Adsense earnings, new CMS, new URLS - Google AdSense - Display Ads forum at WebmasterWorld - WebmasterWorld

Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

Adsense earnings, new CMS, new URLS

This is what's been going on

explorador

3:24 am on Jul 27, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Hi there, I finally decided to move the strongest site to my new CMS (I wrote this one and the predecessor). Oh yes I know... they were not compatible as I built the last one with many more things in mind, I'm very proud of it, one code to rule them all (many websites).

The thing is, the urls are now slightly different, slightly means nothing! one letter and it's not the same url, so you have a not found error. It was unavoidable for a number of reasons. So I'm sharing what's happening:

Migrated everything and the change was fast, one folder and done!
The design is the same, except for wider columns
A new faster mobile version with responsive design
Same urls as the desktop version, the CMS does the job
BUT diff urls from the previous site that was very well positioned

I created a map of links for redirects, I only missed like 10% of links, those are the index pages, the index of each section as widgets from america, widgets from europe, etc. The rest is fully mapped.

One thing that I didn't include was to integrate a mapping for the images, you know, many web searches have to do with images... I forgot, I will work on it this weekend.

Results so far, my observations:
Less earnings, like 50% of what I was having these last 10 days.

Been making less money all 2013 but 10 days were not so bad finally. I'm not sure about the impact of the migration as Adsense is not as stable as before so I can't tell, specially reading the earnings and observations thread because some members seem to experience the same ups and downs I have... result? confusion because now that I read they are experiencing the same lows as me, so perhaps it's not just the migration and redirects.

I decided to share this here because many times some ask (and we wonder) about the effects of "fixing what is not broken"... well in my case my new CMS works better in many ways and I was tired of patching the older one, I wanted all the sites under the same system, it was a personal choice, I will see how this goes, I believe one week is nothing, one month will say a lot. So far the traffic stays the same.

explorador

1:36 pm on Jul 27, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Low earnings: keep in mind GAdsense has it's own bot, even that I put redirects to keep the link juice I guess the Adsense Bot detects new urls

netmeg

6:17 pm on Jul 27, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

When did you go live with your new site? Do you use channels for your ad units, and are you using the same channels, if so?

explorador

2:59 am on Jul 29, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

I went live last week, july 23, the change took like 5 minutes. Yes I'm using the same everything from Adsense, the only thing new are a few ads for responsive design.

Earnings seem to be coming back, slowly coming up so, the big change to my little one is looking good so far.

PS. Keep in mind G adsense is not as stable as years ago so things can look confusing, I bet some low days after a change can mean a lot of things unrelated to the change, or not...

explorador

9:38 pm on Jul 30, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Yesterday was low, not low as terrible, but low, who knows, with the new unstable earnings it's difficult to tell, but so far despite the lows, I'm more in peace with the new structure of the sites. A lot easier to backup and migrate.

explorador

2:43 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

After several days of low numbers things came back to average.

Due to Adsense not being stable on earnings I can't really tell what caused what but the challenges of migrating the site were:

- Keeping the urls (lots of rewrites with move permanently)
- Improving the mobile version/experience
- Caching whatever what's worth caching
- Reducing page load and speed

Who knows... at least the nightmare is over, perhaps the earnings will continue like this, perhaps will go down (up? I doubt it ha!) but migrating one strong productive site (including adsense) to a new platform and adjusted design sure worries us all, just wanted to share that.

Done.

jbayabas

3:14 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

It's the same domain, but just different page/post URLs, correct? If it's a new URL, it will take several months for your ranking and traffic to stabilize. If its a new domain -- it's like starting from scratch; I hope you did not do that.

Make sure to redirect your error page to the main page, so you won't lose traffic.

netmeg

3:30 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Make sure to redirect your error page to the main page, so you won't lose traffic.

You don't want to do this. It would be a soft 404.

jbayabas

4:18 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

Rephrasing... What I meant was create a page for your error page that says like, "Apologies, this page does not exist. Click here to go to homepage." Include your header and footer as well. The goal is for your visitors not to close the browser, thus you losing valuable traffic.

explorador

5:13 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

jbayabas: It's the same domain, but just different page/post URLs, correct? If it's a new URL, it will take several months for your ranking and traffic to stabilize. If its a new domain -- it's like starting from scratch; I hope you did not do that.

Make sure to redirect your error page to the main page, so you won't lose traffic.

Yes, same domain, slightly diff urls. It's been less than a month and my traffic is good, I could say no change (my traffic has been growing year per year, specially on these two sites). I'm also receiving more emails from visitors, daily, lucky me.

I didn't want to go that way but for several reasons it was the best one.

404, that was the most difficult part, keeping the link juice. I worked hard on it and made a map of links from the old to the new site, so I have a full 301 moved permanently redirect, this way SEs will update the index while my visitors coming from old links will never see a problem or a 404 error.

Even if they see a 404, the cms uses that url to try to locate the right content and give the users the error page you suggested along with a list of options of content. Still with the header error to avoid SEs indexing these pages.

The only thing I forgot and later noticed, was updating the redirect for images, my websites have a lot of images (all original) and many visitors reach me via image search, the solution was simple, I just for got to act quickly... To my surprise G updated the image index amazingly fast, I can search for the same things and find the images with no errors on their new locations. I don't have a clue on how or why this happened so fast, I just got lucky.

explorador

5:33 pm on Aug 13, 2013 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

There is nothing official on this but I remember Adsense has it's own bot, so after migrating the content the earnings went down quite noticeable, I expected the bot to update the content and urls to display better ads, it seems it was exactly like that, things got better.