What's up with the 404's???

[Gerry]

Trying a few domains at Parked (again)

Here are my stats so far for March.

TOTAL

397 163 486 10

The 486 is 404's.

I am told by the rep that 404's don't affect parking and revenue.

Wait a minute.

Aren't 404's pages that do not resolve???

If I have 486 pages that do not resolve and 163 searches, is not my total searches 649?

And I am to assume that 404's don't affect parking and revenue?

That is nearly 67% of bogus ads and searches.

I realize that parked does not control the Yahoo advertisers.

But this is very very lopsided.

Last month's trial (about a week) was no better with 506 searches and 1360 404's.

That is 63% of the weeks' total that are going to nowhere?

Or is there another more complex reason.

 

[Theo]

The 404's end up on a page much like the other hits. If the visitor then clicks on something, it will count both as a 404 and as a hit. If you have domains with large number of 404's, consider setting up your own DNS and forward these to the main page of your parked domain.

 

[Gerry]

The 404's end up on a page much like the other hits. If the visitor then clicks on something, it will count both as a 404 and as a hit. If you have domains with large number of 404's, consider setting up your own DNS and forward these to the main page of your parked domain.

Thanks Theo.

I'll go back and take a look to see if I see that.

I am not that familiar with their control panel so I hope it breaks it down.

May be back to get some pointers on the DNS issue.

Losing 63%-67% of traffic is horrid.

 

[Theo]

You're not losing the traffic. If you use the Parked.com DNS (same with Sedo) all 404's are captured. What happens at that point depends on the visitor. Usually domains with lots and lots of 404's used to be image galleries etc. These are hard to convert.

 

[Gerry]

I see.

Man, ya' gotta love a domain getting $15.97 per click one day and $0.02 the next.

I must have drained their Yahoo budget.

 

[Focus]

That just means the visitor is clicking somehting different...check the keywords on your page and make sure the ads are from yahoo and not the blocked feed...

 

[Gerry]

That just means the visitor is clicking somehting different...check the keywords on your page and make sure the ads are from yahoo and not the blocked feed...

May need a little bit more instruction on that.

 

[Focus]

It's pretty easy to tell...for instance you can have a regular yahoo fed page with generic keywords all over it and a keyword like a specific company name will show up or some tm term (because of user searches and the domain "learning")..so when a visitor clicks on that it gives them ads from the back-up feeds at parked which through no fault of their own sometimes only pay pennies on the click..in the case of the TM term or a specific name like "Tony Hawk" for instance yahoo does not display ads for it but rather the back-up feed, the advertisers will show up as sites like info.com, lowpriceshopper.com, & findstuff.com and other small non bold advertisers...this most likely is what explains the disparity in the click values. I'm guessing. Good luck!

 

[Gerry]

I am trying a few domains on Parked.com (again)

I would like to revisit this thread and reopen the discussion here regarding the 404's
http://www.dnforum.com/f366/404s-vs-regular-traffic-thread-318277.html

Could someone explain in very simple plain terms to a non-programmer what the heck is going on, how to correct it, and where this needs to be done?

Looking at todays stats, nearly 60% of my traffic is a 404's, yesterday nearly 50%.

But, when I look at the stats and source of traffic, nearly 60% is from natural direct type-in traffic. Isn't that what we all strive for? To have natural type in traffic? Sure, links are great but have an identity (brand or site) with 60% natural type-in traffic is pretty decent.

So, if those 404's don't count against me then how are they helping me?

And why is it that (overall) there are far greater clicks on other parking companies for the same name?

And if 404's don't count against me, then how can I make them COUNT FOR ME?

That is a lot of traffic being lost.

 

[Donny Simonton]

404's doesn't mean traffic is being lost, 404's get the same landing page as everybody else the different is we just track it differently. About 95% of all 404's are broken images, broken javascript, and pages that no longer exist. So for example let's say you have your domain developed and then you park it with us you may get some 404 traffic for a while.

In your case, it seems somebody from China has decided they like one of your domains, it's a 4 letter, p**y.com. Their ip is normall 221.194.136.60 and their user agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; zh-CN; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11; CollapsarTEXT". They generated 98.8% of your 404's for yesterday. So basically they really seem to be 404's.

Donny

 

[Gerry]

They generated 98.8% of your 404's for yesterday. So basically they really seem to be 404's.

Donny

Thanks. That does make it a little clearer.

If he (or they) are responsible for 98% of 404's, I understand. One person, multiple clicks captured just as one person-multiple clicks captured for revenue.