Does Akismet ban affect Google ranking?

LOL I was banned by akismet. Well, not me personally, but my brand new URL that I created for my main money making page just a couple of months ago and made a redirect - which several previous posts were about.

Funny how I figured this. I did not comment on blogs with this URL yet at all. Never till yesterday. And yesterday I went to investigate my main competitor links - which was prompted by my drop in SE results for my main keywords. Yes, I got a serious drop like a week and a half ago, two keywords went to the second page, and one dropped from 3rd place to 4th which accounted for a total 50% drop of traffic. And yes, my main competitor got ahead of me on all keywords. I am still investigating the reasons for this drop, hence an attempt to figure out what competitor is doing.

So, I went to Yahoo site explorer and took a look at his links. All the first page were blog comments on high PR posts, and I naturally went to comment on the same posts. Yet my comments did not go through! WTF I thought? So I went to one of my own blogs and commented there. Yep, it went directly to spam! OK, so I went to a handful on friends' blogs and commented there and had them rescue my comments from spam. Did not help. I could continue this route since I own quite a few blogs and my friends own even more together, But I just stopped and thought I would rather try Akismet support.

I don't remember making a single comment with this URL, let alone spamming blogs. Been there, done that, don't do this anymore for quite some time, so I am positive it was not my action that caused the ban. Then what? Likely it was my competitor. Dirty stuff, granted. Looks like he is not very picky in his methods. So my second thought was - heck, let me do the same to him! Then I sorta pondered about it and decided to play nice. Like I don't have a proof he did it, only suspicion. I will give him a benefit of the doubt, keeping this incident in mind however.

So I won't spam blog comments with his URL. And I won't try to get off Akismet blacklist with undercover activity - I will just submit a support request to them. I did not do anything wrong, why should I hide? Will see how it goes, and will try to keep you posted.

One more thought however - could it be that this Akismet ban affected my Google ranking? Searched the net, and found another blog post about Google downranking coinciding with Akismet blacklist. Something to ponder about...

Theoretically it should not happen, because this way BigG will promote dirty competition, which definitely will hit the relevance of their search results, yet practically there is no limit to stupidity, so you never know :)

Well, here is the letter I sent to Akismet support:

Hello,

Looks like one of my urls http://XXX.html is considered spam by Akismet. I am positive I did not spam comments. In fact this url is just about two months old, and I even can't remember ever placing a comment with it before yesterday, when I actually discovered it does not go through. I would greatly appreciate it if you can look into this for me.

Thanks and regards, Joshua

The results are here: http://adsense-diary.blogspot.com/2009/04/akismet-ban-lifted-kudos-to-their.html

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...

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...

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 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...

Transferring all available link love to Adsense pages.

After some serious consideration decided to cut off all the internal links to the homepage using nofollow. It's kinda scary, but I figured out I should survive :). The reasoning under this decision is pretty simple. After internal links reorganizing I have three pages receiving almost all link love from the whole site: homepage and two money-making Adsense pages. If I cut off the homepage, these two pages should receive one and a half times more link juice.

Will it improve Adsense pages rankings? This is the goal. Will it hurt homepage ranking? I bet it will. How much? I have no idea. Since 95% of money are currently made on one Adsense page, and I'm currently promoting the second one that should become better money-maker, I guess homepage ranking is not that important from the income point of view.

Information sharing is a different story. At the first glance it should suffer if I get less traffic to the homepage. Well, consider this: if I manage to double the traffic on my Adsense pages (what moving from 5th to 3rd place on Google for a couple of key keywords can easily do), how many people will wander to explore the rest of the site? My guesstimate is much more than I lose on homepage. I'm going for it.

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.

First comment. Yesterday's traffic. Back to the third place.

First comment on this blog. Of course from spammer. Sure enough I had to delete it. I wonder how people spam sometimes. What they hope for? This one had about dozen links to the same foreign site, and was written in the language I don't understand. Who in his right mind would keep such a comment on his blog?

Yesterday traffic burst was because Google in one of its re-shuffles put me on the first page for a very competitive keyword. Like 90,000,000 results. It was not long lived, and as I write this, I'm on the fourth page for that keyword. It did not make me awfully big increase in Adsense though - as appeared this keyword traffic tend to have high CTR with very cheap clicks. $12.28, while respectable on my scale, is nowhere close to the record $19.65.

Yet today I'm back to third place with my main keyword, and it feels sooo good! Well above average traffic and CTR, and record CPM as I write this. I'm close to getting the record Adsense number today. A couple of more hours to go, and only one dollar left to beat the record!

Nofollow links. Drop in traffic and other stats in the morning. Peel away ads - nice addition to Adsense.

Keep finding links to nofollow all over the place. I'm catching them one by one in the places I really never thought about. According to the tool my profile got improved dramatically. Don't see any result on SERPs and traffic though yet - and of course on adsense. But this is too early, I think at least a week is needed or may be even more

Today I see a serious drop in traffic with no changes in SERP results. On top of that, both CTR and CPM were extremely low the first half of the day. Somewhat improved by the night, but CPM is still lower than average. May be because of adsense layout changes.

