Things are getting better. Internal vs external links.

Things are gradually getting better. After quite some time down the page I'm back to the third place with my former main search term, and I'm slowly creeping up with my now main and second search terms. Currently I'm holding 16th and fifth places respectively. After serious dip well below 1000 traffic is back to around 2000 level, and adsense shows some more or less respectable figures. Nothing close to $150 just yet, but yesterday I managed to close $44, which is way better than last week standard $15-20.

Looks like my aggressive link building campaign and risky internal linking experiments are starting to generate some value. Not sure what is more effective, but I suspect internal linking. And looks like it has even more potential, cause I just fixed titles, and the new structure definitely is not reflected in the SERP yet. This is not to say link building campaign does not work. Just on the current stage internal links re-structuring seems to bring in more bang for the buck.

But I can do only so much with internal links. As soon as they are optimized, I can't improve any further. On the other hand, external links can be built infinitely. So, until I have more ideas on internal links optimization, I need to continue with link building campaign...

Update on traffic building

Here is an update on my risky traffic building experiement. Currently Halfdeck's tool found about 340,000 pages and crawled 91,000 of them. Search engines found some, too, but the results are mixed so far. I definitely got a serious boost on MSN across the board. And I got a serious slap on Yahoo across the board, too. Google seems to be indifferent so far, with just a few noticeable changes both up and down.

Yesterday I realized that all of my Amazon pages have identical title. I had to spend some time on coding trying to figure out the solution, and now they are getting unique titles with the product name and my site name. I hope this will push things in the direction I want. Will keep you updated :)

Adsense results and plans

OK, here we go again - one month is over and another month begins. Time to access how plans were fulfilled, and to make new plans. September was really controversial. I did manage to close $1119 in Adsense total - noticeably higher than the maximum planned. At the same time, it did not leave the feeling of satisfaction. There were three teaser days with revenues well above $100 each that showed what income could be achieved, and then things just slid back to the mediocre levels.

However, I dare using those teaser record Adsense days in my plans for October. I use the same algorithm as before, and base it not on the mediocre end of the month days (not all of them even crossing $20 mark), but on those three great days. So, $150 x 31 = 4650. Reckless? Unrealistic? IDK. I had such days, I know it is doable. If I don't try, I don't get there for sure.

Maximum Adsense goal? Well, same calculations as before: $4650 x 2.5 = $11625. Doable? IDK. But I was able to beat all my previous maximums. Wish me luck this time, too :)

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...

SERPs down, traffic down, Adsense down.

Oh, well, it's not always that rosy, you know... Yesterday I went down to the fourth place with my now main keyword for ddir, and today I'm even more down, currently on the sixth place. Accordingly, my traffic dried out (relatively), and my Adsense earnings took a nosedive, too.

While three days of the third place on SERPs turned over $151, $137, and $157, yesterday I was not able to hit even $100 and closed at $93.62. Today's forecast is even grimmer, and I frankly do not expect much more than $50, if at all. Currently (10am) I have 8.37 on the Adsense counter.

While just a week ago $50 on Adsense would have made me happy, today it's no longer the truth. However, there is not really much I can do. I'm already spending all that I can in terms of time and money on the marketing campaign. I should have several articles spun by the end of this week, and I'll start submitting them immediately. All the spare time I devote to stumbling, bookmarking, and otherwise promoting sites that link to ddir.

The good news though is that I'm back to the third place on Google with my former main keyword. Now it is forth in my priorities, and I did not pay much attention to it, but it manages to creep back. And, It got to the first page of Yahoo, too. Ninth position so far, but I did not finish my campaign yet. I just need to keep doing what I do, and eventually things should take care of themselves :).