Traffic Dropping Again

I'm not sure what exactly is the cause of this; however, after having great three months, I'm experiencing two low months now. The traffic is down by about 25%, without us making any changes to the forum, vBSEO. Yes, I did install Sitemap Generator v.3.0 and expected improvements in the traffic; but was disappointed.

Can someone take a look at our forum and suggest something?: CrazyEngineers Forum

Note: There's nothing 'odd' in the Google Webmaster Tools. The site is malware free. There are about 11k 'Not Found' links but that count keeps on varying.

Even the adsense CTR is down! :(

The adds below header is very bad planned. They took a lot of space and possibly irritates your visitors. You should try to show adds side by side.

I think you should remove the standart button and icons. Also you can upgrade vb to final version which has less bugs. To increase CTR you need to optimize your adsense ads. Different colors and size you can give a try.

But the other important factor getting more natural fresh backlinks. I recommend to have some social bookmarking for your site. It will repair traffic downgrade.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

The adds below header is very bad planned. They took a lot of space and possibly irritates your visitors. You should try to show adds side by side.

Thank you for your response, Mert.

We had no ads in that spot for a long time. But with those ad spots we get 'awesome' earnings and had no problems with the traffic for long time, traffic was growing and adsense income too.

What exactly do you mean by 'Show adds side by side?" , is there any site you could point me to?

Originally Posted by webmastersitesi

I think you should remove the standart button and icons. Also you can upgrade vb to final version which has less bugs. To increase CTR you need to optimize your adsense ads. Different colors and size you can give a try.

But the other important factor getting more natural fresh backlinks. I recommend to have some social bookmarking for your site. It will repair traffic downgrade.

Thank you for the tip, webmastersitesi!

Yes, I'm considering upgrading to the the latest vB, but have had very bad experience with vB. Upgrade introduced newer bugs! But I've heard that the new version is stable.

The ads had higher CTR with the same colors. So I'm not sure whether that is the exact problem.

fix your nav on your homepage and your forum and stop linking to your site (like in this thread) incorrectly. You're killing all your search juice to your forum by making the main link to it a 301.
Brian's Tip of the Week #1 - Avoiding Unnecessary 301's


Your ad placement isn't so bad, it's just the fact that you didn't blend them into the site. Ditch the yellow, blend them in. Personally, i find the notices and welcome headers to be more annoying.

Your site is pretty slow too.
You may want to look into optimizing things.
WebPagetest - Dulles : www.crazy...ineers-anyone.html

@Brian: Thanks a ton for your advice.

1. I had no clue! I've fixed the nav menu on the homepage. However the Nav menu on the forum looks okay, is there any specific suggestion for it?

2. The ads were perfectly blended before but after noticing a dropping CTR, I changed them to something uglier. I'll blend them again after testing for about 24 hours.

Do you have any suggestions for the ad placements? The current placement was earning us a very good CTR and earning; however it began dropping suddenly.

3. I use the default theme with just a new header and custom colors (through CSS). Are there any suggestions for speeding up the site?

I think for the step 2, adsense maybe applied special sandbx called adsense sandbox for your site. It start showing low quality ads because you have low ctr or not good to advertisers. (not converting well)
For the speed 3 you need to use Litespeed and some Cachers like Xcache, EAcclerator. Also you can use vb4.0 optimization mods. Actually upgradin 4.08 may speed up your vbulletin. Of cource there is alot more you can lower the forum counts change icons with smaller sized etc. etc. Also you can ake your forum W3 compliant. Check validator.w3.org

Thank you for the tip, wemastersitesi.

Originally Posted by webmastersitesi

I think for the step 2, adsense maybe applied special sandbx called adsense sandbox for your site. It start showing low quality ads because you have low ctr or not good to advertisers. (not converting well)

Is there a way to find out whether sandbox has been applied? I got very good CTR for about 3 months after I added those spots. Earlier, we had a 728x90 leaderboard, that did okay, but not as great as the current spots.

What should I do?

I can give you the main idea is convertibility. Also you can apply censur for bad keywords check here: Google AdSense Stop Words - Poison Words

Remove low performing ads. Choose one ad which has lowest CTR in the forum let's say you have 3 ads 1 is for sure lowest remove it and keep 2 ads this can help your reputation comes back.

Make sure you have privacy policy, Terms and condition on your site. Google knows who has it:

Also i did not like the placement of google adsense squeres on your forum. make sure it looks like same at Board update (see the title)

These are things that hopefully bring you more money flow. good luck.

I really appreciate your responses, webmastersitesi.

Our forum is all about engineering and I doubt there are any stop words. Our mods regualarly moderate all threads and make sure there are no stop/bad words anywhere. I do not see that as a likely cause of low paying ads being displayed.

Yes, we should have a privacy policy, terms & conditions. I'll work on it right away! Thanks a ton for reminding it.

I saw honda swap foums and they pretty much have the similar ads placements like ours. They use even bigger rectangles so I'm guessing you're pointing me to the ads that appear besides the logo. That is a good suggestion and I'll give it a thought.

I'll get rid of the ads in sidebar.

You should notice a title bar just above the google adsense at hondaswap. This takes whole attention there then clicks may come Bigger size is the better 336*20 may change alot thing. Also removing the sidebar is a really good decision. Please let us know how it goes.

If your members aren't clicking, stop showing it to them. guests account for 99% of click ad revenue on my site, so i basically don't show any CPC ads to members, only CPM.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

If your members aren't clicking, stop showing it to them. guests account for 99% of click ad revenue on my site, so i basically don't show any CPC ads to members, only CPM.

Is that possible? How do I choose between CPC & CPM ads in adsense?

(PS: I know I'm asking too many questions. I however appreciate your help a lot!).

Also, how can I disable those ads for members? I guess there's a vb if condition to it. I don't know how to implement it though.

You can use special ad tools integrated vbulltin 4. You can control whom to show ads very easy at ad manager section. Yes you can do it with vbconditions as well. Adsense does not allow you choose CPM. But there are advertisers naturally select your site because they believe it's good targetted.

There's nothing in google to set it this way. I simply don't show google to members when i have soemthing else to fill with as it simply doesn't perform.

You can use a <vb:if conditinon="$show['member']">

</vb:if>

conditional to show stuff to members only.

You can also
<vb: else />
inside and use 'guest' instead of member too.