Crap Site Effect

[Livenomadic]

Up until last week I hadn't touched my site in 9 months.

For those 9 months my adsense click through rate was about 8-10%.

Seven days ago I added 200 new articles to my site, completely SEOed the template, and improved the layout (Basically relaunched the site).

Since then my CTR has dropped to 1-2%

My overall revenue hasn't been effected because I am getting way more traffic, but this change in CTR was puzzling.

While speaking to a webmaster friend over lunch he gave an interesting theory:

Sites that SUCK will have high click through rates because the ads are the most interesting parts of the site itself.

While this theory didn't say much about my old site, it does make a kind of sense.

Anyone else ran into this "Crap Site Effect?"

[robobat]

Hi,

since you are having an increase in traffic, why don't you look for another ad network company that overs eCPM such as fastclick(the best), burstmedia, focusin and etc.

[moltar]

Maybe some ads are still PSA on the new pages? Or even if they are not PSA, maybe Google did not figure out exactly what the pages are about and showing not very relevant ads. It sometimes may take a few days for the ads to change to the most appropriate ads.

Try separating them into channels. Put one channel on the old pages, and another onto the new ones. And see how it will perform.

[rjohara]

This is the sort of thing Brett was talking about in a thread called "Does style even matter?"

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