Forget about using pop-unders... Trust me

Bad experience with pop-unders with googlebot

[DreamMaster]

I am a long time lurcer but first time poster and I learned a lot of SEO techniques in here which I put into practice in one of my sites and had a lot of sucess.
About 2 weeks ago I decided to use pop-unders to further increase my traffic but to my surprise that traffic was practically worthless. Out of thousands of hits not even one sale, so I decided to drop the pop-unders.
The problem is that I took them off my page about 2 days after the googlebot crawl of my site and to my disbelief googlebot only crawled about 400 pages of my 6500+ site which had never happened before. Usually googlebot crawles at least 6000 pages of my site in every update.
I also used one of those sites that check the uptime of your site and confirmed that there had been no downtime in those days.
Like I said, I nuked the popunders but I guess I was a bit too late and scared googlebot off my site.
The moral of the story is never ever use popunders, I guess I learned my lesson the hard way :-(

[volatilegx]

Hi DreamMaster and thanks for contributing :)

This is the first I've heard of Googlebot not likeing popunders. Anybody else seeing this?

[BigDave]

After all the comments out there by google about how annoying they find popups and popunders to be, I would not be surprised if they counted against you somewhat.

Google wants to send users to sites that they want to find. And popunders are a big negative in most peoples book.

But I really do not think a sample of one site is enough to come to a conclusion. Losing a major incoming link could have the same affect.

[egomaniac]

I have a couple of popunders on my site for for newsletter signups. I have had these there for at least year, maybe longer (can't really remember). My site has good pagerank, has many pages with top rankings, and gets spidered regularly (and the popunders are on the most prominent pages).

I don't think Google is penalizing for this. As much as people hate the random popups/unders for the X10, Casinos, etc., targeted popups for things like newsletters many people don't mind at all (I boosted my signups by 40% when I added my popunder).

I think your lack of getting spidered fully is due to something else.

[DreamMaster]

I used trafficswarm for my pop-unders because I thought it would not be as bad as other services to my visitors because they don't pop up a whole sized page and the page only has 6 links with reviews to other sites in the network. Therefore it is suposedly very targeted and a lot less intrusive. That said, I did not think it would have such a negative effect with googlebot.
And I did not loose any links because I only have a few and I checked them out and my site is still listed.

[hobbnet]

We have one pop under and an exit pop. For our two main keyword phrases we are listed 3rd and 5th. Each term gets about 1.5million results and is a pretty competitive area (many overture bids are over $1.25 for these terms).

HTH

[Nick_W]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld DreamMaster, you're gonna like it here ;)

I don't think you have anything that would back up your clain though do you? Sites drop in and out of G all the time and pages get dropped and then re-indexed all the time.

With the amount of pages G has in its index funny stuff happens from time to time. I'd be willing to bet it has nothing whatsoever to do with pup unders and is either a glitch that will right itself in time or something is amiss at your end.

Hang in there, it'll most likely be fine again come next month...

Nick

[jomaxx]

Ditto that. I don't know anything about Trafficswarm, but Googlebot doesn't read Javascript, much less try to execute it to see what happens, so it's doubtful you were penalized for that.