Since months I'm submitting tickets looking for traffic loss depending by technical issues caused by Ezoic.
Issues on Search Console reveal bad experience fr users due to your Cache alteration of Javascript, due to Humix showing videos out of the viewport, Cloudfare not serving pages faster than from my hosting and not serving at all causing hundreds of %xx errors. Due to this, Mobile and Desktop score are dropping and consequentially traffic has a -90% drop since I joined Ezoic, as well as a -80% in revenues, also because ads are not better or paying more than ordinary AdSense. Last not least, the Javascript corruption causing the malfunction of file upload and PayPal processing credit cards that caused the -100% loss in transactions...
I have been told so many times your tech Staff would have fix it but, more than excuses, nothing has been done. And when I asked for infos about how to safely remove the Ezoic Integration, I have been asked to respect the agreement until next march. So, let me urge the fix of all the above as soon as possible or a undeniable proof of Ezoic's non-responsibility, otherwise I will take legal action for the respect of my rights and compensation of lost earnings from advertising as well as the sale of my services.
Thank you.
Please don't force me to take legal action
Ezoic Employee
- Edited
Hi Diego - Harry here, I'm one of the onboarding managers at Ezoic. First of all, sorry to hear that you've been encountering so many issues recently with your site. Our aim at Ezoic is to help sites grow so I'm saddened to hear that you've run into problems, it's definitely not what we'd expect to see happen with sites on the platform.
First off - I've been taking a look over your search console data and I had a couple of insights:
Looks like your Core web vitals are mostly in a good place, with you passing on all URLs on desktop, and while you have some URLs being flagged as needing improvement on mobile, when we actually drill down into this, you're missing the benchmark for a pass by 0.1 seconds (see screenshot 1). In my experience in onboarding and optimizing sites for core web vitals, I've never seen a site be punished from a search rankings perspective for being 0.1 seconds. In fact, core web vitals is more about limiting search rankings for unusably slow sites, rather than giving the number 1 spot to those with the highest scores. Whilst it's good to be aware of your site's core web vitals, they won't make a massive difference search rankings-wise
I can see that a major pain point here is the 5xx/4xx errors that you're seeing, and that's understandable - I think that we might have a solution to this. I just tried accessing your site impersonating googlebot, and I was blocked by cloudflare. It's something we can occasionally see when cloudflare blocks Ezoic IPs. You can find a list of our IPs here : https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/how-to-fix-origin-errors If you whitelist them in any cloudflare firewalls, as well as any security tools you're using at your host, that should fix this issue.
I know you've reported drops in traffic occurring earlier this year in tickets in the past. I've checked them and our agents had replied and were waiting on a response, but the ticket was closed because we never heard back from you. Did you ever receive these replies? Maybe try searching for this ticket ID in your inbox 395672 you can reopen the ticket just by replying to the message in the email thread and we can continue investigating that for you. This also goes for the issue you were having with paypal. Our team were waiting to hear back from you on this one, and will still be happy to help if you reply
Finally just to address the response that you'd gotten regarding premium contracts. The reason that we set these contracts is that we negotiate long term deals with advertisers in order to secure you more revenue. As an ad partner we are required to fulfil these deals once we enter into them. I can speak with our team about breaking out of the contract early, but unfortunately the decision is out of our hands.
You impersonated googlebot? And you surprised you were blocked? My god I can't believe I read that.
CF is well known to block fake google, bing, yandex and baidu bots dude....
Sorry o.p for barging in.
Ezoic Employee
joshism Hi there - Lindsey here from Support.
I want to provide some clarification for my colleague's message. Since we are Google partners, we have access to certain tests that can help us gain a better understanding of what the Google bot might be experiencing. I understand that the previous message may not have conveyed this as clearly as intended, but the essence of the testing my colleague conducted was to explore this aspect.
I want to emphasize that the test we performed is a standard procedure and not something unusual or malicious in any way. As my colleague mentioned, when conducting such tests and encountering this particular outcome, it's occasionally associated with Cloudflare blocking Ezoic IPs. This issue can often be resolved by whitelisting Ezoic IPs.
If you whitelist these IPs in your Cloudflare firewalls and any security tools you're using at your host, it should address the problem. :-)
For the other issues mentioned, please feel free to respond to the tickets that had previously marked as Resolved and they will automatically be re-opened. If you are unable to see our responses or messages back to you, please let us know and we can investigate this to make sure you are able to receive further support for these issues.
