Jessica97 - 1:27 am on Feb 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

@backdraft and @maximus---I'm experiencing the same thing on the sites that I am monitoring now. Last week when the lights went out--3 sites in particular all had more sales and income by 12pm on dip day then what occurs generally by 4pm on a regular weekday. Then after when the lights went "out"---for the remainder of the day-almost no movement at all in terms of sales or income for the rest of the day. Impossible during the week on these well established sites. It just does not happen unless something is throttled or there's some massive Internet outage or server issue.

Then, just slow abnormally low sales/income until the weekend, where it picked up again and Saturday/Sunday were back to regular levels. Yesterday was awful again..the switch turned off almost the entire day.

While today is better. Not perfect but better. Most of the traffic on these sites is US based also. What I do notice is when the traffic is junk CTR and EPCM go down in parallel with the drop in quality traffic...like clockwork on the pages that do have some Adsense on them. Orders also have the same pattern...if the pages that have Adsense on them aren't performing during this latest "update" no orders are flowing in or orders flow in during the morning...then it goes dark and no more orders for the remainder of the day. Never has happened this way before.

When this first rolled out I was noticing poor search results being returned for some sites I don't manage, so I assumed that this was the issue for us as well, but after checking further or maybe things had shifted by the time I could check everything I was seeing similar results to what @backdraft is explaining, fairly solid rankings--but the quality of traffic most definitely has seen a shift over the past week and when this happens it has a direct correlation to the numbers.