I was shocked at earning $16 on Wednesday and yesterday was even lower, $13.27. But the strange thing was that on Thursday I did $30. It seems I am back to earning what I was back in February before building out 70 more sites.
I’ve been reading more about the new algorithm changes that Google just launched known as Mayday. Here’s Matt’s word on how this is going to effect long-tail searches.
I am convinced that this change is the cause for my micro niche sites being sandboxed. As if I already had enough on my plate, now I need to do some guess work into figuring out how to get my sites ranking again. More content? Changing main page content? Backlinks? I don’t know. I am still seeing .orgs of my keyword ranking on the first page for the keyword phrase and the only difference I can see is that they have more content both on the first page and overall throughout the site. I’m seeing 10 pages on one particular .org site that is sitting at #5.
Even my niche blogs have been somewhat effected by this. The one blog I was raving about getting to rank on page one back in march is once again sandboxed. It has over 300 back links and 60+ posts and yet the .org version is a one page with 8 backlinks and sits at position #6. Now with this one page, they have basically added 6 posts into one.
Here is a similar example. This site [http://ghdflatirons.net/] (not mine) is ranking at #3 for its keyword but look at its backlinks. Almost all the backlinks are coming from its own link wheel of identical sites. One of the sites in that link wheel is one I have been competing with since October 2009. The content is not bad, honestly. So I am thinking of maybe adding more content to my main page micro sites and see if this can help boost their rankings.. I’ll start this new plan of attack on Monday. I gotta do something. I cannot let my loss of rankings cause me to lose my income when I was just hitting almost 1k a month with adsense.
RSS Feeds
on 
on 
on 
on 
OUCH.
Actually, I have been pretty sick to my stomach (past 12 hours anyway) when figuring the impact of the attack on the long-tails. I’m having an interview w/a top banana SEO at my blog (when he gives me the questionnaire…hopefully this week), and a couple of the questions center around this very algo change.
I’ve seen one of my sites get sandboxed, it was at #3-5 (floating) for a couple of months…this is a site that generated 300 backlinks after my manual article submissions brought it to about 75….then the two UAW runs brought it to 300+ and they finally settled at 175. Long and short of it is that I was going to flip this one since it appraised near $1k and I lost interest in it…CPC was low, but still earned $15-20/month.
NOW it’s at #2 in Y, but who cares: I get no traffic w/o G to this site, it’s pure SEO. Now I don’t know if it can be flipped or not, will have to come back to it later. In your situation, I can see this as being a very stressful deal – most of my income is still from Elance, but wanting to get more passive income vs. active…
Your site stats don’t make a lick of sense, which is the frustrating thing…it’s a new change and bottom line: it’s a computer program that does the indexing/ranking…now it’s just a matter of what can be done to overcome it, which is data that will come in time.
I’m sticking with it all the way — will have to just focus on what Matt and company are saying they’re looking for and keep truckin’.
.-= JamestheJust on Elance´s last blog ..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results =-.
No doubt this is very frustrating and nerve racking. Especially when I started up with internet marketing my entire game plan was always to focus on long tails. Whether I built niche blogs, sniper sites, hubpages or micro niche sites.
I think after the Backlinks Philippines test, I will havea better gauge as to what will help them rank better. Either backlinks or more quality content.
Its all about the backlinks….
Not according to the Mayday update it isn’t.
Seems like the forum at WMW are saying that the best way to get you rankings back up is to look at your internal site structure and ensure your anchor text keyword(s) are present within the actual content, not nav bars, sidebars etc. (http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4144824.htm).
I’m going to run some tests in WordPress using SEO Smart Links plugin and see if this is actually the case.
Will let you guys know what the outcome is.
Thanks for the link!
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
I have had a couple of very low days with adsense this week – but my traffic has been consistent. Check your traffic to see if it has dropped, or it just EPC?
