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
Once I realised my mistake, I put back the old pages and they're once again reindexed even though there are no back links to any of them!
The other big mistake I made was not experimenting with different ad sizes near enough. I recently switched over to a large rectangle from a leaderboard and the response to the new format has been nothing short of amazing - CTR and earnings have doubled and tripled!
I still don't have AS on my homepage, which accounts for about 10% of my traffic, is that a dumb mistake?
I don't carry any advertising on about 7,000 photo gallery pages, is that a mistake?
I don't show ads to logged-in forum visitors, is that a mistake?
My host had a crash and my most recent backup was 1 month old, and the host's most recent good backup was 2 weeks old... now THAT WAS a dumb mistake on my part.
[edited by: RonS at 9:19 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2006]
homo hominis lupus
I have no issue with trusting people generally, but the problem in our field is in the "eye of the beholder" the more you learn the more you feel it is child's play, the less you trust your own success.. Also it is an established fact that our barrier to entry is really low, right? Here I am spreading my fears ;-)
I wasn't going to post this, mainly because of embarrassment, but figured maybe others can learn from my stupid, stupid mistake.
So here goes... I actually typo'd by domain name on 2 navigation links. You may be thinking that's not so bad, except for the fact that I didn't catch it, BUT, some smart person did!
Someone noticed I typo'd my domain on the links, and actually registered the typo'd domain. Sooooo, 2 of my navigation links were sending my visitors to another website that was parked with nothing but ads.
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!
Guess you need someone to lazy to develop their own projects. Someone unmotivated who just has the capability to do basic tasks and doesnt understand technical aspects of web design.
Hmmm, where do i send an app? :)
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'?
Er, like forgetting to remove their Mediapartners-Google disallow reference from their robots.txt, so as to allow the Adsense content robot access to the site to determine what it's about <g>
Heck, anyone can make a mistake!
Matt
I just found a long standing Duh mistake. I was changing colors and ads around when I hit this one page (on my computer) that was totally blank!
I quick went to site online and yep, it was also blank.
went to my spare copies area-opened it, quick made the changes I was implimenting and uploaded it.
I still have no clue how it happened but it was that way for months.
sheeshhhh,
Ann
Ann
Sheeeesh, just how dumb do I have to be to get sympathy around here? :)
(Would that be more accurate as "commiseration" than "sympathy"? )
[edited by: RonS at 12:59 am (utc) on Oct. 31, 2006]
I offer you my warmest sympathies and heartfelt commiseration to one and all who, like me, have participated in the 'I think I must have been sleeping' club!
:)
Ann
rsync over ssh is the way to go. It's secure, reliable, and uses bandwidth efficiently.
Overnight we have become a front page thread.
Well, keep 'em coming, the world wants to know :)
And maybe needs a little help.
This morning I noticed a grey bar on my newest site and went to Google and could not find it anywhere (copy and Paste) After awhile I looked really close at the URL and noticed it had a dot com dot/ at the end. I thought "self, that is not right. Have you ever seen that before(scratches head)". Self replied, "nope, never!".
I searched til I was blue in the face but the upshot of it is: It took that way when I bookmarked it several months ago in IE and that was the only instance of it I could find.
Using the correct URL the PR 4 is showing and all seems good. I deleted that bookmark and did another which works fine....
This confounded web is going to drive me crazy(er)! I hate not finding what caused it but at least I can live with the results. :)
Some dumb mistake I must have made in the beginning and fixed during tweaking.
Ann
I have a PR5 site created two years ago, updated several times a week, and while that sounds hunky-dory, I didn't realize at the time that my designer had loaded about a million different sized white "images" as part of the design. So load time for the site has always been an issue for dialup people because each of those white images (invisible to the eye because they just fill in the background on the page) have to load individually. It's fine on Broadband, though.
So over the last two years I've done my best to become a smart web person, learned CSS, Photoshop, SEO, all that good stuff and now have my redesign for the site all ready....a nice clean CSS design, very optimized yet still keeping the personality and content of the old version of the my site. I intend to keep all the original file names and leave the internal navigation of the site the same, just load a new CSS stylesheet and use a different layout on the pages.
The stupid question is...will that screw me up? I had thought that keeping the same file names for all the pages, plus the same navigation, should keep the spiders happy when they view the new page, but I'm still a little superstitious about suddenly losing page rank and all that organic traffic overnight because the site is being served through a completely new design template and things are laid out a bit differently.
What do the veterans think? When I upload the new site, which is more likely to happen:
a) All will be exactly the same with traffic, PR, etc.;
b) There could be a momentary dip of a few months until the spiders get used to the redesign;
c) I disappear from the search engines and end up starting over again, reborn as Ms. Crankypants.
I have over 2000 backlinks, so that's a good thing.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw a dumb question here into the thread because I'd rather not be contributing here in a few weeks saying, "Look at the dumb thing I did!"
Thanks in advance for feedback!
Cosmokid
That is a very good post but not appropriate for this thread.
Please copy and paste it in the css forum and perhaps you will get help there.
This thread is about dumb mistakes ALREADY made that affected AdSense earnings.
Thank you for posting but that is too far off topic.
Ann
If that was a good while back you might want to give them another chance...when they get it right :) it gives a good living.
Ann
I know there are a lot more out there.
tell us about them so we can all be on our toes.
Ann
*G* try typing with a baby mini schnauzer on your lap!
2 years of missed revenue.
I blame it on drinking.
Two oscommerce sites, one of which was run by a product feed from a backend system, the other was just run by a colleague through the admin interface. Uploaded a product feed one day.. to the wrong website..
The unique ids collided quite a lot so not only did I add a load of irrelevant products and categories, I overwrote quite a large number of products. Latest backup was a almost a week old, and quite a bit of work had been done in the interim. Lets just say I wasn't too popular for a while..
Lets just say I wasn't too popular for a while..
LOL That is a good one.
Hobbes: Sorry if that other post came across as making light of a tough situation. I really meant it to be helpful, may have been an ill timed attempt at humour.
Lesson? Try different formats and locations. Don't assume that one will work and one won't.
Great idea for a thread, Ann.
And Ann, typing with a baby schnauzer on your lap must be quite a challenge! It's usually 1.5 cats in my lap, here (more than one wants to get on, but only about 1.5 actually fit on the lap. :)
Cosmokid
my advice, try a bit of everything all the time.
here's one I just found -- A couple weeks ago I started using the psa's to send traffic to other sites of mine (waiting years to do that is one mistake), today I just happened to click on one of my psa ads and guess what? it loads the site *in* the box where adsense is supposed to be instead of taking the user to the site they clicked on in the ad!
