for agile teams. You open a room, share the link, and vote on story point estimates. No signup. It's not a startup with a roadmap and a team, it's a side project that since years covered its own costs and a bit more.

The problem was in the end the nature of the tool itself. The pages are almost only interface: a room, some cards, a result panel. Nearly no text. Google's ad system looked on these pages, saw ads sitting next to no real content, and decided the inventory is low value. In ad-network language this is a "smart pricing" thing, it pays you quietly much less per impression because it doesn't trust the page. For exactly the same ad slot another network was paying several times more than Google. That was for me the tell.

What did not work: the obvious things. I opened support threads, asked for manual reviews, looked into switching the ad partner and escalating over intermediaries. Months of this and nothing that I could measure. The penalty was not a bug that you reverse with the right ticket. It was a judgement about the content on the pages, and none of my messages changed the content.

So I stopped to argue and started to treat it like a content problem. Two directions.

First, stop to be judged by the empty screens. The room pages, the part that is really only UI, I took completely out of Google's index (robots + noindex). And the screen people see before a room got a real explanation what the tool is and how estimation works, in every language the app has. If a page carries ads, it should also carry something worth to read.

Second, build the publication that such a tool normally never has. A proper guide to the technique. Honest comparisons with the other tools, also where my tool is the wrong choice. An about page with a real name and a real face behind it, marked up so the search engines and ad systems can see there is an actual person here, not a content farm.

One small thing surprised me how much it was mattering. My main landing page had the title "Free planning poker tool". It was ranking fine, but almost nobody clicked, the click rate from search was around 0.2%. The word "free" was doing nothing. I rewrote it to what people really search for, and the click rate on this page went up roughly 15x. Same ranking, same page. I let this lie around since years.

Where it stands now: around thirteen months after the penalty hit, the ad rate showed the first real movement up. Still clearly under the level from before April 2024, but clearly over the floor where it was stuck. Organic traffic is also up, because the content answers now questions that the tool alone never did.

I want to be honest that this is a recovery in progress, not a finished comeback story with a bow on top. I can not prove that the content lifted the ad pricing and not something else that moved in the same time. What I have is a tool that is now also a small publication, which is anyway the better thing to be.

If you make money with ads on a tool, you are a publisher, if you act like one or not. Thin pages with no content get treated like this. Better don't wait for a penalty to find it out.

Full write-up with the details: https://www.scrumpoker-online.org/en/blog/recovering-from-a-google-ad-penalty/