Site was down, now EPC is 5X the norm

i'm not worried, but should i be?

[jackti]

This is what happened: My web host provider decided they would limit cpu usage on their SQL server and started limiting active threads to 1, with a "-1 seconds" timeout, i have some pretty busy pages and the result was that most people would get an SQL error message (including Googlebot).

Now all my pages are showing ads for web hosting and all kinds of SQL services, my CTR is down to 0.1%, but my EPC has now gone up 5 times. If it does raise a flag at Google somewhere will they look at a cached snapshot and figure out what's up or should I maybe contact them?

[JinxBoy]

nah, it should be okay...

Switch hosts though, thats awful.

[raywood]

I'm confused. A server error page doesn't have the script to fetch the google ads. So they couldn't appear on the error pages.

Then you got your site working again and showing normal pages, but he ads were related to the previous error messages? So google doen't analyze pages on the fly, huh. I guess it crawls, analyzes, caches, and serves ads related to crawled pages until the next crawl. Is that correct? I thought I had noticed some strange behavior on some of my pages that change frequently.

Anyway, for 5x EPC I'm off to build a site about SQL Server.
ray

[jackti]

well, not everybody would be seeing error messages, as maybe 1/10 people got in, googlebot would 9/10 times get an error message after someone had triggered an ad when they got in.

And even if the EPC is 5 times higher, i'm still losing revenue since my site is automotive and i'm seeing less than a 5th of the clicks i was getting before, so I don't think Google would blame me for trying to get rich quick :/

And as for the hosting, I went and changed to a new provider about 5 minutes after i noticed what they had done :) that kind of setup is unacceptable for any decent-sized web site.

[richmondsteve]

What happened to jackti happened to one of my sites in early August. My site received a sudden huge spike in traffic over several hours which caused my PHP scripts to display MySQL database connection limit errors *intermittently*. During this period Google's Mediapartners bot would visit site pages and those that displayed the error message would be considered pages about databases. As a result those pages displayed AdSense ads for database products and services *even after* the database load went down and the pages displayed their prior expected content.

For two posts I made here in August about this incident see
Scale of fraud, or... [webmasterworld.com] and look at msg #19 and msg #20. You can ignore all, but the last 3 paragraphs of msg #19 if you want.

Based on my experience, jackti, I would advise contacting Google ASAP to explain the situation. Better safe than sorry.

[jackti]

richmondsteve: thanks for posting your story -- after i had read what happened in your case I decided to email Google explaining what happened. I only have positive experiences dealing with them, I'm hoping it's no different this time..

Yesterdays stats is just looking ridiculous, the CTR is as bad as ever, and now the EPC seems to have gone down with it :), so it's down to < 1/10th of the earnings i had before.
I don't know if Google can do anything about it, but even if they cant it's reassuring to have mailed them about it.

Thanks again.

[richmondsteve]

jackti, I just re-read the two posts of mine I pointed to you and realized they didn't mention that Google did in fact do something on their end pretty quickly to replace the irrelevant (but high CPC) ads and resume displaying relevant ads. I mentioned that in a Deceember post, but forgot to put the link to that post [webmasterworld.com] (msg #16 at this link).

Since it's been more than 8 months since my experience and I'm sure plenty of others have been in the same boat since then I'm pretty confident the AdSense team will understand and take appropriate action if you explain the situation clearly. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.