Pulling the trigger

It is scary, really...

Despite of the tests that proved positive and very encouraging, it is still very scary to start the redirect on the main money-maker. Right now I am up $96 and change for a day. Will I see such numbers ever again? I don't know...

Yet I decided it's time to do this, and there is no reason to roll back but fear. Have to do this, right?

OK, so right now for quite some time this page is hovering between 6th and 8th positions for the main keyword and 5th and 7th position for the second main keyword on Google, holds position 77 (LOL) on Yahoo and 21 on MSN for the main keyword.

Quite competitive keywords I tell you. Currently BigG returns 25,900,000 results for the main keyword; 9,480,000 intitle; 19,700,000 inanchor; 7,560,000 inurl. For the second keyword those numbers are 41,600,000; 63,400; 513,000 and 8,620 respectively.

According to GA this page received about 140K pageviews for the last month, and currently it produces revenue of about $120 per day.

Guess I will try to write down the numbers on the daily basis for some time, and hope they will get better :)

Ok, it's time to pull the trigger, wish me luck...

Redirect 301 - looks like it works!

10 days after I started this experiment I am positive it works, and works even better than I expected. Out of two redirected pages one had very short lived drop of traffic - for a couple of days literally - and it came back to the pre-redirect levels and stays there. From being nowhere for the main keywords page moved to the second page of Google and stays there, even managed for a short while to jump to the first page and make a double listing with the main page.

Another one seemed to have a more prolonged drop of traffic - until I realized there was something else involved. Further investigation showed that this page was also receiving a significant amount of traffic from MSN, from another keyword. And I did remove that keyword from the title at the time of doing redirect, cause this made the title more oriented to the main keyword. Well, right now I restored the old title, will keep a look at this and report later...

Now, what happened earnings wise? Surprisingly, they stayed the same for the second page. This was due to the overall growth of cost of click for the last several days I think. For the first page earnings actually increased like 80%, probably due to the same factor.

In fact, I made the same experiment for the third page at the same time - I did not mention it cause it is using completely different keywords. Yet the results are pretty much the same - over the span of 10 days overall unchanged traffic and almost double earning :)

Chages on Hubpages. Redirect 301 status.

So I don't forget. I noticed the day before yesterday that one of my high-traffic hubs have a very low CTR, especially comparing to another traffic champion. Some quick analysis revealed that the layout of the above the fold portions of those hubs is different. Yesterday I made a change to make lower CTR hub layout the same as on higher CTR hub. Up to the moment of change (Feb 15 inclusive) the CTR for lower hub for the month of February was about 3.5%. Will give it a couple of weeks and come back to that at the end of the month.

Redirect 301 experiment does not stop to amuse me. Despite of rumors talking about 6-8 weeks it did not seem to take BigG more than a couple of days to pick it up. At some point one of those relatively low link popularity pages even formed a double listing with the major one, 5th and 6th positions on the first page of BigG for 40,000,000 results search! It did not last long though, a day or so, but now it still is on the respectable second page for the same keyword, much better of than it was before redirect.

So far I am happy with results and seriously am planning on doing this to the main money maker page in an attempt to move it higher than 5-6th place. Just want to wait a few days more to make sure the results hold.