Redirect 301 status. Ads layout

No changes on BigG. All is exactly as it used to be before the redirect. Now I realize I was hoping changing the url will have enough power to move me up a position or two. Well, no luck, looks like it is not enough with such a fierce competition. Yet every small bit counts, so I don't think this was the wrong move. It definitely proved beneficial in just a bit less competitive area - like a page or two down for the same keywords.

Interesting and not yet confirmed observation on the ads layout. Initially when YB picked up the right config, I let it run for a day, and then added other ad zones. Overall CTR and eCPM fell, but I attributed this to normal fluctuations. Now, in an attempt to squeeze a bit more from the same page I added one more ad zone from another ad provider to this page.

To my disappointment, I saw further drop in CTR and eCPM, not compensated for with the added eCPM. So, I removed almost all ad zones from the page yesterday night. Today I see a serious increase in both metrics. I will give it a couple of days, and then try to switch other ad zones back on. If CTR and eCPM follow, I will take it as a proven fact.

I like it!

I don't know what will be down the road, but I like how I feel today! I am already having the second most profitable day of all time, and it seriously threatens the previous record, that was set almost a year ago. Right now it is showing $170.63 for the day, with the record being $185.35, and it still has more than 4 hours to go!

So yesterday night YieldBuild finally picked up the right configuration, and now I am enjoying the ride in the full force - CTR about 50% and eCPM approaching $30. Traffic seems to pick up, too - hence the spectacular results. Not sure exactly where extra traffic is coming from - SERPs for the main keywords are still inside their recent range, albeit at the upper boundary. Probably some secondary keywords got a boost from changing url - will try to check with GA tomorrow.

Well, overall I am really satisfied so far. It did not take long, just five days, and there were no drop in traffic at all. And if you are not using ad optimizer you will not feel the transition at all!

This all refers to google. No changes on Live yet, and I got dropped from Yahoo :D

Redirect 301 - completed

Well, it took BigG about five days to do the job. Right now page address is updated for every keyword I bothered to check. No changes in ranking in BigG, no significant changes on Y and Live either. Wonder if it was the good idea to implement at all. Yet on other pages I saw a definite improvement. Either improvement did not come yet and will come a bit later, or this change was not enough to alter the current status quo for this particular page...

Money wise I am still in dire straights - Yieldbuild still did not pickup the right configuration, and my eCPM still stays a half of what it could have been, earnings follow of course. Need to have more patience on this, I know it takes a while. :)

Trying to push YieldBuild to optimize faster

The whole day was agonizing over relatively low eCPM. Not really really low, it was around $10, which is not that bad at all - yet I got used to twice as much lately. I know what ad tabs configuration Yieldbuild should arrive at to get this eCPM, so watching it wondering around without any purpose finally became unbearable.

So I went in and edited out two ad tabs, so only one is left and what that thingie should do is just to figure out the right type of the ad and its format. Yet so far it did not pick it up, despite of my best effort :(

The total for today is around $65, and it unlikely to get much higher than $70 for the whole day...

No changes on search engines side. Still the same positions, and more or less the same traffic, that slightly grows, probably due to the seasonal tendencies...

Redirect 301 - current status

Search engines wise - nothing to report home so far. New page got indexed in Google and Yahoo, Live lags as usual. However, there are no changes in search results just yet. They still show the old address, and position remains the same - hovering about 20 on MSN, 80 on Yahoo, and the bottom half of the first page on Google.

Yet there is one thing I did not think about that hit me in the back - my ad optimizing service. It rightly decided that this is a fresh new page, and started all optimization from scratch. It will take anywhere from several days to several weeks to arrive at the optimal placement that worked that well for me at the old address!

Meanwhile I got a serious reduction in eCPM and of course earnings! Yesterday I made just around $65, and if not for ads re-optimizing it would have been in the area of $110...

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...

Not many changes... Kind of lost interest

There are not many changes with my Adsense for the last month - since I last posted here. I did not perform to expectations, and Adsense revenue for October was even lower than in September. Still, it was more than $1000, which gives me a hope I can finally make it in the nearest future.

For some reason I lost interest to posting my "adventures" here, so this blog will just hang around until I want to post again - or forever. Good luck to everybody :D

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...

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 :).

Finally making a living with Adsense; a bit earlier than expected.

The day before I was hoping to get to the immediate monetary goal in a couple of months. You know what? I'm there. Tonight. As I write this, my adsense counter for today is showing a number just a tad below $150. I did not make a typo. Not $50 (which was an uncharted territory for me just before yesterday), but $150. Now, let's do a little math: $150 x 365 days a year = $54,750 yearly. While one can't have caviar for breakfast with that kind of money, bread and a fair slice of butter are more than affordable.

