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?

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.