Stumbled upon peel away ads - love them. Installed on the site right away, and eagerly waiting for some statistics to see. The package is very primitive though, and does not have any recording, let alone data processing, so I have to rely on advertisers' data. If the idea works, I can add some tracking code of my own to it. It could be really good addition to adsense.

Optimizing internal linking. Tool for this with download link.

Trying to optimize my internal linking to get more juice to adsense pages to rank, I followed Dan Thies's advice and downloaded the great piece of software. I did some analysis on my site. Sure enough it appeared I have a few places I can improve on. I spent the day today figuring out the changes I have to make and applying them, and looks like I'm done with this by now. It is not going to play out today or tomorrow, but over the course of a week or two I expect Google (and other engines, too) to pick up my new internal link structure, and give a due attention to the pages I made accent on.

I love the tool by the way, and I highly recommend you go ahead and download it, too. Of course if you want to control what your pages have higher ranking then others. If you don't, that's you decision :). I'm not aware of any other software doing the similar job showing you how you can accentuate your important (adsense!) pages for search engines. Plus you have really good customer support. No, I'm not affiliated with the author in any sense, I just came there by Dan's recommendation, and I love the tool. It's absolutely free, and here is the link: http://www.seo4fun.com/php/pagerankbot.php

Fourth page of Google for "adsense blog". Dull day. 20,000 visitors monthly. Reverting on-page optimization. New Adsense layout.

This blog is on the fourth page of Google for adsense blog. Considering I did not make any SEO effort whatsoever on this one month old blog, it looks not bad at all. The secret weapon I used while being a marketing tool is not really a SEO practice. Actually, traffic on this blog improved overall. It is not that dramatic as it was the first couple of days after secret weapon launch, but it definitely differs from what was before.



Another dull day on the main site - Sundays seem to be extremely cheap for some reason. And this come on top of low traffic - for real reason people having life instead of starring at computer screen. Yesterday monthly traffic crossed 20,000 mark - another record on my book. Almost all traffic is organic.

Remember I was changing some on-page factors to try to rank better on ddir? I'm reverting most of it. Ranking have been sliding on many keywords ever since. Now I changed the title on ddir. And made some slight text changes on this page to reduce keyword density. I'm no longer targeting that weird long tail on Yahoo. I want to move to the third place on the main one on Google.

At 11:00pm changed adsense layout. Now I have separate blocks for upper left links and menu itself. This was one of configurations I have before, and I like it much better in terms of user experience. I'm giving it a second try to see if it is really worse than combined menu.

Trying to straighten out nofollow.

After reading Dan Thies on nofollow, I decided to take inventory of my internal link structure and try and optimize it. Not that I did not do anything along these lines before, but all the efforts were impulsive and uncoordinated.

For example, I ended up having link to contact and privacy pages only from my homepage. And those links are nofollowed at the same time. Does not really make any sense. You either keep those links only on homepage, or have them on all pages and nofollow. And the second solution is much better than the first one.

Now I'm going to try it more systematically. Using the same example as above, I will return those links to all the pages. This will make user experience better. And I will label them nofollow. This will keep my page rank from leaking to the pages I don't want to rank for.

And my more important pages should receive a bit more PR love. I don't think it alone will boost my rankings, but every bit counts. And better rankings = more traffic = more Adsense.

Nothing to write home. So-so main site Adsense. 301 redirect of parked domains.

Nope, nothing good to write home today. This blog got whopping ten visits, and zero Adsense. I even don't want to post the picture today - really nothing to brag about. The only good thing about this blog today - social bookmarks are still here, and they are operational. As soon as I find the full set of images and figure out the way to get them uploaded, you'll see much nicer layout.

On my main site Adsense is mediocre. Since nothing really changed on search engines, traffic is between 700 and 800 today, even with the weekend over. As of now Adsense shows $7.13, more than twice below the plan :(

I have several parked domains, and a couple of them are showing PR2 for some reason. I just discovered this recently. It took me some time to decide what to do with this PR, and now I'm going to setup 301 redirect to try and transfer this PR to my main site. At the end, it all should translate into Adsense. We'll see how it goes.

Yahoo traffic goes down, Google picks up. Difference between Google and Yahoo. Latest Adsense layout is the best for ddir so far.

Well, yahoo doesn't like me anymore. My position keeps fluctuating between 4th to 9th, and yahoo traffic dropped significantly. The good thing is that google finally picked on my link building efforts, and yesterday I finally got to the third place. I doubt I can get any higher, cause first two places are occupied by natural keyword holder, and the number of links they have are no match to my subtle effort. Traffic from google did increase, but it did not stabilize yet, so it's too early to post any numbers.

I did notice though, that quality of google and yahoo traffic is different. Quality in terms how many people click and how expensive they click. Google seems to be much better. However, the difference could be due to fact that keywords are different, and yahoo top one is slightly awkward. I personally cannot picture the person who might type those four words into the search engine. I rank first on google for that yahoo keyword, and it does not bring any traffic. When I was second for it on yahoo, it brought 600-700 daily…

Today is the last day for the last adsense layout test, and the latest configuration seems to be the best one. I don't know however if difference in traffic has anything to do with it. Anyway, CPM is 20-30% better than any other layout, so I stay with it for now. I think I will come back to revise this later, when traffic gets stabilized a bit.