PCIN.net Update

A co-worker sent this to me. It is on all sorts of sites. I generally don’t like this sort of thing, but seeing as I love reading Yertle the Turtle to Andrew, I’m partial to Dr. Seuss:

(Read this to yourself aloud - it’s great!)

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn’t hash, then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall……

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, ‘cuz sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang.

When the copy on your floppy’s getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions is causing unnecessary risk, then you’ll have to flash the memory and you’ll want to RAM your ROM, and then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

I seem to be having my share of Google problems lately! I wrote a lengthy post about my problems with Adsense. There have been a few responses, but no one is really able to answer my questions.

I’ve also been having a problem on my family website. Almost every month the Googlebot goes crazy and crawls my site non-stop. I won’t go into the detail I did with my Adsense problem, but I did email them originally, and it took 10 days to get a response! In the meantime, they kept sucking up my bandwidth which I have to pay for. They asked for some information from me which I sent. They replied 5 days later asking for more information. Things seemed to settle down (I assumed they’d fixed the problem), so I waited a few weeks. But then it started again, so I sent along what they had asked for. 11 days later after not hearing from anyone yet, I emailed them again (I was obviously angry):

Do something about this!!!!!!!!!!!
Why is no one replying??????

You’ve already used up 12.5 GB this month, and I only have 15 for the entire month. Stop this. I want to be crawled, but not like this……………

Why is the customer service so bad? Is there someone I can email who will actually read this? This should have been corrected when I first commented on it 2 months ago. I provided all the necessary information, but was still told they needed more info (even though I had already given it to them).
Now here I am with the same problem.

Fix this please

Unbelievable, it took another 15 days after that angry email before I got a reply. Wow, their customer service is awful!

The end result was their Googlebot doesn’t handle sessions well:

From the log snippet you provided, we can see that your site is using session IDs. As you’ve observed, session IDs can cause problems for our robots. Please disable session IDs for Googlebot so that our robots may crawl your site more efficiently.

They sent me a link to some information on how to modify a PHP script so that it doesn’t create a session for the Googlebot. Unfortunately, I don’t use the script that link talks about. So I have to figure it out for myself. It irks me that I have to make changes on my site when they are the ones that have the problem. I have 2 PHP scripts on the site: PhpGedView (for genealogy/family history information), and 4images (for family photos). Now I have to go figure out which one is the problem…

I realize I’m using open source scripts that are free and there is a risk in that. I realize that this is not a business site that has quality control over the scripts. I realize that the site isn’t really meant for anyone other than my family. But Google should be able to reply in a more timely manner, and provide better answers.

As of November 27, my site had 224.55 MB worth of regular traffic, and 21.55 GB worth of “not viewed traffic” (according to Awstats), with the Googlebot using 21.40 GB of that traffic!

This is going to be a long post…

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I have ads on my site. I am part of the Google Adsense program. I recently noticed that on Saturday, November 5, 2005, my reports indicated that there was a search done using my code, and an ad was clicked on. But there wasn’t any money credited to my account.

I know it would have only been a few cents, but its the principle of the thing. It’s also a trust thing. How do I know that other clicks weren’t recorded properly?

Anyway, I emailed them:

My search performance shows that there was one click on Saturday, November 5, 2005. Yet I earned nothing for the day. How is that possible? If a link was clicked on, then there should have at least been 1 cent in earnings.

I got an email in reply from them. I can’t tell if it is a canned message or not. And it’s signed The Google Adsense Team. I hate that. Let me know I’m dealing with a real person! Here’s their response:

Hello Graham,

Thank you for your email.

To protect your interests as well as those of our advertisers, Google monitors clicks and impressions on Google ads to prevent any abuse of the AdSense program. Google’s proprietary technology analyzes all ad clicks and impressions for any activity intended to artificially drive up an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings.

Clicks or impressions deemed by our monitoring system to be invalid will appear in your reports, but because advertisers are not charged for them, no associated revenue will be shown. Please rest assured that your account is being properly credited for all valid clicks and impressions.

For additional questions, please visit our AdSense Support site at https://www.google.com/support/adsense or feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

—————-
To access the Google AdSense home page or to log in to your account, please
visit: https://www.google.com/adsense

Well, I thought that was a pretty lame explanation. What makes a click invalid? A click is a click. It wasn’t me. If it was a robot following links, then shouldn’t they be able to tell me that? All I want is an answer. I don’t want to know the “proprietary technology”. I just want to know what made it invalid. So I replied:

How can a click not be valid? I wasn’t at my computer all day, so it wasn’t from me. It was a regular click from one of the sites.

I think I’m dealing with a real person now, but apparently it still took the whole team to reply:

Hello Graham,

Thank you for your concern. Each click on an AdWords ad is examined by our system. Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to isolate and filter out invalid clicks.

As previously stated, please rest assured that your account is being properly credited for all valid clicks and impressions.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

By this point I’m getting annoyed. What made the click invalid? Why can’t they tell me what it was. The proprietary nature of their system is the algorithm that determines if it’s invalid, not the actual fact that it was invalid. So I replied again:

I sure hope I’m dealing with a person and not an automated reply. I certainly don’t think the whole Adsense Team got together to reply to me.

You say that I can rest assured that account was being properly credited, but I still don’t understand what would have made that one click invalid. I realize it would only be worth a few cents, and I’m not concerned about losing a few cents, but it raises concerns about the whole system. So what made that click invalid?

Graham

The response was pretty short. Apparently it doesn’t matter if I have any questions. Apparently it doesn’t matter if I’m helping them make money. An apparently it still takes the entire team to answer my questions! Here’s their response:

Hello Graham,

We understand that you wish to receive specific information regarding invalid clicks. However, due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

So, the bottom line is they won’t help. So here’s my questions:

• What made my click invalid?
• Why can’t they state clearly, “It was invalid because it came from an IP that regularly clicks.” or “We think it is click-fraud” or “It was a search engine robot” or something else like that?
• How often do they do this? I only noticed that day because there was only 1 click. I don’t make a lot of money, but I almost always have anywhere from 5 to 20 clicks. I’ve always assumed I was paid for those 5 to 20 clicks. Now I don’t know if I’m being paid for 1 or if I’m being paid for all of them.
• Why do they record clicks if they are invalid? That throws off the stats. If it isn’t valid, then don’t even include it, or find another way to report it.
• Why can’t they have one person reply to my ticket? I can’t stand not knowing who I’m communicating with.

I know I’m “small potatoes” in the big pictures, but it’s frustrating not being able to get help or a satisfactory answer. I’m glad that I am able to make some money, and I don’t want to lose that. But I’m still annoyed!