WTF Google, Get Off My Site!!

[Nohel]

So I had a 6 month long campaign finally get slapped. As I'm sure many know the routine, you see your impressions drop, clicks drop, conversions drop, till you are left with 0.

Funny thing is, right before I saw the 0, I noticed google visited my site 3 times...the first was as about 1am yesterday. They were on my site for about 2 hours according to my stat tracker I have in place! 2 hours! WTF can you do on a site for 2 hours. If that wasn't enough, they came back 2 more times at 4am and 4:15am.

Needless to say paused my campaign with all adgroups. I check my stats today and I see Google on my site again this morning! After they slapped it already, they got on at about 4:04am and were on there for another hour.

Now what the hell are they doing on my site for so long? I'm fearing they might put a note on my account and not just this campaign.

Anyone else have Google ride them this much????

 

[zany zoroaster]

You can't track how long someone's been on your site for. All your stats software is seeing is a hit from google at 1am and then another at 3am - it assumes that this is a human who sat there from 1 to 3 staring at the page, before refreshing/going to another page. Don't pay attention to the timespan when it comes to search crawlers.

 

[seodeveloping]

Crawlers just bounce on and off sites real quick. It's possible that google altered something that they look for in advertising accounts, and when a spider re-visited your site, something wasn't compliant, even though it has been running for 6 months previous to the slap.

Just a thought.

 

[Nohel]

@ Zany:

Statcounter has a feature, as I'm sure many other tracking services, which track length of time visitors are on your site. Looking at the "user activity" log, I can see what the individual user does on my site. I labeled Google's IP address from Mountain View, CA to show up everytime they come...When the bots come, its a very quick hit and bounce...this time...I have a log of them being there for shit load of time...I doubt my tracking is perfect, but I don't think it's that far off to misduge an hour or 2 hit

 

[zany zoroaster]

Nohel, I've seen statcounter's feature, and its exactly what I had in mind. The way the HTTP protocol works is that each request for a document is completely standalone. This means that each page/file that you view creates a separate one-time entry in the log or in the stats tracking system. There is no concept of "I have been browsing the site for 30 minutes" - there is only "zany requested file1. zany requested file 2. nohel requested file 3. googlebot requested robots.txt" etc. each request is individual.

The way that analytics packages attempt to remedy this situation, and give you a statistic that says "Joe spent 20 mins on your site" is to take a look at this stream of unrelated file requests, and see the timespan between the first and the last. Its impossible to see when a user "left" your site, because he never informs the site that he left...
Why are google's visits usually a quick hit and bounce? Because they're either a one-page request (the next request comes the next day, so its considered timed out - it doesn't say "google spent a day on your site") or because most of google's requests are just a request for robots.txt followed by index.html (the span between these is only a few seconds, so the visit is counted as lasting a few seconds.

This explanation doesn't really address why you got slapped, but its there in case you ever end up working with analytics/HTTP protocol stuff...

 

[Nohel]

good stuff...I appreciate the clarification. I'm sure the whole dynamic url thing is in part to what led to my slap...in addition to other things I had going on...I guess on the brite side, it's an opportunity to use what was working and restructure my campaign to be more efficient. Usually once something starts you making money, you don't want to tweak too much for fear that it will change profit margins. But I guess if there is no risk...there is no reward.