A Ray of Sunlight?

Hello good people!

I might have a bit of good news. I figured out something interesting today. My adsense woes might not have been because of Google updates after all.

I discovered that the amazon widget I use has recently been updated and the old version (the one I am using) doesn’t work correctly anymore.

Basically the problem comes down to bots and amazon api call limits. You see, as an amazon affiliate, you’re allowed between 4,000 and 7,000 calls to the Amazon.com rss feed per hour. Once you hit that limit, you can no longer show amazon products till the next hour rolls around.

My problem? I have hundreds of sites that web crawlers crawl constantly. My sites have infinite pages, millions of them. So if the Google bot, or some of the other nastier bots out there start crawling my sites, in minutes I can hit that Amazon api limit.

From then on, my sites show a big error.

When that happens, and Google see’s that, they might think my sites suck and lower my rankings.

Amazon deprecated the old rss feed around the time when my sites started tanking. So that MAY be the reason why my sites have hit the toilet…

What am I doing? I downloaded the latest version of PhpZon which is the software I use to show the amazon widgets on my sites. The new version has a caching feature that should confound the bots and solve this whole process.

I’m in the process of updating all of my sites to use the new version of Phpzon.

Then I’ll have to see what happens after that.

Moral of the story…keep an eye on your websites and follow the progress of any third party plugins or software that you use on your sites!

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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