Looked at my stats since Sunday and wondered what I did to piss off my readers. Then I remembered that was when Rogers started their search page redirects. Before, a lot of people were viewing and/or hitting my site through searches.
Now, as you can see, I’ve dropped by nearly 50%
Rogers Hijacks my views
I wonder if I can get a slice of that lost revenue pie…?
As a reminder for my faithful: my RSS feed link is here. Clicking on “Subscribe Now” for Firefox users get all my post sent to them with a lovely scent of pine.
9 thoughts on “Rogers Steals My Traffic (And Yours Too!)”
Mm. Pine.
There is also this Greasemonkey script that redirects any lost DNS search back to Google.
Michael Geist has a great article on this as well as some snappy comments after. I have to say that Geist is becoming my Personal Jesus.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. So Rogers has actually reduced the features of some web browsers (ie their ability to deal with incomplete urls). There’s a lawsuit waiting to happen there.
Oops, don’t click on that link. Looks like the comment engine was trying to be helpful. :-O
Anyone remember when VeriSign tried that?
I’d check with your hosting company and make sure that at least http://www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com both point to the webserver. A wildcard record pointing to the webserver would probably be better if you can do that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to see how much more DNS tampering they can get away with. So long, Net Neutrality… 🙁
I love you.
I hate Rogers.
And I realize I have no actual DNS proof or server stat numbers, just current page views that correspond coincidentally on the same day they started their service.
Let me hate and accuse wildly, ok?
Some people type just “deadrobot” (no dotcom, etc) into the address bar and depending on their browser, get my site or a search page with the link. In some instances a full URL has to be put in. That’s how SharkBoy discovered this feature from Rogers. He was typing sharkboy.ca (no www, no http) and getting their search/ad page. I am not entirely sure how this is working from Roger’s end but my numbers are really down.
That sucks. But how exactly is hijacking misspelled urls taking traffic away from your site?