If you’re creating a blog, you need to add a privacy policy page, and perhaps, a terms of service page. And may be asking why? Is it a legal formality, or is it simply just the right thing to do? You do need to consider the fact that you may be potentially collecting personal information, like email addresses or some other form of contact information. You may also have people comment on your site, so you may want to protect yourself against other users opinions. (you may have heard disclaimers before like, the views on this show do not reflect the views of this media outlet, or something like that.) That’s the type of thing you need to protect yourself against. But there’s actually one other really big reason, which we unfortunately stumbled upon when working on one of our sites.
Google HATES Sites Without Privacy Policies
Yep, that’s right. The Google gods will punish you unless you have a privacy policy on your site. And what do I mean by punish? Well, your search engine ranking will be lower. Also, if you’re using Google Adsense ads on your site, your CPC (cost per click) rate will most likely be lower, which means less money in your pocket. When we first started, we had a pretty decent cost per click at around 45-55 cents, and about 75-150 clicks per day on ads. After a while, it looked like Google started to index the site more and our CPC was going into a steady decline. One day, we had an exceptional click-thru day, (950 clicks in one day) but we had a crappy CPC (25 cents). Now, overall, that’s not horrible, (do the math quickly, it’s over 230 dollars for one day) but we suffered financially because of a REALLY crappy CPC. As a matter of fact, it was our best one day total for Google Adsense, but our second to worst day ever with our cost per click. And, over the next 2 weeks, the average for our CPC started going down and began to average around 25-30 cents consistently. Bleah. Not great. TONS of clicks, but not as much revenue because, well, Google didn’t like our site.
So, we started doing some digging, and we came upon an online posting of people talking about privacy policies, and how the sites they managed really started suffering because of a lack of a privacy policy. Our site also did not have one, so we immediately added one, and over the course of a day or two, the cost per click started inching up. The other reason we added a privacy policy is because it’s required if you use Google Adsense for ad revenue. They REQUIRE one!!! They won’t shut your site down, but your search ranking will suffer and your Adsense revenue may start to go down. We actually got a few clicks in the 4-5 dollar range! Not bad! And, the best part, there’s a great online tool for creating privacy policies. And it’s free!
If you need a generic privacy policy for your site, you can go here (http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com), fill out the information, copy the privacy policy after you’ve filled out everything, create a new page in your WordPress site, and paste the information into your text field for WordPress and call the page Privacy Policy. Search engines and advertisers will love you, your site will love you, and it will help with all things Google related.