Could either of these changes led to higher CTR and EPM?

No ads on home page, added a ton of bots to mod_rewrite.

[HughMungus]

Yesterday I made about double what I usually make in a day. Today, I'm already making about what I make in an average day. Of course, that's not enough information to make a sensible statistical analysis of what changes I've made but I thought this might be an interesting question in the meantime.

There have been two changes: 1. There are no ads and no PSA's showing up on my home page and 2. I added a ton of what I presume to be "bad bots" to my .htaccess file mod_rewrite.

Regarding possible cause #1: I replied in an earlier thread that I'm not getting ads on my home page anymore. I'm not getting PSA's or any keywords in Adlinks, either. It's strange because I am still getting ads on the internal pages. One theory I have is that maybe ads that appear on your internal pages are perceived to be more valuable to Adsens because the deeper the ad in a site, presumably the more specific the pages are (which gives you ads that are more specific than the ads you'd get on your general home page).

Regarding possible cause #2: Brett posted a list of bots I assumed should be blocked, if for no other reason than to decrease bandwidth. But could this also be helping me as far as Adsense somehow?

Another thing I just noticed is that my adlinks revenue is UP despite there being no keywords in the list (just a search box). Makes me wonder if the search box alone makes more $ than the keywords that are selected (and if it should be on the page permanently instead of only if there are no keywords to display).

Any thoughts? Totally theorizing over my Saturday morning coffee here.

[ClosedGL]

Hi Hugh,

I've thought the same thing about the search field rather than the Adlinks list; I'm sure the search field is a better earner, though I have no evidence of that (yet?).

Interesting that you mention the blocking of bad bots. I have been comparing statistics between one site which uses Webalizer to count traffic and the same site using Awstats to count traffic. I've noticed with Awstats that it can differentiate between bots and humans; leading to a 40/50% reduction of figures compared to Webalizer.

Bots can't click advertising, they also can't contribute to my site, so with a few exceptions (Hello Googlebot!) it would be nice to start blocking a few of them and start saving myself some hosting fees.

Just out of interest, do you know the whereabouts of the list that Brett posted, I did a quick search for "brett bad bot mod_rewrite" but nothing turned up...

Thanks

[HughMungus]

Well, there's another thread today in this forum about "increased earnings" so maybe it's the same thing across the board.

Here's the thread with what I presume to be a "bad bots" list: [webmasterworld.com...]