Can’t do that no more, after the latest AdWords “upgrade”.

Theoretically to make it easier for us, AdWords moved Campaign, Ad Group and Account reporting, out of Reports, and into the Campaign tab. They’ve actually disabled the Campaign/Account/Ad Group report types in the report menu, so you can’t create any more new reports there. So instead of grabbing one of my old custom report templates and changing the month, I now have to go to Campaigns, select Control Panel, Select the report, change the month and run the report. If it lets me.

If you try to segment the data on the Campaigns tab by month for more than 14 months, it tells you you can’t do that – it’s too big a time frame. Not nicely, either. Let’s say I have a date range of 14 months, and I click on Segment, then month, to get a monthly break down. That’s fine. Change it to 13 months. That’s fine – it redisplays with fresh data. Change it to 15 months – uh oh – back to the default view, no error message, no warning, no nothing. Disgraceful degradation.

That’s not upgrading, that regression. Taking away useful functionality.

My old report template was still there from when I ran it last month, for the period Jan-2007 through to July-2010. I clicked on the report name, and the template appears. Select the month from the dropdown so that it’s now August. Run the report. And get the following message:

We’re sorry, but we’re unable to process this request. Some of the possible reasons for this include:
- Trying to view a report that no longer exists.
- Trying to view a report that doesn’t belong to you.
- Trying to download a report that has not finished running.
If you believe you have reached this page in error, please double-check your report parameters and resubmit your information. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Balderdash. It’s my report, I own it, and you didn’t let it even start running.

For inconsistency, if I click on run report, using last months July date, it runs happily.
But no, I can’t change the date to August and run it.
And I can’t produce the report from the Campaigns tab, as it’s more than 14 months.

Shame, Google, Shame.

Halloween Australia has been one of my best performing sites in a couple of ways. It is usually number 1 at Google for Halloween Australia, and also Halloween Events Australia. Probably because it has one of the few dedicated halloween event calendars, listing around 50 events each year, ranging from streets offering trick-or-treating to big commercial events, and it was definitely built with SEO in mind, to get organic traffic. It was light, source-ordered content, highly optimised, and had some nice incoming links. And with Google AdSense and a few affiliate links, it would make October my highest earning month online.

Last halloween it peaked at 1600 hits on 31 October, but at this time of year its still around the 30 visits/day mark, but it’s starting to ramp up now. There have been 4 events added so far, and a magazine contacted me for an interview last month. (Haven’t done it yet).

But it was labour-intensive. I had to manually approve each event, as it was added – actually by editing a field on the database – I had never got around to writing an approval program. And photos were also supposed to be manually uploaded. I didn’t make it easy for people.

So it was time to convert to Drupal again, to get more community oriented.

I took a few shortcuts. Reused my Christmas Drupal template, and just changed the colour scheme. Styled a few view tables that hadn’t needed styling on the old white background.

Then I had to copy the content across. Create new data types for events, recipes, craft, stories. Create new views for each data type. Manually add the events from this year. Check that access was fine for new members. Then importantly, redirect the old URLs (eg halloween-recipes.php) to the new format (/halloween-recipes/).

Elapsed, it took from Fri night to late Sat night, with a few late tweaks on Sunday, to add polls, and finish the redirects. Probably 6 hours all up.

Again, it will be interesting to see how the traffic continues for the new site. Whether the redirects will work properly, or if I lose any ranking at Google for changing the page URLs.

There didn’t seem to be any negative impact on traffic for Womens Health and Fitness – it’s still around 30 visitors/day.

But now it’s time to learn a new CMS for work – goodbye Drupal, and hello Mura. (There goes Sunday afternoon…..)

I want to rebuild my Halloween site, but I think I’ve left it too late for this year.

It’s currently just a hand-built site, which means it’s lightweight, runs quickly, and is really well optimised for SEO.

So good that its currently on page 1 at Google for halloween australia, halloween events, halloween costumes australia, and more.

It’s even translating into sales – I have links to affiliate companies on the site, and have referred a dozen sales for costumes and party goods in the last two weeks. So I really don’t want to mess things up.

But I wanted to make it more of a community.  Its pretty basic – you can’t upload PDFs of fliers, or have fancy fonts to advertise the halloween event. It needs more easy interaction.

Currently I have to manually approve all halloween events, to avoid spam. But if I make it better, people will be able to see straight away what their event looks like, and customise it on the spot.

I have a new Drupal version of the site ready on my laptop. I just have to upload it, and re-enter all the halloween events that people have already added. And there are more growing, every day.

If I do301 permanent redirects, so that people clicking on old indexed pages are automatically redirected to the new pages, that would fix things in the short term. But every seo forum I read, the experts admit that redirect are eventually followed by a drop in listings. It’s never smooth.

Do I want to risk my good rankings this close to halloween? Or do I upgrade the site to make it easier to use.

A conundrum.

it’s shorter to type than google.
and it really loves my old-fashioned hyphenated domain names.

i was playing with my online shopping site – www.myonlineshops.com.au tonight, cos a couple of shops asked if they could be added.
then thought i’d see how it was ranking.

not for the title – myonlineshops. there’s not much competition for a single word like that, so it easily appears at number 1 on google, yahoo and bing.

but i had originally targetted “online shopping australia” – it’s the second half of the title on the home page.

so i went to bing.com to see how it ranks.

oops. i forgot that i had bought online-shopping-australia.com.au a while back, planning to experiment with a shopping comparison engine.
didn’t end up building it – just did an empty drupal install, and left it there, while i went ahead and built myonlineshops – with lots of drupal bells and whistles.

so purely based on the domain name, with one sentence added, it ranks number 4 at bing for a competitive keyword. the page title is still drupal, for goodness sakes.

mind you, even yahoo gives me a page three result for the empty site, so yahoo still has a little domain name slant.

it’s nowhere on google of course – there are no incoming links. Although why not add one: Online Shopping Australia

Also checked my old web design site from years ago. Yep, Bing likes web-design in the name – a nice position 5. I don’t use it anymore – just leave it there for the residual page rank.

And my healthy home business is number one for work from home in australia.

bing, i think i really like you.
even if you remind me of the irish terrier dog down the road, also named bing, with the horribly dribbly chin.

these shameless plugs will really have to stop soon.

lol. or as my kids say: L.

It’s faster to search for “keyword tool”, than to type in the address. Especially when I know Google will always display the result that I want in the first position. But the above result shows two similar results. Look closely.

Yes, there are slight differences – one url has .au, for Australia, so when the resulting page displays, the country is preselected. But everything else is the same – surely that would have been enough to trigger the duplicate filter, and only display one result.

Unless you’re Google, of course.