Deleted channel still showing in stats

Could content theft account for lost earnings?

[vordmeister]

I've been fiddling around with some different positioning recently to try and recover my 3 month drop in earnings. I'm tracking the alternative styles with custom channels.

I removed a channel on Sunday. Today (Tuesday evening) I have 150 impressions for that channel, and 300 impressions for the channel that has replaced it for the last 2 days.

I use php includes for serving ads, so there isn't any chance of that channel still showing. ISP cache is a possibility, but I'm in the UK so surely 33% of my visitors aren't using AOL.

Content theft is my current thinking. I've tried copyscape but I've a feeling they use the google api, and there are a whole load of pages that sren't in google's index at the moment.

Tomorrow I'll do a manual check with MSN and yahoo, but in the meantime does anyone else have any ideas that could explain the weird stats? Or good ways to check for content theft?

My worry is if 33% of my impressions are on pages stolen by people daft enough to leave my code in place, what precentage are from sensible theives that I can't detect? Is that why my earnings have halved?

[vordmeister]

My bad - found a link unit in the body of the index page with the old channel rather than a call to the php include. Going to keep tracking it seperately as it seems to be doing very well.