FabulousEntertainment

The problem du jour was that we ended up triggering Google’s Badware filter which meant that anyone visiting the site from Google got a warning that the site contained badware which might damage their computer. Needless to say pageviews dropped a bit!

I logged in the Google Webmaster Console as soon as we got complaints and checked it out. It said that the homepage was an example of a page with a badware problem. The only two external links on the homepage are to Adult Friend Finder (via my affiliate account) and a banner ad from a very reputable network ran by one of the largest companies in the world.

So I complained to Google and within an hour or so they’d removed the badware warning, so overall I’m quite happy with their response.

The interesting about Fab Swingers is that virtually all of the membership comes from word of mouth recommendation. So really the best way of getting more members now is just to work on improving the site (except for regions where we don’t yet have a critical mass of members).

The past couple of days I’ve been working on scalability. Profiles are now cached (with memcache) in a better way. I’ve also removed a whole bunch of counts in SQL and replaced them with summary tables.

Finally, I’ve also been working on a new feature. One of the things that we’ve really missed is video upload and someone requested it in the swingers forums. I’m not going to do this myself, instead I’m going to integrate with a video hosted service but it should be fairly transparent.

None of this has been deployed to the live server yet and there will be a short outage too — it’s going to take a little time to build up the summary tables.

I was just looking at the site earnings and I got a bit of a shock, from May 1 to May 4, pageviews have absolutely tanked by about half.

I went straight into Google Analytics and found that visits were holding up fine but the problem was that the bounce rate had rocketed from the usual 3.5% up to 12.5% and the page views per visitor had also fallen away.

So it looks like there was some sort of technical problem which put people off using the site for about 4 days and then everything went back to normal. It wasn’t such a critical problem that it killed the traffic completely but maybe the site was just slow or perhaps people with certain ISP’s were having a problem.

Having said that, we had no email reports of problems and usually as soon as there is the slightest glitch the support email box is filled with hundreds of complaints within minutes.

I’m not sure there is much more that I can do to investigate now so I’ll just park it for now and go back to it happens again.

I’ve just finished my last day at work and returned from my leaving night out (so excuse any typos!). My plan from now on is to make a living from Fab Swingers and the other website I run.

It is quite a big step but it’s something that I really needed to do. Both websites need more time spent on them if they are to realise their potential and I was just being over stretched by trying to do too many things at once.

It’s also a bit more pressure though, as my hobby turns into my job. One of my friends has a great expression for this type of situation: COB which is Cock On Block!