Issues with Google Break Dance plugin

I’ve had a lot of experience with this plugin and thought I’d offer some feedback. First, here’s the code that I’ve been using in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} wp-content/uploads/.*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https://www.google.[a-z]{2,4}(.[a-z]{2,4})?/url\?.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=\?.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://www.MYSITE.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(.*bot.*|slurp) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(wp-content.*)$ /get_posturl?$1 [R=302,L]

This code redirects Google’s “View original image” directly to the page on your site instead of just viewing it at Google. This code also eliminates the “caching” problem which required an intermediate page refresh to get to my page.

Now let me explain what happens on my server when this code is installed and the plugin is enabled:

1. As reported by WP-Useronline, the number of users quickly climbs from my usual average of 50 simultaneous users to 500-800 users.
2. Each of those users is viewing a valid URL.
3. My server stats report shows an increase in visits from my typical 10,000 per day to 50,000 per day.
4. The server load jumps from an average of .5 to 5.00 or higher.

Superficially, this appears to be really great. I ran like this for several days so I could analyze the results.

Now, here’s the bad news. Even with about 40,000 additional visits per day…

1. Google Analytics shows zero increase in traffic during this time.

2. Google AdSense showed zero increase in page views.

3. Google AdSense showed zero increase in revenue. In fact, my revenue dropped by about 80%. I noticed that I was only getting .11 cents per click during that time.

4. After disabling Google Break Dance the clicks and revenue continued at that same low rate for about 5 days before starting to come back. I suspect that my good advertisers bailed out because they weren’t getting any results (even though they probably were but Google AdSense couldn’t report the info).

So clearly Google Break Dance has some very serious issues with Google Analytics and AdSense. The redirect code must be blocking those programs from reading traffic and clicks, thus denying me of correct stats and revenue.

In addition, there were some other possible side issues:

1. My Pinterest plugin failed to generate a confirmation image during a submission.
2. Google News stopped adding my new stories to their site.
3. The images in my Feedburner feed were blocked.

So I’m offering this information in case anyone wants to compare notes or make suggestions. Thanks!

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/google-break-dance/