Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We have had a huge drop in Adsense earnings, number of clicks, visitors etc., to about 1 tenth of normal, over the last few days. Prior to this income, clicks, visitors have been growing steadily for many months.
Today we discovered that a section of our site (all under a single common folder eg. www.site.com/folder/files.hml), the highest earning and most visited section, has seemed to have totally vanished in Google search results. We are getting a small number of visits still to that section from other sources, and all other parts of our site still rank well. Adsense is still on the pages and a tiny number of clicks (visitors from other sources than Google searches) are still occuring.
No matter how specific the search, that section won't show up, even if you put the name of the site and the page topic in the search it won't appear. You might only get a couple of other vaguely similar pages, or another page from our site that Google decides is close enough, but not the actual exact relevant page.
Can anyone make any suggestions as to what may have happened to cause this? And what we can do to fix it? It really is most worrying and confusing.
Thank you all for any help!
Anthea.
Any reason why my ads would be worth less today vs. last week?
There's a service called Copyscape that does basic checking for duplicates on the web, but it's a premium service, so I'm not sure how useful the free mode is.
[webmasterworld.com...]
The good news is that everything came back on the next G update, which was exactly July 27th. I am quite paranoid now about end-of-the-month data refreshes. I seem to be surviving the current turmoil quite nicely, earnings/traffic are growing every week.
I'm not trying to brag about my good fortune so far this month, but instead, give you some hope that things might just work out for you on their own.
I figure there was a lesson to be learnt from my 30-day-crash, and there probably is one in your case. In my case, I believe it was a duplicate content penalty, caused by a few factors I had entirely overlooked before. Its meant scrapping about 100 hours of work and starting over on some sections. The worrisome part of this is that I can't be 100% sure (whoever is with Google?), so I could be chasing the wrong solutions. Nevertheless, when its one of your best paying sections that gets hit, you have to try to protect it.
for my sites, it had several disturbing effects - i call it triple drop:
1. lost rankings, lost traffic = ad impressions down
2. traffic shuffle effect one: new distracted visitors clicking on cheap exit ads = epc down
3. traffic shuffle effect two: new visitors unrelated to site content clicking less = ctr down
now cope with that! all in all earnings 50% down on a 200.000 uniques/month site. thank you google. no plan how to react this time. just doing damage limitation at the moment.
you might also want to skim: [webmasterworld.com ]
I guess we've just been lucky never to have been adversely affected by Google shake-ups before. Hopefully all will right itself in time, or with a bit of tweaking. Fingers (and everything else) crossed!
Anthea.
this thread is why you should always have more than one site, even if it's the same subject matter.
ditto.
ctr slightly down
ecpm down
impressions down
[edited by: Scurramunga at 10:33 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2006]
Remember tomorrow is D-day - perhaps another Google swipe.......aaaaah will it never stop? Where as I used to aim to put up al least one quality page a day, I have only managed one page in the last month, as I am spending so much of my time keeping an eye on the ever changing Google world. Scared to turn my back in case it has all disappeared. Touch wood I have not suffered like a lot of you guys, but it is becoming more and more of a pain in the a**e!
this thread is why you should always have more than one site, even if it's the same subject matter.ditto.
ditto ditto
However regarding having two sites on the same subject - isn;t this deemed duplicate content?
Only if they're identical.
It would be hard work to have two sites on the same subject competing side by side - or not?
Yes, and building an authoritative site in your niche would be more difficult unless you had unlimited resources.
I think a better reason to build two or more sites (if you choose to go that route) is to target different subtopics or audiences. For example, if you wanted to cover travel in a Elbonia and Elbonia already had a dozen established general-interest travel sites, you might consider creating sites in subniches that you'd identified as being underserved--e.g., Elbonian spas, Elbonian ski resorts, and Elbonian hiking and bicycle vacations.
Where as I used to aim to put up al least one quality page a day, I have only managed one page in the last month, as I am spending so much of my time keeping an eye on the ever changing Google world. Scared to turn my back in case it has all disappeared. Touch wood I have not suffered like a lot of you guys, but it is becoming more and more of a pain in the a**e!
Ditto! Ditto!
A year ago I ONLY added content, my filter was completely EMPTY (I expected at that time I'd only need to use it for competitors... ha!), and my stats were consistant within the realistic percentage.
This year, however, I hardly ever add content as it only seems to fuel a decrease in earnings, my filter is completely FULL (needing weekly weeding so as to allow room for the new worst offenders), and my stats swing wildly with no reasonable consistancy what-so-ever!
It's an interesting (and often infuriating) game we play! How many intelligent people would otherwise participate in an undertaking of this sort where you have absolutely NO control of your situation and NO idea as to the underlying rules?
Still, it is what it is... we all do still make earnings with little effort through a concept that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Can't beat that!
Chapman
It would be hard work to have two sites on the same subject competing side by side - or not?
As usual EFV is spot on.
For instance I have two core sites that have 1,000+ pages of good quality, GLOBAL, information, one is a directory and the other is a brochure site with general relevant information about my specialised products, however I also have a lot of country-specific sites about those products that has even more technical information for the trade purchaser.
These sites are generally 20-60 pages.
The core sites are meant for Joe Public to learn more about the products and source supplies whereas the country-specific are for architects and specifiers etc.
most people don't start two sites on the same subject at the same time, and therefore achieve the same rankings for the same keywords on both sites... especially when the keywords are competitive.
what usually happens is that you create a backup site for your main site, using unique content for both... give the backup site enough content and time to get out of the sandbox, so that you don't have to repeat the process from scratch when google hammers your main site.
you can also use the backup site to target different search engines, or target image searches and rich media searches, if it's compatible with your content.
image/rich media searches aren't nearly as competitive as text searches are, and if people are using the same keywords they would use for text searches, the traffic is relevant... you can also pre-qualify the traffic by funneling it through your backup site into your main site.
It's an interesting (and often infuriating) game we play! How many intelligent people would otherwise participate in an undertaking of this sort where you have absolutely NO control of your situation and NO idea as to the underlying rules?
remember calvin and hobbes playing calvinball?
only in our case, it's like turning up for a game where
- we don't know who the players are
- what field we're playing on
- what we're supposed to do, when and how to do it
- the rules keep changing
- the ball keeps changing
- we don't know what to do with the ball
- sometimes the ball gets thrown out of the stadium
- sometimes there IS no ball
- sometimes there are duplicate balls
- and sometimes, there are so many spam balls, everybody gets disqualified...
but one thing remains constant - Google holds the whistle... and we get paid for not knowing what to do with the ball!
