Testing scraper site theory

As I've told you before I lost a lot of my traffic because of the Google update at the 22nd of July 2005. Afterwards I had my SEO consultant to find out why I experienced such a huge decrease in rankings and traffic.

None of my websites are scraper sites but one of the possible reasons he came up with was that my sites are being punished as if they were scraper sites. Confused?

Our theory is that even though my websites aren't scraper sites, they might be build in a way that makes Google think they are scrapers.

My sites content is structured like this:

[headline]
[a little text teaser]
[Google adsense ads]
[the rest of the content]

Our theory is that the adsense ads make Google think that my sites are scrapers.

Fortunately it's very simple to test this theory. Today I will remove the adsense ads from one of my sites. Of course I will get back to you about the effect.