Site Diagnostics Craziness

Have you checked yours? Impact on eCPM?

[developerfood]

Recently I noticed that under Reports/Site Diagnostics I was getting a good number of "Not Found" Blocked URLs, which, as I understand it, means that the GoogleBot can't crawl those pages.

However, my server logs were not reporting 404 errors for those pages, and the Google Webmaster Tools errors list was clean and empty.

I contacted Google Adsense Support and got this message:

"Thank you for your patience while our tech specialists reviewed your account. They found that your pages are being properly crawled and the ads are being served normally; therefore you can disregard the "Not Found" messages. I hope these messages are not an inconvenience to you."

That's friendly enough, and of course it does not inconvenience me, except that it freaks me out. I'm going to take their advice and ignore it.

The mind races, however. Since GoogleBot and the AdSense GoogleBot share the same database, and since this error is reporting only on the AdSense side, am I therefore getting less than optimal ads on those pages, which would result in a lower eCPM?

I'm curious if anyone else is seeing this occur, particularly amongst those who are reporting reduced eCPM.

[phranque]

i see this commonly and it may refer to the last attempted access which is not to say the url was never accessed.
it may have been some other network problem and the request never reached your server, hence no error logged.

and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

[developerfood]

Boy, I wish I could take Google's advice and just ignore this, but I've found that my organic search traffic is now half what it used to be before this craziness began.

I've made another request to AdSense Support to review the situation. In the meantime, does anyone have any advice at all, other than to ignore it? I just can't do that any more.

[developerfood]

Another response from Google:

they found no technical error and suggested I use Sitemaps

um, I am using sitemaps. I have been for nearly a year.

Just what kind of 'review of my account' could have occurred? 'Yep, it's an account alright.'

I feel like I've been support spam'ed. No matter how many times I've seen people with the same complaint on this site, it really hurts now that it's happened to me.

I've never needed Google's help, never asked for it in all these years. I've always researched, corrected, rinse and repeat.

But this time - simply put - it's Google's fault.

To be then treated like this - well, I've had it.

First viable candidate as competitor and I'm gone. Period, end of story.

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:46 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2007]
[edit reason] paraphrased - no email quotes thanks [/edit]

[panos]

I see this commonly too. Google displays strange chinese URLs that do not belong to my site and should be blocked by the allowed sites filter. Anyway i think they are just "false alarms".