Site Stats and Adsense

In last week's post, Chess Stats Year-Over-Year, I investigated a drop in my site's visitor statistics:-

Those numbers show an increase from to 2015 to 2016 on the old server, then a decrease from 2016 to 2017 on the transfer to the new server. The last number, 'recs/page', indicates that something might have changed in the server mechanism that delivers pages. I'll investigate those numbers in another post.

While I was looking at those numbers, I encountered a few anomalies that raised new questions. I flagged those to my server provider and will wait for a response before I go much further. In the meantime, I noticed a new problem regarding Google Adsense. Here's a screen capture showing the top and bottom of a typical page on my CFAA site.

Improve Your Middle Game (Part 1 - Patterns)

What's the point? I last discussed the top ad ('Luxury Cruises' in this example) in

• Going Mobile : Responsive Ads (August 2016).

I last discussed the bottom ads in

• Mixed 'Matched Content' (January 2017).

The top ad doesn't blend well into the rest of the page. Google ads should be unobtrusive, but this one dominates the content. I should either move it or eliminate it entirely.

The bottom ads are simply wrong. That 'Matched Content' link from January shows a few Google ads mixed with image links to my own pages. All we see in the page pictured above are a couple of Google ads with links to my content missing completely. The problem occurs on a number of my pages, while other pages show the ads and internal links correctly. As far as I can tell, the ad code on all pages is identical. I'll see if this is a temporary error before carrying it any further.

I doubt that these Adsense issues are responsible for the decline in visitor traffic, but they don't help. In any case, I'm spending too much time on them, which is a distraction from the content itself.