eWillys Update

Interesting where you pointed out the Non-Viewed (robots, worms, etc) traffic load.

I probably visit the site twice per month looking at Engines and Transmissions.
Yeah its a massive total bandwidth for the site, its a giant monster, not sure if we will need to address that, I've kept tight with the host provider on it. So if we need to make adjustments down the road may have too.
 
This is a big problem with AI--as we've all seen, browsers now "summarize" data on the web and serve it up as "the answer" to your query...

But where did that answer come from?

Other websites--

And what happens to the traffic (and potential ad revenue) for those websites? It goes down, because people are just going with the AI response (rather than personally visiting the source website(s)).

So...long term that is going to shift a) the revenue model for independent websites and b) the quality of data and information available online (which also will paradoxically reduce the quality of the AI responses generated from that data)...

Not a good situation no matter how you shake it...
 
This is a big problem with AI--as we've all seen, browsers now "summarize" data on the web and serve it up as "the answer" to your query...

But where did that answer come from?

Other websites--

And what happens to the traffic (and potential ad revenue) for those websites? It goes down, because people are just going with the AI response (rather than personally visiting the source website(s)).

So...long term that is going to shift a) the revenue model for independent websites and b) the quality of data and information available online (which also will paradoxically reduce the quality of the AI responses generated from that data)...

Not a good situation no matter how you shake it...

Makes sense. Thanks for the detail. Real Estate problems: Location, location, location. We've had summaries available on request or search or within something like wikipedia but now the summaries are front and center on the feed, available upon your first click.
 
AI as applied to search engines is like -- back when we were kids -- going to the library, having the librarian do all your research for you -- and then hoping that what she turned up for you would be relevant, accurate and impartial.

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AI is cool and all that, but we had better keep one hand on the plug in the convenience outlet that is powering it.
 
I don't use AI, but yesterday I was playing with CoPilot and found it mostly useless or wrong and so I asked it: "Do you think you're useful?" Half an hour later it was still trying to find the answer so I turned off the computer, put it back in the box and shipped it off to it's owner. I was setting up a new laptop for a friend.
 
I don't use AI, but yesterday I was playing with CoPilot and found it mostly useless or wrong and so I asked it: "Do you think you're useful?" Half an hour later it was still trying to find the answer so I turned off the computer, put it back in the box and shipped it off to it's owner. I was setting up a new laptop for a friend.
Kinda like the EARLY calculator the Navigation guys on the sub had...it'd do all kinds of complex calculations BUT couldn't divide by 0 for chit...it'd set there & ruminate an answer til it overheated it's power supply. The Nav folks hated us for some reason....
 
July 2025 Update < Follow that to the site update, its a lot smaller then this one.

Was a good month so far, not over yet lets not rush away the last few days of July.
Road Trip
I was able to go out and see some really cool rigs in MI, looking for a new or some new caretakers of some special rigs.

When I say "special" it's not in a Holy Grail these are rarest models ever, it's more in the back story and history of the rigs. Was neat to see them in person, it was 3 generations my Dad, myself, and my son all took the ride with my Dad's good friend who owns the rigs. It was good to share that time together.

500th Post

I hit my 500th Post in July, that's pretty neat. When I was at "The Great Willys Picnic" a theme/question that comes up often "What are your plans for the site", I honestly don't know, I have some projects and goals for the site, working out the bugs a little, it's at times one step forward, pause, one step forward, then half step back, its not a full step back.


Ad's, the necessary evil at times....

Somethings work and others do not. I got my AdSense all sorted and it was cruising right along nicely, it was a lot of trying to balance out the way that the new Auto Ads work vs the page formatting, there were times it killed the site with ad's, then I hit a sweet spot and it I felt it just worked, it was just about 3 clicks for the user to see 20 posts or 2 full pages, that included minimizing one header ad, closing one Vignette thing that was on transition from page to page, and a second minimize a pull down.

