Content_ed - 9:27 pm on Mar 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

I think panic at a temporary earnings (or traffic) collapse often induces webmasters into frantic activity trying to reverse the trend. In cases where this activity includes any changes in site design, all bets are off, because the reason we were doing "well" to start with isn't necessarily the same reason Adsense sees.

Pretty much every time we've attempted any sort of redesign in the wake of an Adsense crash it's jut confused the issue, and I'm sure we've abandoned (for advertising purposes) sections of our website that were just seeing temporary inventory challenges or seasonal blips.

Unless you have a great configuration change control system in place (and we don't) you can end up without a path backwards, beyond old backups and prayer. After a software upgrade incidental redesign a few weeks ago tanked the earnings on a major portion of our site, I had to go all the way back to a back-up from last summer to find one that returned things to normal. Part of the problem was that the other backups were done RIGHT AFTER other changes that didn't work out.