Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My story:
I could not understand why the traffic had dropped so drastically on my middle site...checking stats not site.
Then after 3 days of worry and belaboring the adsense stats I visited my own site (heh, instead of WW) and the index page wouldn't load! Bottom bar said done but nothing was there. No 404 as the poor thing thought itself loaded.
Anyway, I quick opened it up for edit and found some minor changes I had made over the weekend that had somehow resulted in a major mess up of my header tags.....teach me to take that extra moment to recheck the pages I 'fix'.
Anyone else like to share how they bit themselves in the, ahem, foot regarding loss of adsense revenue due to their own 'dumb webmaster mistakes'?
Ann
sorry, the thread should say Dumb, not dump. :)
Maybe, but there's certainly nothing wrong with dumping mistakes that have resulted in the loss of AdSense revenue. :-)
Stoooopiiid!
Traffic and earnings took a nosedive but imnot sure if it affected me as much as recently losing my best inlink.
Keep 'em coming.
While there are some that may think this a whimsical throw away thread then think again. Every mistake a member makes, (and reports it here), on his or her sites will be saving the many in here who read about it a ton of grief.
For those reading here it will serve as a heads up warning to others, newbees or seasoned pros to NOT make the same mistakes, or in the case of mine, be very careful and CHECK your pages well before and even immediately after going live. :)
Ann
It's like
put index.htm index.htm.new
delete index.htm
rename index.htm.new index.htm
This is to minimize the downtime of a page while the upload occures.
But one time, I was in the WLAN of the press center of a big German fair. They had some strange fire wall setings.
The delete command worked
The rename command worked, but returned file not found
But why?
The reason was, that the put command did not work, but unil I found out the reason, all files on my best earning domain had been deleted.
For luck, an other FTP programm worked and I had retored all after about 1,5 hours.
Different FTP tools work differently under different firewall rules and on different servers. FTP can be a pain sometimes. I now check my pages a few minutes after upload (not immediately). Of course this is not uniquely an adsense issue.
Actually it is an adsense issue since you can't get clicks if your pages don't show.
More input please. :)
Ann
One of my sites was doing really well CTR wise, so I obviously bought extra traffic for it. One fine day, I created, tested, and uploaded a new page to that site. A couple hours later I noticed my stats had stopped dead on the clicks and earnings side of things while the impressions kept rising. I of course came to WW to see if similar problems with Google stats were being reported and it was only 6 hours and $26 worth of paid traffic later that I decided to go check out my site and to my suprise instead of the usual well targetted ads, I was getting ads about "Meade and Celestron Telescopes".
As I may have mentionned before, to prevent clicking my own ads, I use replacement GIF images taken from the AS Ad format page [google.com], while I work on my sites offline. I may have forgot to flick the switch. DUUHHHHHHHH!
I changed my basic text links menu for a nice, stylish javascript one. What I didn't know is that these lovely menu's can't be crawled by SE bots. I only found this out when I looked at my auto generated Google sitemap to find a total of 8 pages in it instead of a couple of thousand.
Fortunately my site was doing well in serps, and had been correctly indexed in the past so I doubt if there was any loss in the short space of time the menu was there. It's now been replaced by a basic test menu with some css formatting, and the sitemap is properly showing all pages again.
I don't think the loss was much, but had the situation continued a lot of my pages would have dropped out of search, and resulted in some loss of income.
So the message is to make sure your Google sitemap is up to date, and that bots can crawl your site properly!
I put an error page redirect to my homepage so any visitors coming in to a bad url would not be lost and would go to my home page.
Before I knew what was going on I had a dup content penalty because G thought I had 7 copies of my homepage under different urls.
visitors dropped by 1/2 for six months.
[edited by: Alioc at 12:06 pm (utc) on Oct. 22, 2006]
About the Javascript menus. I use them BUT before each one is a link to my very complete and updated regularly sitemap page. :)
I was clued early on about that.
Ann
Anyone else like to share how they bit themselves in the, ahem, foot regarding loss of adsense revenue due to their own 'dumb webmaster mistakes'?
Fortunately this was pre-AdSense days when I was pushing Amazon as my principal source of revenue.
I had this "sophisticated" way of includes etc. etc. for a rotating banner ad which called another .htm file embedded within an IFrame.
I was sooooo super smart, didn't want this .htm file to be indexed by SE's so I put in the <head> of that file.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Of course, being an include....
Dumb, dumb, dumb. Took days to discover the error, never thought to look at my source from a page loaded from the internet.
A friend picked it up. Dumbest mistake I ever made.
Unfortunately I wrote it wrong, denying access to any robot anywhere.
I dived and dived for 3 months. But that was before Adsense for me too <sigh! />
Come on, I know there are plenty more out there :)
Ann
Initially I only put AdSense on a few pages and a few sites since I was unsure how the trade would judge them. My first month's earnings of USD 230+ convinced me to try further however it was nearly a full year before I went sites wide and then saw a doubling of my earnings in the first month and well into 4 figures...
That really made me take notice so I started to play with placements etc and within two months doubled my earnings again.
The moral of the story, don't be so darned complacement, keep experimenting and adding relevant stuff...and you really don't want to know how many thousands of Dollars I reckon I missed out on:-(
Ann
<strong><font color="#666666" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1">Last Updated
<!-- #BeginDate format:Am1 -->October 18, 2006<!-- #EndDate -->
</font></strong> For some reason, on saving, Dreamweaver will occasionally insert it elsewhere in the file, overwriting a few characters of the existing code. About two weeks ago I started a seasonal Adwords campaign, but I couldn't figure why the Adsense wasn't bringing in the revenue. Checking the page, the Date code had been inserted right in the middle of the Adsense code.
Maybe there is something to this 'check your work first' thing.
I had a good income going and decided to convert my existing hand coded HTML pages to a CMS. Totally slipped my mind that it was my old pages that were indexed in the SERPS. Suddenly, 2 years of hard work of backlinking, etc. went down the drain. My listings got _almost_ totally wiped out from the search engines. Biggest boo boo yet.
I managed to get 99% of it out of googles cache fortunately, but it took a week of work to get it back online.
These things happen...
TJ
Can't get myself to let go and hire people to do what I am doing cheaply, I could grow tenfold if I did, but afraid of competition, can't get myself to trust a stranger with my proprietary work, a vicious cycle!
Ann