You don't get a lot of freedom with the Auto Ad's and Optimization features, they would auto link key words and phrases like Jeep or Willys, even works like "Truck", they would turn blue and the user could click them.

It all worked well, the daily views covered the hosting fees, its not a revenue source but for folks like the local bank I needed to set up a business account and the wanted to know my income sources and it really made it easier letting them know how the Ad revenue worked and paid for the site, but its not 10's of thousands, it should have made about $100 a month.

Then something I guess went wrong and they shut off all ad's on me and suspended the account for invalid activity, they wont exactly say what triggered the penalty box, it looks like its a 30 day deal. I feel what triggered it was when OWF was running slow, I ran that Ping test where it picks a random data center then it tries to reach your site and gives you a score, it was maybe a day after trying that out they suspended the Ad's. My feeling is they thought I was trying to up the revenue with fake links to the site, or a ad bot of sorts. Its also possible it was caused by a 3rd Party hitting the site but was trigging the ad's to uptick. It's just like the current Credit Card situation where the Vendor has the responsibility to protect the card transactions, they require the publisher to enforce the traffic to the site. It's basically impossible to prevent the level of traffic to any site just like the current DDOS event, you can add new software to prevent it and pay for all the add on's, its such a cat and mouse game and it's on the backs of the sites to add all this stuff on.

Never going to figure out what caused the penalty so can't really learn from it and make any changes, I looked at traffic and I don't see anything glaring, if they told us what the issue is I'm sure some folks would just find a work around and ride that fine line. At the end of the day, the site does not need the income, but the income does make it nice to cover costs at times.

Will the ad's return, will see, not in a rush to go back to them, I have turned the Auto Ad's back off again for now, this week I'm in the camp of they won't get my traffic, I will show them! Average views for the month via AdSense was very stable around 1350 views a day, no large swings, some months you will see certain days that have large swings of what's getting captured as real traffic, but its most likely just some bot or crawler. Not to be confused with the real bots and crawlers that are 10x the normal site traffic.

Status Report
Overall its been a good month, site is running well, no major issues to report.
HTTPS Site:
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HTTP SIte: (still get a lot of traffic on this, alot is due to folks have links to the site and they are hard coded to the older site is what I have been told.)
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The browsers are fun to watch who is coming in from where. (edit images were identical screenshots)
HTTPS:
Screenshot 2025-07-28 081424.png

HTTP:
Screenshot 2025-07-28 081515.png


Buyer Beware and Lessons Learned Near Miss
Had a few folks reach out with some dedicated postings for sale, which I'm always happy to toss up and cross post, I think they are hit and miss and to get the best visibility you need to cross post in a bunch of place if you choose the public ad's, I still think the direct ask at times is a very good method for selling a WIllys. But I fully understand having the want to just sell to a stranger and never hear about the rig again for some folks that approach is what they are after.

The miss of the month was Andy sent me that very innocent link to the 1963 Willys Delivery hybrid Wagon, with a simple question of "what do you think this is", I thought it was a hybrid Traveller of sorts, and I forwarded that to a very respected member as a "hey check this out you have been looking for one of these, maybe take a look", which they did and tossed an offer on it. To paraphrase the reply back was more of "get off my lawn, I know what I have go away", which was a pretty big red flag for me but in the end it all works out, that turned out to be a good thing for them, bad that I shared a link that was not good.

After that offer was refused, I posted it and then cross posted it here, and we got the Paul Harvey time for the rest of the story, yeah it was a rig that was from a trusted person and through a series of basically cons the rig was being sold under circumstances that were not per the original agreement. Your typical fraud, bait and switch stories, not good. Ad was removed by the seller, I had all the photos and text that's how I do my posts shared them as best possible and will put this one up into the if its too nice and too cheap run, if it's rare and too much run, hard to find that line at times of real and legit.

But I think we did the right thing as soon as we found out about the rig's real history the information on the sale were removed, we did harvest the pictures its a neat rig, will just look at them from afar, and hope the next caretaker is not taken for a ride by this seller.

