Web Caches and Other - evidence of filtered traffic?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

As most of you know the "Web Caches and Other" category in adsense includes Bing and Yahoo image search and reporting for this category is done separately from your other sites. Recently my RPM has been higher under the "Web Caches and Other" category than on my own site which is odd, given that the Web Caches and Other clicks are also my site framed on yahoo/Bing.

Also recently the days in which I receive peak traffic have changed to be Tuesday-Thursday when they used to be Friday-Sunday and Ive also noticed that the visitors are more informational seekers than ever before, the number of transactional traffic has plummeted.

Do you think the higher RPM for Web Caches and Other might be a sign that the quality(not quantity) of traffic to my site is being controlled?

[incrediBILL]

Do you think the higher RPM for Web Caches and Other might be a sign that the quality(not quantity) of traffic to my site is being controlled?

Absolutely.

It's just what I've always said when I warned people back in the day to use NOARCHIVE and nobody listened, they never do, that the search engines were using cache pages to keep the surfer on THEIR property and not YOUR property, and the end game is all about the ad dollar.

Face time with the visitor is the whole goal of any site and the more latitude sites give the search engines, by allowing cache pages and screen shots, the less face time and by default less ad dollars they'll ever get.

Who cares if the cache page is a better user experience on the search engine because the end goal is supposedly to transition the visitor to your site which is happening less and less.

The search engines are taking and taking and webmasters aren't bright enough to stop it.

Not only that, we're dumb enough to reformat our data in microdata and RDF to make it easy, so they can show surfers information like reviews and poll results without them even visiting the sites!

Let me repeat: people are stupid.

</rant>

[Leosghost]

Some of us have used "no archive" for many years, in my case ever since I realised that the images were being hotlinked and they ( the search engines ) were merely archiving the text..

Why pay most ( 99% ) of the bandwidth for 1% of the visitors..

Also all the reasons that Bill gave above..:)

[incrediBILL]

Some of us have used "no archive" for many years

Many do but not enough to make a difference or the SE's would pay more attention to webmasters.

Being a webmaster is kind of like being a voter and you vote with your website. Problem is, just like voting, most people simply either don't vote or are misled or uneducated and vote the wrong way.

Until webmasters become unified you'll just take whatever the search engines or directories give you and you'll like it or lump it.

Closest I've seen to webmaster unification was the SOPA action against GoDaddy but then again that was completely risk-free and meaningless because the registrar doesn't effect site traffic, it was just noise.

Had Google been behind SOPA you think anyone would've blocked Googlebot or do anything else that could impact their traffic?

No.

Lots of whining, no action, no guts, no glory.

[IanCP]

when I warned people back in the day to use NOARCHIVE and nobody listened

I did and that seems an eternity ago.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I listened too, Bill, and though my results have no cache link there is still a full preview of my pages in web results and a copy of my site behind image results. Not-working-as-intended.

I also stopped using a frame busting script recently, and am looking for a better alternative, because Google attributes frame busted traffic as "direct traffic" instead of coming from images. That and the bounce rate is MUCH lower in my case without the frame busting script.

My thinking was that if my page is loading without my consent in a frame on Google that I should break that visitor home but the result is all too often serving that bouncing visitor a page twice. We need a google-no-frame tag me thinks.

I feel like my site is getting mauled by Google when they refuse to send the visitors who are, in fact, looking for my content and found it in a preview or frame but didn't need to see more. Web Cache and Other...

[Leosghost]

there is still a full preview of my pages in web results and a copy of my site behind image results. Not-working-as-intended.

That is down to their "preview"...not to your "no cache" or "noarchive" being defective or

Not-working-as-intended

and you've let them have access to your images, give 'em and inch.. and they'll take the bread out of your mouth and your arm with it..

[incrediBILL]

That is down to their "preview"...not to your "no cache" or "noarchive" being defective or

Yes but the little weasels won't let you opt out of 'preview' unless you opt out of indexing the page itself. A preview is an archive copy, I don't care how you candy coat it, be it a visual graphical archive or a text archive, it's an archive and NOARCHIVE should've worked and instead give us NOPREVIEW, but we got neither.

[Leosghost]

Agreed..but what I mean is for example..I don't let them at my images in my folders ( robots set to forbidden )..and I don't let them hot-link my images..

So they index me, but if you hover over the little arrows the "preview" is taken live from my sites, spaces where the images ought to be..but there is not the "cached" link..

One of these days I'll get around to serving them degraded ( but good enough for the definition they use at "preview" ) watermarked thumbnails from a "holding" image site..( I have a few sites that I could use just for those kind of thumbnails ) and alter the image source paths on the sites that they preview so as to pull the thumbs from said "holding" sites..

Previews would thus look a little better, might even let them have image search access on the "thumbs" site..searched images would then give me some free advertising to the main sites..and no-one ( except the terminally larcenous and "G", "B" etc image bots ) would bother to hot-link to the degraded ones..

Or only let the image bots crawl and link to the "holding site" etc ..or something like that..

However there is only a limited amount of time in the day..and the little hand just went past "alcool o' clock" here..so ..it won't be today..:)

[netmeg]

Just serve G a big fat Flash file, and your preview will be nice and blank.

[JCKline]

I've used NOARCHIVE since it was introduced (yes I'm old), not because of AdSense (didn't exist then), but because it bothered me that people could "get what they wanted" without actually visiting my site.

[topr8]

>>It's just what I've always said when I warned people back in the day to use NOARCHIVE and nobody listened,

i did too!

i've been NOARCHIVE for years and i ban search robots that don't respect it.