Adsense drops by 95%. Crawler errors.

[Flightlevels]

Ive been on Xenforo (import from vBulletin) for about two years. About 6 weeks ago my Adsense income, clicks, active views and ad sessions dropped by 95% overnight. They all dropped to near zero. I don't believe I changed anything about the site.
Adsense reports crawler errors of "page not found" for;

http://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.php
http://www.mysite.com/forums/forum.php
http://www.mysite.com/forums/activity.php

Those pages lead to a Xenforo error of "page not found"

Can anyone offer any insight to my problem?

 

[Mr Lucky]

Your vbulletin redirection script stopped working?

 

[RobParker]

I believe those are VB pages...

 

[Flightlevels]

Thanks for the replies. I don't think the crawler errors are the cause of my significant drop in Adsense revenue. Google made changes on 18th December which affected many sites. Here's a 400+ post thread discussing the issue in the Adsense support forum.

A quote from that thread....

"As part of Google’s efforts to increase brand safety for advertisers, Google is making changes to the way it buys impressions on URLs that are uncrawled. More specifically, starting on December 15th, AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager will adopt more restrictive bidding on ad requests coming from URLs that are uncrawled. This is necessary to avoid the risk of ads running on sensitive content."

The website Search Engine Roundtable has three articles discussing the issue

SER January 6

SER January 15

SER January 16

 

[RobinHood]

I’ve been noticing this.

On brand new threads the ads won’t load as they haven’t been crawled yet. Pretty quickly after the first impression they start displaying though.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Quality is being valued over Newness and Quantity
Another forum down rank by Google.

 

[Slavik]

Quality is being valued over Newness and Quantity
Another forum down rank by Google.

Only if you arent producing quality content The drivel and instant gratification content has moved to the likes of FB and Twitter. Forums are moving to fill the gap of high quality content and troubleshooting which those sites who really promote quality forum discussions are doing very well.

 

[Digital Doctor]

Forums are moving to fill the gap of high quality content and troubleshooting which those sites who really promote quality forum discussions

What are forums doing to fill in the gap ?

 

[Slavik]

You quite literally just quoted what they are doing.

 

[Flightlevels]

After 62 days of next to zero income Adsense abruptly returned to normal 2 days ago. RPM jumped from $0.10 to $1.40 for no apparent reason.

 

[Golddisk]

After 62 days of next to zero income Adsense abruptly returned to normal 2 days ago. RPM jumped from $0.10 to $1.40 for no apparent reason.

Interesting. Did you happen to check if ads weren't appearing on certain pages? I have heard a lot of reports of ads not showing up on all pages they're set to, and I am even experiencing it on my forum.

 

[dutchbb]

Sometimes i get a report that some content is not allowed and some advertisers leave, earnings go down and after 7-14 days (if fixed) it will go up again (report removed and advertisers back).

And of cource pages were ads are not showing because of google new crawl rules to protect advertisers has also effect.

 

[Flightlevels]

Interesting. Did you happen to check if ads weren't appearing on certain pages? I have heard a lot of reports of ads not showing up on all pages they're set to, and I am even experiencing it on my forum.

I did not identify any specific pages which did not show ads. Some ads continued to be displayed but I suspect they were only low value third party ads.

Sometimes i get a report that some content is not allowed and some advertisers leave, earnings go down and after 7-14 days (if fixed) it will go up again (report removed and advertisers back).

And of cource pages were ads are not showing because of google new crawl rules to protect advertisers has also effect.

I have never had a warning for content, my forum is private for professionals and I'm very unlikely to receive one.

 

[dutchbb]

Can adsense crawl your pages if they are private? You can set access for that in adsense panel. But if they returned to normal maybe not necessary.

 

[Flightlevels]

Can adsense crawl your pages if they are private? You can set access for that in adsense panel. But if they returned to normal maybe not necessary.

Yes I have granted the Adsense crawler access by entering login details in the Adsense > Settings > Crawler Access page of my Adsense account on the Google Adsense site.

 

[dutchbb]

I think google is doing a lot of things at the moment and some things go wrong or slow, same for indexing with the new search console. And still waiting how the chrome internal adblocker will behave..