Thanks for the support and following along, Tim
 
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This is tremendous information - learning a ton from you & thank you. AI creates and analyzes surveys for improvements of such things that may help to optimize your income stream and user experience. Not sure how the resto world responds to surveys - maybe ask two questions upon log in once a month for ratings? The whole AI deal is massive data and its interpretation - so data collected matters differently than pre-AI, ie survey user experience for massive ratings of select inquiry; simultaneously evaluate user activity for correlation or eventual predictive ability linked all the way back around to income & content flow optimization.

One Point is - AI does all of this for you and you talk to your phone instead of type, my read of how your new website partner AI helps you do less grind and focus more on content or your interests as site host.

So the answer may be simple: "eWillys community intentions are to meet enthusiasm for Willys with one stop information sharing, purchasing, legacy building - to be a solid long term partner in the Willys community as a web hub for Willys enthusiasts, small businesses, and partners in the electronic World of all things Willys"

Here's some more stuff you probably already know... (more about google penalties than advertising but similar in some ways)

Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/06/30/google-penalty

"Google is serious about its ranking algorithm, updating it constantly to provide users with the best search experiences possible. This also means penalizing pages or sites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

You can incur a Google penalty by intentionally practicing black hat SEO, inadvertently through improper site maintenance, or simply due to an algorithm update. Regardless, Google penalties negatively impact your search rankings, and in some cases, your pages or entire website could be removed from results.
google logo with black hat and penalty stamp

So in this post, we’re going to cover what NOT to do (and what to do instead) to prevent a Google penalty and protect your site from a traffic drop. We’ll cover:
  • Algorithmic vs manual Google penalties and what to expect.
  • How to check for and fix a manual Google penalty.
  • Seven common Google penalties and how to avoid them.
By the end, you’ll be equipped to preserve your rankings and continue growing your website traffic.

What is a Google penalty?

A Google penalty occurs when it detects that a website violates its Webmaster Guidelines. There are two different types of penalties, but both of them have the same consequence of a drop in ranking and traffic.

Algorithmic penalties​

Every year, Google makes changes in its algorithm to continue serving the best results for its searchers. Some of the notable Google updates are Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and Hummingbird.
Some algorithm updates are designed to lower the rank of guideline-violating pages, like Panda (keyword stuffing, grammatical errors, and low-quality content) and Penguin (black hat linking tactics) while others are designed to favor pages with newly prioritized ranking factors, like Pigeon (solid local signals) and Hummingbird (mobile responsiveness).
 
Thanks, yeah it's listed as Invalid Traffic which they do explain they just do not expressly tell the publishers what part of the invalid activity was triggered. If they want my Traffic back they know where to find me! JK they are in full control here for passive income to the site and operational cost are covered by proper ad placement so its good to play nice with them, but I put a ton of time into this and went over the user experience along with the placements and keeping the number of clicks low, maybe to a fault, but at no time did I click to gain income, it's like portions of a penny for a click, you would have to spend hours clicking and clacking to make even 5 cents it crazy.

No one wants the ad's anyway, so on the left shoulder you have the nice "no ad's emoji" and you pay the out of pocket costs then on the right shoulder the "evil ad's emoji" but costs are covered. It's low hanging fruit for sure. We have all been there where you open a Web Site and you cant even find the website there are so many ads, you can wick the Ad program up to make you lots of money in the short term, but eventually folks just don't come back, I can name a number of sites that I have done that with.

I find it funny that I thought I finally got into the "passive" ad income range where it was running by itself, then they shut it down. Which to me returns it to a very "active" ad income where I need to figure out what may have went wrong. No free lunch for sure here.

There is an appeal process and I could have done that easily its a very simple form, but then I just went back to the lets see how it goes with no ad's for a bit.

Thanks for the above info!
 
The August 2025 Update is posted.


Was a good month, traffic was down which is not a bad thing at all, it just means they were busy pinging others websites this month.

Lots of quality traffic, feed back, and email request.

