Tag Archives: analytics

Epic Fail! Google Deindexed Me

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I went to check on my Google Analytics stats last week to discover that my traffic had completely stopped. As in, there was NOBODY coming to the site. I know I haven’t posted much lately, but that seemed a little odd. I normally get at least 1500 visitors a month just from Google sending traffic to my old posts. So I did some more digging and discovered that around the end of June, my traffic took a nosedive and never came back.

Analytics Nosedive

I logged into Webmaster Tools, and found that my site mysteriously stopped getting crawled. Then came a couple of hours of wandering around forums and blog posts trying to figure out what happened. Something was blocking Googlebot from verifying my site, but what?

In the end, it was an issue with my .htaccess file. During some site speed optimizations, I inadvertently blocked all traffic from Google’s servers. Oops! That was a huge mistake… I’ve resubmitted my site to Google, updated my sitemap, and am waiting for the traffic to come back now. The moral of the story is, if you are working on your .htaccess file, be sure you know what you are doing!

 

Another Bevo Media Post

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In case you haven’t seen all the posts lately (like this one and this one) about Bevo Media, it is now publicly launched and ready for action.  It is a tracking platform for paid traffic, along the lines of Prosper202.  It does have a lot of nifty features that 202 doesn’t have, and they are putting some serious marketing muscle behind this release to make it a major player in the PPC / PPV / Media Buy tracking & analytics field.

Bevo Media was designed by Ryan Bukevicz and a team of programmers, and the finished product is definitely quite polished.  The interface is quite visually striking.  But looks aside, there are several things that set it apart from 202 and other competitors.  First of all, it has built-in support for the top CPA affiliate networks.  You just enter your login details and it will automatically pull the stats for you.  This is a massive time saver!  It also has built-in API support for the big 3 PPC engines.  This means that it will pull your click costs automatically as well.  That means no more logging in to your networks and search engines 10 times a day.  Bevo Media becomes your hub for everything.

Another cool feature that I’ve never seen before in a tracking system is the Classroom.  It has different articles, videos, and tools to help the newbie affiliate get their feet wet and make some money.  If you are already a successful affiliate, there’s probably nothing in here that will be new to you.  But if you are just starting out it’s definitely worth a look.

They have both an online hosted version (like Tracking202.com), and they also have an open source self-hosted version (like Prosper202).  They both look the same, and if you opt for the self-hosted version they have a very nifty tool that will automatically install and configure it on a Rackspace Cloud server for you.  For people that have never installed anything on web server before, this is a godsend.

So is Bevo Media better than Prosper202?  Ultimately that decision is going to be up to you.  202 has a lot of diehard fans, and it’s become the industry standard over the last couple of years.  That being said, I think for people running PPC traffic from the big 3 search engines, this is going to give them a huge advantage over the standard Prosper202 installation.  It’s more on par with Tracking 202 Pro, only it’s free.  Definitely give it a shot if you’ve got some time to test it out, and let me know what you think of it in the comments!