Ezoic Employee
Just to add a bit more context as well that might help clarify the Googlebot crawler access issues, do you happen to have Bluehost as the hosting company? We know you're using Cloudflare on the site, but if Bluehost is the actual hosting platform you're using it could quickly explain the issues with the Googlebot and allow us to provide a fix since there's a known issue with the interaction when involving bluehost, cloudflare, and Ezoic.
Diego How about you read the contracts you are about to enter into before you do so, and take some responsibility for your own business instead of blaming other people? If Humix isn't working for you, resolve it or remove it. Ezoic has made it very clear how it alters code in order to optimise sites and it's up to you to ensure compatibility with other third-party tools. You certain will lose and be even more financially disadvantaged if you try to take legal action on something you should've known about when you started. This kind of crying and threatening really annoys me because you're taking time away from other genuine issues the staff could be dealing with. Don't bother replying, not interested.
londonblue Are you a legal representative of Ezoic or do you have some qualification to allow you to address me in that tone? I don't think so, and if you are, I will make sure everyone knows how the Ezoic Staff behaves.
I don't know who you are but I assure you that regarding the legal evaluation of responsibilities, the evaluation of what is said in the contract and how clearly, how many things did not work (and I thank you for admitting that it was due to the manipulation of the code made by Ezoic), compared to me you are certainly at a disadvantage...
I await a response on londonblue's qualification.
Thank you
Thank you for your answer.
To be fair, let me say publicly that, after my post, the Ezoic Staff evidently took action because I saw the situation improve significantly.
Thank you
HarryB I'm sorry, I totally lost this conversation.
23 day after your answer, maybe my Search Console data is changed as well as Core vital scores, dropping from a 8x to a 6x but surprisingly with better performance in terms of revenue. Unfortunately, I'm not able to dive technically into this but luckily there's someone like you able to check and possibly repair what's wrong. On my side, I'm open to make as many changes as needed, including changing Wordpress theme if it might help fixing Cumulative layout shift or Largest contentful paint issues. Thank you for your time!
Ezoic Employee
Diego I do want to make sure that there isn't any confusion on this part: checking your site speed through Google Search Console or other external site speed checkers can be a bit inflated due to the fact that they do not take into account script delay or caching. This means that certain optimizations done by Leap fly under their detection.
It is always best to view your site's core web vitals in the Leap dashboard, as this is most accurate as to what effect your site's ranking and the current status of your site speed.
- Edited
JeanPierre Yes, I'm talking about Core vitals shown on my Ezoic's dashboard
As usual, I appreciate what Staff can do and what I will be suggested to do by my side. Including changing Wp theme, if necessary. Tks
Ezoic Employee
Hi there,
It looks like both your LCP and CLS could be improved upon (it's important to note that as long as the scores are green tboth Google and your visitors will be satisfied, and any further improvements won't have any noticeable impact on either).
So I would first advise improving your cache hit rate, this is directly linked to LCP and FID because a cached response will always be faster than a response that comes from the origin server. A good cache hit rate is anything above 80% but ideally, you want this to be as high as possible
I would highly recommend that you take a look at this article on how to improve your cache hit rate: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/how-to-improve-my-cache-hit-rate
Additionally, if you are not already using our CDN manager which is part of our WP plugin then I suggest taking a look at this article: https://support.ezoic.com/kb/article/how-can-i-set-up-the-ezoic-wordpress-plugin-for-cdn-management
The CDN manager will help to automate cache updates so you do not need to manually clear the cache when making changes to your site, this should help with improving and maintaining a good cache hit rate.
I would also recommend looking through the technologies you currently have on your site, we rank them according to the impact they could be having on your site speed and offer alternatives where possible. You don't need to swap them all out, and you can in fact keep some if they are vital for your site, however making some swaps could have a great effect on your site speed.
If you do wish to change your theme to further improve your scores, you can find ones we recommend within the technologies tab under 'Technology Library' however I would advise to make this change in January. During the start of the year the ad rates are typically at their lowest, and as such chnages like this will have the least amount of impact on earnings.
Finally, for your CLS, you can test the 'worst' scoring pages here. Our system will detect the cause of the CLS and will provide information on how to resolve it.
Improving these scores can take time as they are based on 28 days of field data, so when making changes I would advise testing the page before and after to ensure that they are having the desired effect.