Recently I tweaked my robots.txt file on one of my blogs, and accidentally made a rule to not index any posts (duh, stupid me.) It was a simple mistake and easy to fix, but by the time I found out what I did, Google had already ran through it and un-indexed all my posts.

My traffic dropped drastically, almost immediately. I get a lot of organic (search engine) traffic for that blog, and the drop in visitors quickly killed my AdSense and YPN earnings. This was about a week ago, and Google still hasn’t come back to visit the new robots.txt and index my posts again. This little mistake cost me over $300/month, if it continues.

Fortunately, AdSense is not my only source of income for that site. By using multiple monetization techniques, I keep receiving money, even if my PPC networks like AdSense isn’t bringing me anything. Specifically monthly-paid text links and pay per post type techniques. This is all temporary of course, because without the traffic, the text link price will dwindle down, and so forth. But the point is I’m able to handle a sudden loss in traffic this way, as long as the problem is corrected.

Moral of the story: You’ve heard it before, but don’t keep all your eggs in one basket when monetizing your website.