Revisit old sites, You could double your Affiliate earnings!
The team at Affiliate Project (I look like rodders and Paul looks like Delboy) are constantly busy on new projects, but we don’t want to leave our old sites going stale. As we recently noticed that one of ours sites was affected by a site speed problem, we’ve been reviewing our sites structures, meta stuff for on site SEO optimisation as well as google webmaster tools to see where our site is appearing. Google has not long ago updated the webmaster tools and now the search queries gives you a bit more detail, a little bit like Google analytics. This is very useful data as you can see in a quick snapshot where your site has appeared for so many keyword phrases and also see what impressions your site got. It also gives you the CTR (click through rate). Now I’ve been analysing this data and also looking over the search keywords that are fairly low competition and OK search volume and we’ll now work on improving our search ranking for more keywords by writing more content on site and off site and doing more link building on these keywords. The first thing we need to do is work through a list of those keywords and pick those that are easiest to rank. We reckon we could double our traffic and click through rate, therefore doubling our profit with not too much work. Hopefully we’ll be out of our day jobs sooner that we think. This time next year rodders 
Google Ranking affected by site speed
Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!
This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.
Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.
Affiliate Project now has Page Rank 3
Wahoo, This blog site now has a page rank 3 and 825 page links according to the SEO for Firefox plugin
Considering that we don’t update this blog that often, with both of us having full time jobs, families and our other sites as priorities, its nice to see the page rank climb. We think this is based on a number of factors; a fair amount of unique relevant content, traffic to the site (mostly from A4U), on page SEO and links to our site from varied sources and various different anchor text links.
I’m not sure how accurate this Page Rank checker is and if this is the same as Google Page Rank or not, but its a useful plugin to use when checking out the competition. For us to get to Page Rank 4 I suspect we’ll need a whole load of more good unique relevant content.
We have in the past done some 1 way links from this blog to our niche sites and they have counted towards good link juice from the likes of SEO SpyGlass tool. The main problem with doing this is competition and is it relevant to this blog! oh well if it helps then why not!
Forgotten about niche found ranking on first page!!!
Affiliate Project and Google have a Love/Hate relationship. Maybe we’ve not figured out the exact formula for ranking sites yet as we’ve had success in some areas but not in others. I’m sure Google keep moving the goal posts too!
We do have many sites ranking on the front page for the domain keywords and some are ranking for many keywords, but these are sites that we’ve worked on promoting more. So it is true when Affiliate Peeps say content is king.
Today we noticed a niche that was started about 1 month ago but never finished because of other priorities, and its now ranking on the first page. There is hardly any content, some pages were returning 404s, we’d never done any back links about this site and all on page SEO was turned off. So with about 100 words and a few products on the front page it was ranking based on only a few things; keywords in the domain name, good use of Heading tags, and a tiny bit of relevant content.
Now we did pick this niche because we researched the competition and found the ranking sites didn’t have much to them, wrong use of on page SEO or targeting different keywords. Plus hardly any back links.
For now with little time to spare to work on the site, we’ve put up a few products, some banners, affiliate links and some google ads so that a dormant site that is ranking for approx 15000 exact searches can be monetised a wee bit. Well that is the idea anyway.
We’ve also enabled the All-in-one-SEO plugin for wordpress, Google XML sitemap, submitted to google with the sitemap to see if this helps it climb. Lets hope these changes don’t make the site drop. If it does, it would be bloody typical of our Love/Hate relationship with Google. And it make us think twice about using all that meta stuff! Maybe organic way is the best. Only time will tell
Google dropped my site again :(
UPDATE: Site back at number 1 as of today 27th Oct 2009, was it something I did?!?!? very strange
Google can be both your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Today it’s the latter. We have a site maternity swimwear which has been ranking at no 1 for well over 2 months now. We had some problems before with the ranking of this site, and what appeared to be a yo-yo effect. We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure the site was developed according to Google’s guidelines.
We haven’t had any recent major changes to the site so this leaves us really confused as what could be causing the issue. The site is being updated on a regular basis for fresh content. My thoughts are its possibly due to either of the following:
- Back links to our site may have dropped, I did notice a couple of hundred back links from 1 site to our site no longer there
- Back links from this site (which has now been removed in an attempt to fix the problem) Maybe these links although all one way aren’t relevant. Obviously this will reduce the number of links but will try to focus on more organic relevant links. I know I have added a link back from this post but couldn’t resist as this will be a PR2 link, so even if it helps initially, at least will get us some more sales until we get more relevant back links.
- Google crawled our site and found 404 pages, possibly due to our Web host (EUKHOST) having problems yet again. We did notice that some of these page URLs had been added to our robots.txt file, thanks for doing this Google.
This is somewhat frustrating when this happens, especially because the site is generating quite a lot of sales. If we were full time and this was happening across several sites, then our earnings could fluctuate and would not be a good business.
Plans for the future going forward is to pick ourselves up and try and establish no 1 position again through more relevant backlinks, maintain updating the content such as offers to the site and also look into dedicated hosting in the near future. Additionally we’ll be looking at developing sites that don’t necessarily rely on SEO such as membership/community sites.
