FAIL! Or How I Lost New WA Sales.
So for the past few months I've been getting a steady amount of traffic to my site (and my WA review) as well as a steady amount of clicks on my affiliate links hence a steady amount of new WA referrals.
However, I noticed that for the past 2 weeks my number of referrals dropped significantly. I couldn't understand why this was happening as my traffic was the same.
After digging around I decided to look inside Google Webmaster's tools and saw that Google sees 79 errors on my site (404 - page not found). Hmmm.... interesting.
This is when it hit me. About 2 weeks ago I did some custom redirections between domains (you shouldn't worry about that as you shouldn't be playing with that) and I somehow managed to mess up my affiliate links.
My review was still there, hundred of people per day were seeing that review. Many were clicking on my affiliate links and they were all taken to the nasty: "Sorry, this page does not exist!" page.
Wow.
I guess this more of a rant than anything else, but maybe it'll serve as a reminder to some of you ;) Track your stuff. Track your traffic, conversions, websites. Double check everything when you make changes. Try not to mess with code or backend of your sites (and FTP) ;)
Have a great day WA!
Recent Comments
64
That just plain s-cks Alex!
... that's an area I really don't want to have to deal with.
Really glad all is well now.
Quick questions Alex -
1) When you do redirection, do you mean 301?
2) If yes, what plugin do you use?
3) Would you inactivate the plugin after several weeks or months after the redirection?
Thanks for your advice!
Yes I did 301 within .htaccess. Basically I moved one domain to my another domain, I did not use a plugin but a single line of code.
However, I forgot that some affiliate links were going through the old domain. That was the issue.
Oh Alex,
Sorry to hear about you misfortune, but glad you figured out what was happening.
Thanks for this reminder so I will for sure check out my tracking since I seem to change themes a few times a year!
Thanks
Sheila
Yeah, we have to always be careful when changing backend code or site structure. It's very easy to lose everything you did.
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Nice detective work Alex. Just shows it pays to crunch the stats :)