Friday, October 31, 2008

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Google Penalized my Site

One of my sites suddenly saw its number of visitors nose dive as if it's on a free fall. Immediately, I checked on analytics and was surprised to see that the number of visitors is at 35% of its usual level. Almost all of its visitors comes from search engines wherein around 70% coming from google and I suspected that I may have been penalized for whatever reason.


True enough, the site no longer appear in google results for my top 5 keywords. The site was always at the top 5 results for those keywords and losing that position send the site into its knees. It's still making some money albeit just a fraction of what it usually make. Google did not completely wiped out the site from its index as it still sends visitors. The site also keeps its top rank in Yahoo and MSN but everybody knows just how low these other search engines bring to your site. Actually, it is still number one in a number of keywords in Yahoo.


Now that one of my eggs is already rotting, I need to lay some new eggs. That's what I'm preparing this past few days. At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong with my site. We have to keep laying eggs so that in cases like these, you'll still have income. Not much of a difference in making your investments in the stock market.


This penalty is the second of two unfortunate events that happened on my online properties. The other week, Entrecard kicked out my site. I made an appeal but I was told that my site does not really fit in the "blog" category. They maybe right, so I just leave it at that. As I have said, entrecard was just a complement. But referrals from search engines is a different story.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Kicked Out of Entrecard

I was surprised last Monday when two of my money blogs suddenly saw its visitors plunge by as much as 15%. Not a signifant number for some but for me, that's a considerable number. Most of you will agree that entrecard visitors doesn't really generate money but hey, it's still traffic. In one way or another, it will help you.



When I checked my email, I was informed by Entrecard that I violated rules 11 and 12. That's two violations! So when I checked the quality standards, here's what's written.



# 11 No autoplaying audio: This includes music that plays automatically when you visit the page, or short audio ads that come up unannounced.
# 12 Content must be recent: Sites that have not been updated in 3 months will be removed.


Ok, I admit that I'm in violation of both. For #11, I have this Pay-Per-Play plugin installed and I'm sure that's the culprit. Since that doesn't really give me money, I removed it from the site. But I hope in the future, entrecard will allow it.



For rule #12, I guess I'm part guilty. You see, I implemented a way to republish some of my old posts at the front page without changing the publish date. So since I thought it would be very helpful to my visitors to view some of them when they come to the website (as against to dig for them in the links), I just implemented the technique. But the downside is that the RSS will still show the last post. And since I didn't really published any new post, Entrecard thought that the site is stagnant. I'm preparing several posts for these two sites and after that, I'll re-apply for entrecard. For the mean time, I removed the entrecard widget until I'm ready with a number of new posts.



For the whole set of rules, follow this link

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

September Revenue Report


By far, September is the most profitable month for us. It's not phenomenal but at least, we already hit the $500 mark.

Here's the summary of the revenue for the month of September.



Adsense : $385

TLA : $145

Total : $530



So what was the changes implemented? They are as follows.




  • 1. More SEO

    Two of my profitable sites get their traffic from search engines. To be specific, the 80% of the traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The rest comes from entrecard, referrals and direct visitors. So I there's a lot of room for improvement in referrals especially from other sites. We did some commenting and shoutbox hopping. It gave us two things. One is the backlink(though currently no value for Google) and the other being some kind of advertisement of your site. We also did a lot of entrecard dropping and campaign. That's something that we failed to do actively in the last three months.


  • 2. Change Template.

    As I already said earlier, a nice-looking template does not necessarily mean that it generates clicks. Prior to the current template I was using on my second site, the template looks good. It's clean and visually appealing. It's actually a copycat of a popular commercial wordpress template. But it only generates an average of $0.50 per day or roughly $15 a month. After the change to revamped adsense optimized template, it got $97 for the month. Click-through-Rate jumped from a mere 1% to 6.55%. Not bad, huh?


  • 3. Add and Rotate Contents

    With wordpress, you can't really display your old but popular post at the frontpage without doing a hack on the template. But there are just times that you won't have a topic to post and you'll have to reuse some of the existing posts. A quick modification the template solved the problem. We added a Feature category that will display in the frontpage all posts under that category.


    Rotating contents also helps in frequency of the search engine crawlers as they would think that there's new content on your site when in fact, you only rotated your article.

  • 4. Analyze your traffice

    Google Analytics is just awesome. Some people may say that there's just too many information that it displays but you don't really have to bother on all of them. Analytics gives us valuable information on the behaviour of the visitors that allows us to give them a better experience and thus, make them visit again.


You see, there's no real secret. You only have to wait and continue on what you are doing and then rewards will come later. For me, later is today. We just need to be proactive to keep up with the changes. We(me and my wife) are testing some new projects in line and hopefully, they'll be contribute too.



And oh! I think it's time for me to reward myself...err, my wife i mean. I'll buy her a PSP once we get the check from Google.

Design by Free blogger template