Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Over on the Google News thread [webmasterworld.com], there's talk that many legitimate publishers are taking a major hit this weekend.
Just wondering how many AdSense publishers are affected?
We've lost more than 3/4 of our traffic. PR 5, 7 year old domain with more than 750 articles. More 285 links in, on the DMOZ for years. Just broke the Alexa Top 100,000 last month, too.
Even a search for our unique domain name doesn't bring us up until Page Two results, where we used to be # 1.
Needless to say, we're losing 80% of our revenue overnight, the way things look yesterday and today.
It seems more than strange that legitimate sites like ours and many others are going down, while scraper sites and others are in place.
Obviously, if this is wide spread, Google will see a hit in their AdSense revenue...
Went from #3 and #4 to page 10+.
As for the loss in revenue... I think it may be the reverse for G. The more junk they bring up, the more likey people are not going to find what they want, and thusly the more ads will be clicked on.
Traffic from Google dropped terrible since yesterday. It looks like I'm going back to hardly $80-100 a day from $175 :(
Bourbon was terrible.
Never thought I'd hear the words...
It should have been named something awful.
This and the fact that Google seems to be using a rediction script now. Some of the results are like google.com/url?http://[domain]/content.asp?contentid=5453... This script is somehow causing problems because sometimes it return a 404 on google.com domain itself. Look like it's trying to retrieve google.com/content.asp?contentid=5453 instead of the fully qualified domain...
Visitors now 95% paid for through adwords.
Google is apparently redoing my site from scratch - turned 90% of pages to url-only and now they are coming back about 20% at a time each day.
But I tricked them this time and rewrote all the boiler plate one night and reduced page overhead by 60% so that should confuse them!
I still do not like the way G leans towards country codes if selected under G's country domain names. As a techie I always start at google.com not my local google and I encourage others to do that too. Google.com is the ultimate benchmark for ranking imho.
Yahoo's looking quite good, were #1, but they apear not to update their index as fast as G, and searches for multiple words at the same time they're not as good... as G.
MSN.com is quite good however MSN countries auto lean towards their country codes - auto bias.
Either its not finished indexing yet or lots of us are in big trouble. I have been reading the other 48 page thread! Total income down about half or less! All are unique content niche sites with pages about a foot long. On one "unaffected" site the normal 7 percent click thru is somehow 1. something too! With the same ads as usual...
All the pages are there but buried for almost every normal high ranking term.
I think patience and more beer is needed!
I think patience and more beer is needed!
Or Bourbon as it were.
I wonder how long it will take for things to settle down. I think I'll start working on another site now and pretend like everything is okay.
Yesterday was one of the worst days for us ever. Down 80% in revenue even though the CTR was the same as our baseline measurements.
Today it's off the charts for us. Record day for both CTR and revenue. 100% over baseline. Very odd.
So far I"m seeing what (for me) is a typical pattern. In other words... chaos.
Up, down, up, normal, down, up, etc., etc., mix and match in no discernable manner.
Sort of sounds like Adsense in general, huh?
Yet I get very low impressions on Adsense (and have for several days). Another (inexact) tracking program I use also says I am getting a lot less visits.
Yesterday earnings seemed to be very slow in coming, but today I see they are refreshed and are respectable (even with the low impressions). Today's earnings and impressions are low, low, low. But, it's too soon to say if they'll stay low (as they didn't from yesterday--at least not the earnings).
Nothing too bad has happened to me yet, but obviously, something is amiss.
[edited by: crescenta at 11:58 pm (utc) on May 22, 2005]
My Stats are way down as well, posted to [webmasterworld.com...]
Sorry about the people who lost their Google traffic - just be glad that Yahoo didn't have an update at the same time. :)
On the bright side, my eCPM is up quite a bit, which would be great if I were more interested in statistics than in the size of my Google EFT deposit.
How did Google make all those billions of dollars? By "indexing" the entire internet. They are the mother of all scraper sites.
I never put much stock in link popularity in the first place, because if you have a bunch of people linking to you, it makes you popular. It does not make you relevant, insightful, honest, fair, or right or wrong.
Linking was also always subject to plenty of fraud and scraping, caching, etc., and it has overwhelmed the web just like email spam.
That's just one complaint I have about the "Google way" of doing things.
I have a feeling that when I search from now on, I'll be hitting the "I feel lucky" button more often or doing searches from Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Dogpile or any other search engine that doesn't change their super-secret-double-hush-non-relevant "algo" every six to eight weeks.
Google was great before they became the de facto king of search and went public. I believe they are now doing the internet community a grave disservice by forcing webmasters and publishers to dance to their tune instead of creating solid, intelligent content.
This Bourbon update is aptly named. The search results are sloshy and besotted, blurry and obscure, just like after downing a fifth.
As usual with these behemoths, I first praised them, now I curse them. They will be their own undoing. Yahoo did it, ebay's done it, Amazon's been there. Google will go the same route and all of it will be richly deserved.
Am I a little upset, perhaps jaded in my contempt for the mega-corporate mindset? You betcha. We put our faith in G and their revenue-producing scheme and it's been nothing but a hellish game of catch-on and catch-up, fall down, roll over, bark. The webmasters have become nothing more than Pavlovian dogs in a grand Google experiment.
Ruff!
Make sure you have another income than adsense...
-Or at least have more sites with different sources of income - and more than one language :-)
In mid-March our Google referrals roared back, in a day's time, to similar levels to those before mid-December. It seemed as if our work had paid off. Alas, traffic fell apart again with the Bourbon update -- with Google referrals again dropping about 85% on Saturday. Our Adsense revenue has been affected, obviously, as Google provides (or used to) a fair amount of our traffic.
No changes to the site at all, still same rankings @ MSN & Yahoo! -- 1 and 2 respectively.
I'm seeing a slight reduction in weekend traffic, however I feel this could be the annual end of school year start of summer dip.
In fact, I use this time of year to determine my professional employed useage.
