ThatAdamGuy - 6:22 am on Nov 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

Interesting!

I've been racking my brain, trying to figure out why my earnings are so low, and now I've got it!

THE HISTORY:
A few months ago, I was earning a pleasant sum from AdSense.

Then, around mid October or so, Google started sending almost 100% PSAs to my main site!

After several e-mail exchanges, Google finally fixed that (thankfully!) and I thought that all was clear and I'd begin earning a decent chunk o' change again from AdSense.

But it was not to be!
/foo/popular-page.htm was once again showing 100% paying ads.
And ased on my logs, I could see that this page was also still getting a ton of hits every day. But my revenues were still in the dumpster! :(

Then tonight it finally hit me. From several internal and external links, I was using /foo/popular-page.htm?source=findwhat or?source=sidebar, etc. When I checked out the pages with these addendums, I quickly realized that Google was serving 100% PSAs under these conditions!

---

So now, of course, I'm quickly removing every trace of these?source thingies and will just do analysis based upon referrers in my logfile and other data. And I should, at least theoretically, be able to buy more than a cup of coffee a day with my earnings once again!

I'll try to remember to post back here again in a few days to let you know if my assumptions are correct. In the meantime, if you're also using anything like /foobar.htm?source=whatsit, you'll want to carefully check to see if this is killing your AdSense revenues, too!

[and boy, I sure wish Google had spotted or acknowledged this issue <sigh>]