As you can guess from the title my newer sites went into a bit of a (hopefully) temporary slap with Google. Basically all rankings were lost until the 5th page or further. Interestingly, this only happened to all the sites that were connected by adsense and google analytics. I only have been adding google analytics once I add adsense since I don’t really care before hand. Anyway, my older sites were left untouched in terms of rankings, though I do feel like the ecpm is slowly going down over time. Some of the newer sites that hit first page of Google and some cool rankings (one is #2 for a 25k+ keyword) are untouched. Now, I’m hesitant to add adsense to these other ones. What I just thought of while writing this post is maybe I will add adsense but not analytics for now. Actually, gonna do that RIGHT NOW and I’ll keep you guys informed if it google dances like the rest.
I’m not TOO worried about the Google dance, simply because I had a test site that I did not expect to make much from adsense and I added my adsense info to and a DAY AFTER it got a -50 penalty or worse. I then tried removing adsense, adding content, making more backlinks but it would never come back until 2-3 months later. Such long Google dances are something new for me since panda but hopefully I can count on my sites returning.
Ok so for now, a short break on the Google dance topic and I’ll reveal the income $’s for this month:
$3,012 from adsense (ohhh a round number!)
$175 infolinks
~$200 clickbank (I’ve been trying some new offers that seem to convert better)
$110 amazon
$45 CPA offer
Total from niche sites: $3,542 (-$788 from last month)
$150 Hostgator
$53 Article Ranks
$222 TKA
$40 TBS
Total from this blog $465 (+$7 from last month)
Total for this month: $4,007 ($781 from last month)
So overall income is down almost 100% because of my newer sites that got sandboxed/penalized. So while I think only time will cure this (I’m estimating 2-3 months) I will do the following since I have 3 sites in this boat (I created 5 in total in early 2011, well about 20 sites but only 5 that I intended to make money with, the rest are for fun/testing).
The “codes” are for my own personal reference so I can remember the different treatment if they do happen to get out of the sandbox at different times (they all got into it on the exact same day).
1. Remove adsense (PH)
2. Add a lot of no follow links + more random anchor texts (PH, MA)
3. Do nothing (RN)
We’ll see if that changes anything, I will keep you guys updated.
AMR -$10 discount
I learned that there is a $10 discount for AMR currently so I updated the links on the site to reflect this, if you still don’t have AMR I really think it’s one of the best one time fee purchases I made for backlinking. Easily competes with a ton of monthly services :).
Other things I am working on
I’m about to start getting involved with iphone apps. I’m about to do marketing for what me and my business partner hope will be an app that will revolutionize store promotions for our town. Gonna do PPC using google + facebook ads and also will start doing “offline” advertisement (banners/posters). So ya, gonna have to work a lot on learning all that stuff this month. I’m looking forward to it, I’ll probably invest a lot of money in making this app a success but if it fails I think I’ll have learned a lot by then about PPC/sales pages/social promotion that will help in the future.
I’m of course going to continue with my niche sites and hopefully the Google dance will end this month, the fact that I was making $800 off some of these keywords while they were at #2 is really encouraging to reach #1. Also, I barely touch my old blogs that make the $3k or so from adsense right now. I’m still debating if I should work on them more. For one site with 2k daily visits I would really like to write a free ebook, create an email list and sell to it and test how that works. For the other one (this one has 100+ pages and 50k uniques per month), the information is getting outdated to what I currently believe should be on it and I would have to re-write most of the content myself which of course would take a lot of my time.
Also, I started doing Muay Thay this month. For those who do not know it’s a martial art and I’ve been going to the training gym 3-4 days a week so far for 1-2 hours. It’s really demanding but I’m enjoying it greatly. For 2011, I had a goal of reaching under 10% body fat and while I’m close 2011 is quickly finishing. At first I expected that eating a paleo diet and going to the gym twice a week would be enough but apparently not for me. I’ve been gaining a lot of strength over the year but losing those last %’s of body fat is stupidly hard! My coach told me he estimates you burn about 1,000 calories doing Muay Thay a week, that should help (and it is!).
Recap of October plans:
Work on learning/perfecting my PPC add campaigns/sales pages
Consider improving my older sites content, at least pick one of the two
Add a bit more content to the new “dancing” sites and apply the 3 different strategies from above, see if that changes anything.
Work on completing SEO hybrid with Becker 🙂
Thanks for sharing!
I have a question. I read somewhere you or becker used Market samurai to find good keywords to make site from.
Do you go after broad – phrase or exact match type, when considering what keyword you choose?
We both have it and know how to use it but we prefer not to… Market Samurai is very slow for keyword research in my opinion and I would rather use the google keyword tool. However, when I do use it I go for exact, always. It’s basically the minimum you can expect for a keyword, so if the minimum is not high enough for me I would not consider it. Though, while I don’t want to confuse people, I do see some value in going for phrase searches when finding keywords for inner pages. On an bigger site you will most likely rank for those keywords + random words after very often over time.
I do like market samurai for seo competition analysis, but just doing it with the seo quake plugin is enough for most people because $100-150 for market samurai is quite expensive just for that feature (and rank tracking I guess).
sorry to hear about the loss but good shit with the muay thai! I just started taking karate at my college recently and its a blast, funny to see how many of us have the same interests.
Ya I’m loving it! At the gym I go to we spar a lot between each other and it’s so fun, I’m considering going to Thailand during the cold canadian winter and train with some hardcore Muay Thay people over there for a few months.
Do you think the sandboxed sites ended up like this because of the backlinking strategies you used with them?
Well, they would not have ranked in the first place without that backlinking strategy so whether it’s yes or no does not matter to me because if I did no backlinks I would have no rankings to start with :P. Maybe some modifications can be made, which is what I will be doing but for all these sites to be penalized together I would almost assume it’s a manual review or some “panda update” in early september that made all sites under 1 year (random number) with a big % of do follow links get a -X rankings penalty. It’s the same hosting/adsense account as my other sites and they were not affected.
Alex- These figures are none too shabby!
It’s unlucky that you got a manual review on your new young sites, here’s hoping they’ve only received a -50 for a month or two.
I know I keep harping on about a short actionable ebook with your formula in it, but I’m sure if it took off as a wso then you could easily double your monthly figures.
I bet John Robinson xfactor sold at least 10,000 of his first book at like $77 a pop… not bad eh?
Although maybe you’ll have to wait for these new sites to bounce back first 🙂
Cheers, John
Dancing with google as well atm. Bit annoying, but let’s see how it works out. Good luck with the %’s!
Thanks for the great report man.
Has your income report taken into account outgoings? If not, how much did you spend on IM this month?
$650-800, most of it is $450 for my VA
Alex what would you do if a site above you is not even working…he is there because of old backlinks, but it seems like the site is not registered anymore…
anyway to tell google to move this site out of the serp?
thanks!
Just be patient… It will get pushed away for sure.
Good direction, dude : )
Are you saying putting up adsense earlier in a website’s life hurt it’s ranking? Is this not something good to do? I usually put up my adsense code as soon as I have some content on a new site.
I wait until it’s on the first page of Google at least.
Hi Alex,
Great post 🙂
I suggest you try the Slow Carb Diet by Tim Ferris. I’ve had great results with it! Down to 14% body fat (from 18%) in 40 days.
The book is called “The 4 Hour Body”. Great stuff.
Oh ya I love Tim Ferris’ stuff. I read the 4 hour body and I have a diet that is really close. I’m slowly getting there, what is slowing me down is I go drinking 2-3 nights a week and while the alcohol is of course extra calories I usually eat really shitty foods while drunk at 3am with friends (nothing remotely healthy is open -.-)