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.

Adsense Diary may be back

It's been a while. Quite a while I would say. I really lost interest in posting here when it seemed that I achieved the intermediate goal. Boy how wrong I was assuming I made it!

Well, I did achieve it, for a short while. And since then it was down and down and down. The last drop was the fall of the average click cost from 10c to 2c, that practically eliminated my income altogether, and forced me to face a hard reality - we are in a depression baby, and nowadays you have to work 10 times more to earn ten times less!

So I am back to drawing board, starting several projects at once and trying to resurrect what is left from the old ones. Good thing is that today I finally crossed again the $100 mark with Adsense - I did not see such kind of earnings since May! In fact at the end of January my usual numbers were between $10 and 20 :(

Actually the purpose of this post was to keep a record that yesterday I changed urls of two of my forums posts from ftopict-160 and ftopict-179 to main-keyword-1 and main-keyword-2. The idea was to make them rank better, since I noticed that almost all first page listings but mine had the keyword in the url or domain. I can't slip it into domain name, yet url is doable with 301 redirect, at least theoretically.

So I did not dare to try it on a main money-making page just yet. According to publications and rumors, it takes BigG about 6-8 weeks to sort out redirect 301, so I want to have other means of income for those two months! First I am going to figure out is it really 6-8 weeks, hence this experiment on a couple of much less profitable pages.

Victory?

I don't know. There was a moment already when I declared victory on this blog, and it was kinda premature... After several days I was dropped from the first page of SERPS, traffic went, and so were earnings. I had several spikes of traffic since then, but neither stayed more than a handfull of days.

My earnings were more or less stable in the are of $30 a day, and climbed steadily - but slowly... Finally late February I got a kind of jump, and it stays in the area of $150 a day - which was the intermidiate goal. To be precise, those earning are combined Adsense and Widget Bucks, and Widget Bucks gives about 1/3...