Webmaster

I really thought, with the exponential growth of the web, spammers would have given up trying to harvest email addresses from webpages. Seems like I was wrong as today I, finally received the first spam mail to the only email address, published on this website. Why did I do such a foolish thing? Well, say thank you to German politicians and an ill-bred law called TMG, which states that you have to, if your website meets some sloppy defined criteria.

Over the last few months, I noticed a steady decline in AdSense earnings. Checking the statistics revealed, that this was neither due to decreasing traffic nor a lower clickrate. Both, traffic and clickrate, have been fairly stable. What went down instead, was the earnings per click.

After looking through my website, I came across a couple of well-visited pages, featuring ads for free smiley downloads. Ok, culprit found. Someone, who offers things for free cannot afford to pay a lot per click.

Ok, you have a shiny new website, you have Drupal as a CMS and you have an AdSense account. The only thing you don't have is a clue about why banners are not showing up on your website, even though you copied the AdSense code verbatim into your nodes/blocks.

Ok, I spend an entire afternoon, evening and half of the night over this (after it has been nagging me for weeks), so I might as well blog about it in the hope, that it will save someone else some time.

The problem

One of my daily activities includes going through my webserver logs and statistics. I most certainly cannot deny being quite curious about how and why people end up on my website as well as what it is, they wanted in the first place. What I find especially insightful in this regard are search engine referrers. They typically do not only provide keywords for ideas to write new articles about, but also show what real people are actually looking for.