Google Docs – a useful tool for us
If you regularly read this blog you will know there are two of us on this project. We write lots and lots of documentation that we need to both access as at the moment we use Google Docs to do this. This is a great tool as we can both access and change documents at the same time, and even msg each other while we are doing so through google docs. What tools do you other affiliates use to store and share your documentation? Would be interested to know if there are better ways of doing this but for now Google Docs is great for our needs as remote affiliates.
Maternity Swimwear site yo-yoing on Google
We recently had a problem with one of our sites, Maternity Swimwear. After being at number 1 on google for the main search term the site disappeared. Then after a couple of days it came back again, at number 1. Very confusing. We looked and thought we had discovered some penalties and some problems with the robots.txt file and while the site came back it soon disappeared again. We were stumped. It then got a bit stranger whereby the site would be at number 1 in the morning and gone in the afternoon. We researched this, asked some people on forums and then Gary found the answer. Our site was “yo-yoing”. This is the term used to describe a site that behaves in the way our site was.
So what causes it and how did we resolve it. Well the main cause can be too many internal links on the home page. So Google looks at these as over linking and penalises the site. We resolve this by removing some of these as to be honest, without really realising it we did have a lot of the same links to our categories on the home page.
I then setup a page per merchant. There were three reasons for doing this, one to add internal links to these pages, secondly to add more content and pages to our site and thirdly to actually provide a better resource to the customer so they could view all products from a particular merchant.
We changed the footer information to have more text rather than just internal links.
After a few days our site re-appeared again but this time further down the page on the 1st page of Google, about 7th or 8th. While we weren’t at number 1 our site seemed to settle and stopped yo-yoing. then after about a week our site climbed back to number 1, now on organic content rather than the number of internal links on the home page and has stayed in that position for a good while now. So maternity swimwear is back earning again and to be honest earning quite well. We are on track to meet last months earnings even with the site not being on the 1st page for a few days.
Maternity Swimwear – back where we belong, #1
Checked Google this morning and Maternity Swimwear is back at number 1 for the non-exact global search term maternity swimwear. Phew. We are well chuffed as it was a bit of a shock to come in yesterday and find it had dropped from the face of the earth, or should I say Google earth.
So what happened. Ok I’ll admit it, it was me! Me and my fat fingers, or fat mouse clicks. Well not all me. I’ll explain. I was updating our database on Wednesday and instead of emptying our product table to re-import the changes I had made, I dropped the table. This was quickly rectified by myself and Gary and we quickly had the database back up and running, probably within 5-10 minutes. However due to a plugin that we installed, wp-cache, the site was cached and wouldn’t update even though we were running SQL queries so we knew the database was fine. This wp-cache meant the site wasn’t updated for a good while and during this time it appears Google crawled the site, received the cached SQL and PHP errors and added entries into our robots.txt file. This then meant Google thought the site was invalid and dropped it.
What did we do to rectify it. Well we searched for reasons why a site can be dropped. We had heard of this before, duplicate content, bad code can be some of the reasons so we did a quick check, no problems there. So we used Google webtools. We then found out the robots.txt had changed and a lot of Disallow entries had been added by Google. So we removed the invalid entries and increased the rate at which google crawls the site in the hope we get back up there. Then this morning we have checked and there we are, number 1 in Google again. We are chuffed as we have worked really hard to get this site to number 1 in the first place so it was a bit of a shock to not find it up there yesterday. However we have learnt from this. Onwards and upwards.
We have said this many times before but this is all a learning curve. In hindsight maybe it was good for us to experience this as it improves our skills in this business. We had to diagnose what had happened and put in place corrective steps to get it back. It only took our site down for 1 day. Not bad if you have many sites, but when you are starting and only have a few niches it can make you panic. Ok it can make me panic but then I am a worrier. Good job Gary is the calm collective one. I just run around screaming.
Niche site dropped from #1 position on Google overnight
Today we noticed that one of our niche sites had dropped from Google for the keyword search terms maternity swimwear. We have started to analyze the site to try and figure out what could have made this suddenly drop 
A quick look at Google Webmaster Tools and we noticed our Robots.txt file had several disallows for most of the main pages, but not the home page. We are not sure why this happened. The only recent change that we are aware of was that we updated the product feeds and had accidentally dropped the table in phpmyadmin. We had quickly re-created the table to update the product feeds, but for about 3-4 hours our site was not showing the products. We think this was because of the wp-cache plugin which has been causing us lots of problems recently. We had disabled this ages ago but it still seems to be caching. We knew the code in our php file hadn’t changed and that the sql statement was working ok, so must have been the caching problem.
Our site has been in top 3 position for almost 1 month now, soon after the launch of the site, so we are really confused why this would suddenly disappear.
We have also posted a question on Google Webmasters Forum, but some comments we got were not very constructive. We know the site needs some improving and will make some changes over the next coming weeks to help with this, but why would our site just drop.
A site:maternityswimwear.org.uk shows our site is also still indexed, so it doesn’t appear to have been penalised. Google Search for www.maternityswimwear.org.uk is still there.
Our only conclusion is that Google bots had tried to crawl our site when there was no content effectively so because of this our site has dropped to page 9 instead of page 1, position 1.
We will wait a few days to see if Google bot puts our site back where it belongs, at the top
Has anyone else experienced this problem, or can provide us with some advice, we’d like to hear your comments.
Family Business website facing Google indexing problems
Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.
I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.
After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.
- Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
- We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
- We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information - We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
- No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.
Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.
For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com
Any comments/suggestions welcomed
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