Alex`s Feb Report – My first month that I go back in $! – SEO Lessons Learned

So as I somewhat mentioned in my previous post on January, February is actually the first month that I went lower in my income from the previous month and for a few good reasons.

adsense in februaryI discovered that changing my theme ( I wanted to try a really nice looking wootheme template, similar to the one on this blog) on my main website destroyed my income within a few days in the beginning of February. I then quickly changed back to my old theme and I started seeing my keywords go back up in ranking around the 7th. Since I had a hard time believing my theme could be such a big factor in my rankings I tried it again…. Around the 10th  and as you can see, by the 12th I had reached a noticeably lower income again. So I was wondering why. Could my artisteer theme that we recommend in our how to start your website post really be THAT powerful? Since I was leaving to Miami on the 15th I decided to just go back to the old theme, make it a bit better looking and leave things as is. As you can see, my rankings have clearly started going up again but is it really all the theme`s fault?

SeoMOZ had a pro version trial going on this month and I gave it a shot. While they crawled my website I saw something interesting that rung a bell of something in SEO that I learned a long time ago ( I think from SEO moz actually, or another big white hat blog). Too many inbound links can cause confusion for the google bot, or rather I think it simply stops crawling them all. My website has been over 100 posts for a while now and since I had a neat dropdown plugin to the right (sorted by theme/categories) each page actually linked to ALL my posts meaning I had hundreds of internal links per post. I think the problem is that the woo themes made this even worse with all it`s cool looking widgets that added even more internal links. Either way, I changed the widget linking structure in my site around feb 25th and as you can see, I definitely have been getting back all my rankings 100%. I was getting back most of them around the 15th when I put back my old theme but I was still struggling with my more competitive keywords… Now it seems I`m /1 for 90% of the keywords I used to rank #1 for (some new ones joined the family too 😉 ).

Sooo things are looking really good now. Here are some of the other income sources (btw should I bother putting pictures of these?? LEt me know if you really care to see amazon or clickbank)

– $60 random CPA offers that I still am testing

$120 Amazon

~$90 Clickbank

~ $70 infolinks

Something interesting about infolinks, look how much it made on the last day of February! Wow, that’s actually quite decent now. I put it back on my main website a few days ago as part of my ongoing tests to see if it affects my adsense income or not (now that my adsense income is back in the normal range) and $10 in a day is quite good. Also, I have a website with about 500-800 daily visits and a low CTR of 1-2% and infolinks almost helped me double my (somewhat poor) income of $3-10 daily on it. For some reason the infolinks ads do not seem to impede at all my users on that website and they also have a similar 1-4% CTR and a $3-5 ecpm (the adsense one is only a bit higher).

Anyway, I’m soon back home and I can’t wait to work on my websites now towards new things instead of scratching my head wondering how I could be losing rankings because of a simple theme change… BTW for now I’m sticking to my artisteer theme but I might go back to the woo theme to give it a shot and see if the heavy internal links were really the issue. Not sure if I am ready to lose a few more hundred $ doing this though :P.