New version of Wordpress and indexing Maternity Underwear
Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this option change?
Affiliate Project gets better at SQL
This affiliate business is a steep learning curve and this is great. We are not afraid of learning. During our 6 month journey so far we have learnt many things a few of which are Web Design, SEO and pulling data feeds but one of area we are recently really improving our knowledge in is SQL.
With the sites that we are currently doing we are mainly using product feeds and we often get these from different merchants and each merchant has their own way of doing their feeds. So we are getting better and better and pulling the right data out of these feeds and manipulating it in the way we need to to make sure our sites are displaying the best selection of products and the right products for the pages the customers are looking at. This involves using quite complex SELECT statements with a variety of arguments, joining table outputs together and then getting results on the joined information.
Both Gary and I have found this really interesting. SQL is a great tool and thinking it through in your mind and on paper about how to get the correct information out of a database and into tables and displayed on the web page is both an interesting and challenging task.
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.
New niche site launching – www.maternityunderwear.org.uk
We’ve done quite well for maternity swimwear so we thought as we had the design template and knew the market a bit should we maybe do some more niches in this area. We had a look and have decided to try a site for maternity underwear. We have been busy designing it and while we haven’t applied to all the merchants yet the site is shaping up nicely. It is pretty much ready to launch and we will add more merchants as we apply to them and they reply.
This new site is offering more challenges as we are re-working the way we use datafeeds and pull information out of different tables. More learning for us but that is what we enjoy.
It’s been quite good to have a theme and template there already although it has actually required quite a lot of tweaking to fit the new site. Have a look and let us know what you think. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.
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.
Affiliate Project dabbles in Dreamweaver to help family business
Recently Affiliate Project was approached by a family member asking for help with starting up a business adventure. They had seen and heard about our success with a few of our niche sites and how we have managed to get the sites listed in the top ranks on google in little time and sought our help to design, develop and SEO the site.
As we have only really had experience with using Wordpress to get our sites out there, it wasn’t straight forward to design the site as the requirements although basic weren’t really suited for Wordpress. Rather than hack a Wordpress theme to suit our needs, we decided to build the layout and style this from scratch using css and code with html with the help of Dreamweaver.
The site for any one interested to see our work is www.expandinternationally.com. Its basically a business website that is aimed towards companies that are looking to export services internationally. In this current market businesses are looking to cut costs and doing business overseas is one way business can save money. However its not that straight forward for companies and that is where Expand Internationally can help with over 100 years experience in doing business internationally.
Our challenge is going to be a little harder as we’re not trying to SEO a niche site. This is a business site and we need to try and understand the market and the target audience, but we love a challenge and this is what we’re in the Affiliate Marketing business for.
Hopefully the site will get up in the rankings so we can prove to the family that we are keen in doing Affiliate Marketing full time.
New site launched – www.maternityswimwear.org.uk
Well after a bit of a break and some well earned rest we are back. We have created another site, Maternity Swimwear where we list the best maternity swimwear from the best retailers at the best prices including Maternity Bikinis, Maternity Tankinis and Maternity Swimsuits. This was a real challenge this one as it is the first site we have done with proper data feeds. We have pulled in the data feeds from merchants and are now pulling them out of our database using SQL and positioned them using php to create tables rather than using a table plug-in. Another steep learning curve for us but one we hope will stand us in good stead for future product related sites. We are very proud of the site and already it is ranked 6th on the 2nd page of google for “maternity swimwear” on the UK search. We hope to improve this by improving our rating and SEO. Have a look and let us know what you think.
Affiliate Project taking a bit of a break
Sorry for the lack of updates at the moment. We have been taking a bit of a break with some family holidays and have also been busy creating a new site. This new site is more in-depth than any we have done before. We have therefore been busy learning some more PHP code and spefically pulling information out of MySQL databases and displaying it nicely. It’s been quite a challenge to learn this new code but now we now it we hope it will make a big difference to work we can do in the future as for a lot of our future sites we have in mind this code and being able to pull data out of MySQL databases and manipulate it in a way we want will be very beneficial. We are quite close to finishing this new site and will be applying to merchants very shortly.
Another site launched – www.bestcashbackcreditcard.co.uk
In our little competition between ourselves we have launched our second site, Best Cash Back Credit Card or should we say one of us has launched their site and the other is still designing. So far it is placed 8th on Google for “best cash back credit card” on the UK search. We have had some impressions as well so are eagerly awaiting to see how the site will perform. We know this is a competitive market but we hope the site will do well as it is quite specialized in the information it gives and the credit cards it reviews.
Meanwhile our first niche site, Power Plates is doing great. We are now making money from it and so far have made enough to cover all the costs we have outlaid so far, which is 1 year’s web hosting and 6 domain names so we are very pleased. We have more projects under way and are still as busy as ever in our spare time. We are still enjoying it and still learning and believe we can get better and better.
Working hard
Well we haven’t blogged for a while so just wanted to update you regular readers. We are working hard on our next two sites. We have turned it into a competition and have given ourselves 1 month to write the sites and launch. Whoever makes the most money in the first month buys the other a beer! Needless to say with this incentive it’s full steam ahead.
We have also been busy updating powerplates.org.uk where we have taken on board peoples comments and improved the site. At the moment using some web stats we can see traffic coming to the new site so we are really pleased with the start it’s made. We are also busy looking to improve our SEO as well.
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