Was able to make some decent connections in Aug between some folks, if they closed the deal on the sale not sure, I don't really track that, its one of those if you can help one person, or just had fun doing it its worth it. So will keep plugging away at it.

Here is a quick summary of what was posted this month, there were 114 posts, but these are the vehicles, others were parts, engines, and other stuff.

Aug 2025 Vehicle Types Posted
Wagons, Trucks, CJ2A, CJ-5, Jeepster's round out the top 5!

CJ-2A
15​
CJ-3A
1​
CJ-3B
1​
CJ-5
14​
DJ-3
1​
M-151
1​
M-170
1​
M-38
3​
M-38A1
2​
Jeepster
6​
Trucks
16​
Wagons
17
TOTAL Vehicles Posted
78
 
Link to the current update....

September 2025 Update


Super busy month in and out of the eWillys world.

Not included in the update....

Kids started Soccer this year that's probably been the best part of the month, but their first year and they are putting in some work for sure not easy which is a good thing.

Habitat kicked off our planning for 2026 Spring Event, that's another great adventure we do.

Where is the Willys Content!

  • Check out Dave's update for his collection is up For Sale, Dave is the founder of eWillys and has some current health issues and is selling his collection.

  • Larry sent over what is left of his 50 year collection.

  • Holy Toledo Calendars are out!

  • Frank still has his 1 Owner '67 CJ-5 For Sale

  • The WIllys Reunion was in Sept and that had a great turn out.

  • Jim held his Jeep Meet Up in Cle Elum WA
  • Any one attend that, I missed any pictures of that one?

  • 1N7 Willys here in NJ is moving forward, Painting Phase 1 has been completed really looks amazing. Lights and Ceilings up next, then hopefully some equipment moved over there this month!


Thanks to everyone for checking out the site! I personally know some of these sellers really appreciate the consideration for passing along their collections. It's a process to let go of say a 50 year collection of stuff, I get it for sure.
 
eWillys Traffic
Been a few months since I ran a report.

Total Bandwidth was average (512.67 GB), high as usual, but the insane number of unique visitors (these are not real people searching for a 1951 Willys Tailgate!)

These are cpanel numbers.

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Top 10
No surprise, no humans here, I wont use any names or IP address ranges and you will have to make a guess on the owner.

#SourcePagesHitsBandwidth
1G crwl b_/ ot 13052,69652,6961.15 GB
2G crwl b_/ ot 22635,14735,147788.71 MB
3G crwl b_/ ot 13121,09521,095470.35 MB
4G crwl b_/ ot 13214,31414,314319.01 MB
5unknown a Fixed Line Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Israel13,38513,3851.45 GB
6unknown but reported as SPAM a total of 1,086 times from 123 distinct sources11,84311,8431.29 GB
7G crwl b_/ ot 12810,99110,991244.51 MB
8G crwl b_/ ot 1299,5629,562212.47 MB
9G7,4739,2841.11 GB
10G crwl b_/ ot 2276,9666,966156.54 MB


One measure I use data from is Google Ad Sense, that number stays super consistent daily so I know if that drops it was a slow day if its in the range things are running normal. Reduced to just a singe header ad for now, so its sub .35 a day anymore on that side.

AdSense from just Google feeds. Crushing that passive income .32 a day, I can crank up the ads and get about $8-$9 a day, but they have such a odd ebb and flow to their process it really impacts the site too much work to keep up on that process.

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New YouTube channel is up and running.


Moved the Wagon video over there as well so at least have a single video up.


Needed to host a few videos but was not able to and my other videos are on my personal.channel and did not want to use that for the site.

After was all done figured out I did not have to publish them, so either way, its up and can add some content and maybe format some For Sale videos to interview sellers on their rigs or something like that for the showcase ad's that people send to me directly on the site.

Thanks for following along and for the support.

Might as well add, please subscribe, hit the bell, like and comment! I tell my kids that all the time to do that to my Dad Content.
 
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