How did I get there? This same keyword I was mentioning several times in this blog already. I'm now on the third position in Google for that keyword. When I turned on my computer in the morning and checked my adsense stats, I immediately knew something happened - it was showing $30 and change. During last week I saw such a number close to the end of the day, and before that I did not even know such numbers exist :). Traffic shoot through the roof - here is the chart:



All that means today is the day to remember and celebrate in the years to come as the day when I proved I can make a living working for myself, not for my boss. I'm sure I'll have enough difficulties ahead, but now I know this is doable. I don't have to second-guess myself anymore whether I'm doing the right thing. It is possible to make a living with Adsense, and I'm doing it!

Setting a new Adsense Record.

I love it. Seriously. For the last several days Adsense shows me at least $30 a day, most of them around $35. Right now at 11pm I have $38.74 on the counter, and a good possibility to tap $40 for the first time in my life tonight. :D This is nothing to talk about for some people like Joel, but for me this is a personal record. I checked this blog - just a bit more than a month ago my normal Adsense revenue was $3. I increased it tenfold. In less than a month and a half. If I manage to keep this improvement pace at least for a couple of months more, my immediate monetary goal is reached.

Internal links do wonders. Hold on Adsense tests.

Looks like my internal link reorganization really helped. I see a definite increase in rankings for most of the search terms related to the pages I aimed link love at. Google loves me, and I'm enjoying the fourth day of fifth place for the very active keyword. Traffic jumped about 50% and now hovers around 1500-1600. I like it!

Can't really tell if current adsense layout is better or worse than the previous one. Traffic nature did change significantly during the test. My usual problem. I can't figure out the solution so far, so I stop experimenting with Adsense layout until I reach my traffic goals I think. Or until I figure out the solution.

I wanted to find the post about forum topics not getting targeted Adsense, and just could not do this. Well, I decided it's time to go ahead and categorize this blog. It took me probably a half an hour, but now I can find needed posts much easier. Did slight re-arrangement of other blocks to accommodate the change.

Talking about forums Adsense, I went back and compared stats from before and after. Well, it definitely helped. I'm now receiving 40% better CTR, and 25% better CPM. Since traffic on my forums are extremely low, it does not translate into big figures yet. But it definitely shows there was a problem that is fixed now. When I get enough traffic to my forums, I enjoy the difference.

BlogRush works. Record Adsense CTR, CPM, and earnings. New keywords.

You probably noticed I joined BlogRush (this fancy box at the bottom of the right column). It's a completely free brand new service (still beta) from John Reese, and it seems to work nicely for me. It's here for a couple of days, and it brings me several unique visitors every day. Considering I give it just a very few impressions, it's really good. Give it a try, it probably will work for you, too. There are no catches, and it looks like a no-brainer for me.

I showed record earning of a tad more than $30 yesterday. Today follows the suit with $28 currently. Adsense CTR is shooting thorugh the roof, as well as traffic and CPM. Most of it is due to the new keyword that I even did not consider before. Accidentally I got to the first page of Google for it (number eight currently), but now I want to keep it there. It became the key keyword for ddir page for now.

I even went back to keyword research, and did a very broad scope of related search terms. Now I have four key terms to target for this Adsense page. Two of them were in my list before, and two much more powerful I just added. Since they all are interconnected, I did target all of them in my campaigns, but I did not track results for those two that are new. I just did not realize I have two more way better search terms there. Why I did not pay attention to this is a mystery to me.

Record Adsense CPM again. Peel away ads don't work. First page ranking.

Coming back to Adsense, I had a record CPM yesterday. I want to brag about it so much - but I really can't cause I can't disclose the number according to Google Adsense TOS. Trust me, this is the number everyone in the industry would be happy to have.

Peel away is not that good as expected. 0.26% CTR and zero conversions hardly qualify for shooting through the roof :(. Text ads for the same advertiser on the same page have CTR up to 1.18%, and conversion rate up to 6.25% currently. Since I already bought the stuff, and it uses the place otherwise not used, I leave it there for now. I might play with other advertisers and see if it gets any better. Anyway, my main income on that site comes from Adsense, not affiliates.

First page position for the very competitive keyword I was mentioning before. At that time it showed 90,000,000 competitors, this time it is showing 57,000,000. Still very impressive. Well, since I'm already ranking for it (for some reason I did not include it in my initial keyword strategy), I might as well take several steps to rank better. I'm changing the title to include it, and going to target it in my next article submission. This might or might not knock my current main keyword down.

Relatively bad CPM for September so far. Adsense CPM and CTR charts.

Traffic is picking up (don't know why btw), CTR is shooting through the roof, but eCPM is hovering way below average. What does this mean? Either people prefer to click on cheaper ads for some mysterious reason, or I'm being served cheaper than usual ads for another mysterious reason. Either way good traffic does not bring in significant Adsense income increase. Sad. I'm still getting around $9 a day for the whole September, forget double-digits I was able to show in August.

Here are the charts of my Adsense CTR and eCPM since the beginning of August (without numbers of course) - did I tell you this is a roller coaster?