Forum Moderators: martinibuster
When I ported my website from custom .php code to a popular CMS, my previously stable-ish ecpm halved overnight and never recovered, this was several months ago now. Adsense can be very fragile.
I have analysed the pages over and over and the only major difference is an absolute ton of .js within the CMS header. I want to remove the .js and test the effects on adsense. Many member functions require the .js and so I hid the .js for guests and adsense.
However, if a user is logged in and loads a page with adsense on it, can the adsense code somehow interact with the page and see the .js I don't want it to see?
I hope all that rubbish makes sense.
Thanks.
When I ported my website from custom .php code to a popular CMS, my previously stable-ish ecpm halved overnight and never recovered,
Enabling and disabling .js is just tilting at windmills.
The opening statement said everything I needed to know about your problem.
Simply put, your site was working well and you "fixed it" and now it doesn't.
It sounds like you lost some of your SEO value during the transition:
- Is the content on all the pages exactly the same?
- Did you 301 redirect all the old page names to all the new pages names?
- Are your page Titles, H1s, H2s, etc. still the same?
Comparing the HTML of your new pages vs your old pages will give you the answers you seek.
I'm quite an experienced SEO and webmaster. I've never come across a change in source code, altering adsense earnings. The difference was dramatic and instant. In the past 5 months we've lost literally tens of thousands.
I've compared ad placements and they're pixel perfect. The only change is the extra code, primarily javascript.
Anyhow I have completely removed it all from a selection of pages so that I can monitor it.
Could there be crawl issues?
Have you checked the Webmaster Tools to see if they have anything flagged?
maybe the page load has slowed because of all this javascript in the head, and a small percentage of the people are not bothering to wait. even a second can make a big difference.
you might not be noticing yourself because as the developer you're seeing the page super quick.
1. I did an experiment and migrated a site of mine from a custom cms I made to a very popular one (not WP). The SEO effect was not good, traffic went down, incoming emails down and earnings down.
2. I redesigned the site (now using this new CMS) to look exactly as the original one when I had my CMS running. The final product was exactly the same: navigation, appearance and ad position. Things didn't get any better.
In both cases I waited for SEs to recognize the changes. Changes on the link structure were minimal.
The only difference just as you point out were the amount of .JS files the new system was using. Navigation was not JS, was pure text as usual and only some random image and content rotators were added. Anyway the new site was heavier.
3. I went back to my original design and old CMS. Things came back to normal. My pages on this site are heavily optimized for load speed. Traffic came back and clicks too.
My conclusion is: loading time, size and compatibility. Although I tested the site on diff browsers I cannot be sure on how the site loaded on every client computer and how it affected their experience.
Webmaster tools hasn't flagged anything. If there were crawl issues, I'd have guessed our rankings would go down. New pages are usually added to the index within minutes.
The site is actually faster now than what it was.
Another avenue I want to explore, is that the CMS we used was invision power board. Our forum and member base already used this platform, and used a global cookie to give members access to the rest of the site.
We decided to just port everything to invision. It could be that google is detecting IPB and smart pricing based on them seeing the page as a forum page. Though the page looks nor acts anything like a forum but does have IPB references in it etc.
Thanks for all the input you've all given so far.
