Just to share with the world some of the pain we’re seeing. Here’s the current graph of the rate of pages crawled per day by GoogleBot.
As you can see, we’re on a trend down… This is absolutely insane! We’ve got 60,000 pages on our site, at a rate of 400 per day we’re looking at "forever" to be indexed. It doesn’t help of course that we’re not index at all.
Well, it looks increasing they CPC rate to $0.55 has improved the impressions. I’ve logged an additional 1,200 impressions in the last day. I’ve also now gotten 12 clicks (up from 800 impressions an 0 clicks yesterday). This now is showing a total over the run of a 0.73% CTR.
The good part is that I’ve also picked up an additional 100 views of the page, so hopefully this means that somebody is passing it around at Google to look into the problems at wink.
GoogleBot is still lame .. ok, maybe Google employees are totally insensitive to advertising. Stats from the last 24 hours:
783 impressions — remember it’s running targeted at "Company: Google"
0 clicks
$0.20 CPC offered
I’m going to change it to a $0.55 per click and see if the impressions go up any.. probably every is going home for the holidays.
Background:
Wink has had no end of problems with Google. It roots back to our book marking service which was overwhelmed with spammers. At one point I estimated that 75% of our new user registrations were link farm spammers. Over many months I’ve cracked down on these abuses and with the re-launch of our service they should be a distant memory. Reality check, I’m sure they’re there, but just not productive anymore.
We the re-launch of wink.com I was hoping that we’d get "re-discovered" by Google and indexed. Not happening, for that matter they’re indexing pages around 200 a day (compared to 2000 a day by Yahoo!), we only have nine pages in the google index. Really thinking about it, they’ve only indexed the "about" section, not the developer section which is pretty much the same (text content).
Experiment:
In total frustration, I’ve gone a placed a Facebook ad targeted at Google employees. It’s pretty simple, basic units — $10 budget with a $0.10 CPC… The subject of the ad is "GoogleBot is lame" in an attempt to get some eyeball share from Google employees. According to the Facebook ad system, this should target about 5,000 people.
What’s lacking:
I’m not a copy writer, so "GoogleBot is lame" is really a lame headline, should it carry more punch. Should it do other things?
References:
The web is rich with libraries and applications. You wouldn’t think twice about using a linked list library — ok, I know people who do… But, in the realm of high performance computing, use off the shelf solutions!
Not really, but between McAfee screwing up my machine while trying to remove some AdWare — it doesn’t do a very good job. Then installing some AdWare killer that did get it, but now left my machine in a state that yeilded kernel panics, it was time to do what nobody should have to do. Reinstall the OS!
I’m now runing Vista, why go to all of the pain unless you’re going to make a meaningful improvement. Still getting used to it, but it’s a change.