Adsense and traffic stay down. Back to risky traffic building exercises.

There was no progress in traffic and Adsense since my last post. Worse, my SERP for the current main keyword went down even more, and currently I'm on the seventh place. Fifth place for the second one does not bring much traffic, too. All this coupled with the usual Sunday drop in traffic translated into the lowest traffic figures I've seen since the mid September. Here is the chart from Google Analytics:



Adsense followed the suit and showed me the figures between $40 and $50, today being the record low of $23. Well, I already felt the taste of $150 per day, and I want those and more back. I'm running a pretty aggressive link building campaign of course, and I also want to leverage every possible advantage I may have. After some hard thinking I decided to try a 900-pound gorilla that I have on stock. The problem is - I can't really tell if that thing kicks me up or down.

Let me tell you the story in more detail. On my main site in addition to Adsense I run several affiliate programs, including Amazon. I have a decent Amazon affiliate module that generates a page for every item in Amazon inventory, plus quite a few overhead pages like categories and searches. I can't tell you how many pages exactly, but we are talking HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS here. Halfdeck's tool is crawling my site for the second full day in a raw, and so far it found 150159 pages.

I used to have many of them indexed way back. They brought me some weird traffic, but unlike Adsense the only person who ever bought anything through my Amazon affiliate id was my wife. I decided I did not like that and spent quite some time figuring out how to get those pages de-indexed. With the help of robots.txt I succeeded, and I managed to bring number of indexed pages down to around 300 meaningful ones.

Now, after musing some time over Dan Thies's teachings, I realized I may possess some nuclear weapon. The idea is that your internal links do matter for your pages ranking, as well as external ones - as long as those links are on pages that are indexed. Granted, internal ones are not as valuable as external, but they still can pass some link love in the needed direction. So, you want as many pages as possible to be indexed.

I did internal link structure optimization already for all of my meaningfull pages, and this gave me some nice results. Now I want to bring this further, and use hundreds of thousands of pages instead of just three hundreds. Even when the amount of link love from the single page is marginal, multiplied by thousands and thousands it creates some serious force. If I manage to get just 1% of those pages indexed, we are still talking about more than 1500 pages here. This should propel me to the top SERPs in no time. At least this is the plan :).

Now, there is a possible flip side to it, at least I can think about one possibility, and it worries me a lot. What if most of my content pages just get lost among the heaps of Amazon inventory? While I really doubt that my money making pages can disappear in such a manner, other pages (especially the ones without external link love) easily can. Well, I guess I have to watch this closely.

I removed the corresponding disallow line from robots.txt a couple of days ago. Google reports it did crawl my site since, but no changes to the index so far. I'm waiting and watching...