I re-read terry kyles experiement last night on warrior forum. It has got me thinking more and more about going down the affiliate side of things instead of adsense. What I mean by that, is focusing on keywords that have a good affiliate product, and putting affiliate links on my sites instead of adsense. I find it annoying how adsense cpc keeps changing. One day I get $6 for a click, then the next day from that same site i get 15c……. it really varies a lot. I sometimes feel like its all just random LOL. Comission junction has a few nice lesser known stores offering good rates, many offer around 10% commission…
I am going to trial it on a site that has been earning about $1 per day for the last 6 weeks. The product sells for around $200 average. Even if i only refer one sale per month, thats $20! Im getting about 20 hits per day / 600 per month and its a buying keyword – I think its likely to convert at at least 1 in 200 so i should easily have the potential for 3 sales per month = $60 per month = $2 per day so double what I am making! Obviously hoping it will convert at much higher than 1 in 200
Thoughts? Maybe well written micro sites that funnel the visitor towards a high converting affiliate site (other than amazon) will prove more profitable than this adsense malarky. It is something I am strongly thinking about….
Dan,
Its great that your stats have stayed the same, I know that my rankings have cimpeltely dipped, like from position 6 to 289…and the story is pretty much the same. One Site went from 12 to 789….
The frustrating this is that pretty much al of us on this journey have stayed as White Hat and done all the things Google has asked yet we’ve been punished for this pretty bad.
Like Sara, the best way to rank was using long-tails but this seems to have comepletly fallen on its face. Like James, I’ve also been sick to the stomach. Not good at all!
That sounds like a great plan Dan. I will probably look into doing something like that myself. As you said, even if it means just getting a few sales a month that earn twice or more than what adsense brings in, it would be worth it. If I do something like this, I will probably try to find stores through the Google affiliate network. Since there is a $100 threshold, it would be easier to collect payments each month if they were all streaming from one payment source rather than a few affiliate sales at one network and another few sales with another.
Yes its best to try and keep them at the same network, otherwise it will be a bit of a nightmare keeping track of earnings.
An extra dollar per day across 100 sites is a lot of cash! Start with one site and see how it goes for a month, then gradually start moving more sites over. Lets face it, most of our xfactor micro sites are product related, so it shouldnt be too hard to convert them to affiliate sites for that product, and should be easier than clickbank.
Talk about rambling. One could easily summarize this long, drawn-out matt-mumbling in three words: permanent algorithmic change.
Sadly, his recommendation, as always, sounds good to most, but ultimately not actionable. I mean, how does “ask yourself if I’ve got the highest quality site” help me? Oh yes, I spend day in and day out just putting out the lowest quality sites, so therefore, I can go back and make it higher quality, as matt suggests.
Finally, the phrase “what sort of thing can I do in terms of adding great content” made me laugh so hard. Seriously. As if I add lousy content to my sites. Define “great” matt, and you would have added value to your video. Right now, it’s just a 3+ minute defensive rambling.
Rant over. Sorry Sara, as you can probably deduce, my adsense numbers have taken a dive, and yes, my long tail traffic has also been affected. I gotta go and ask myself if I’ve got the highest quality site, and I need to figure out how to add great content.
I’m right there with you Stacey. I know I do not have crap articles on my sites. They are original content and are both relevant and helpful to the visitor. I never took shortcuts with my content and even though I had a great amount outsourced, it took me some time to find good writers and I paid them well for their hardwork. I read over every article I ever posted on my sites and if I didn’t like what I read, I would then change it so it sounded better etc.
And now I have to try and figure out how to play along with Google again when I don’t really know where to start from.
I know the feeling, its like being slapped in the face for doing something right!
Hi Sara,
Glad you wrote this post, you got here before I wrote something similar.
My sites have been hit pretty bad in the last 2.5 days and I’m not seeing any improvement. The more and more I search, I realise that the impact is in fact the ‘Mayday’ update. I think we were hit very late as opposed to the beginning on May.
I havent slept a wink in the last 24 hours as the impact of this is pretty monstrous for me (just like you and everyone here).
The question is, what do we do about it and how do we change our approach to ensure that we never lose rankings again?
I’m still going to give it a few days to see what happens but this is the first time EVER that I’ve lost motivation and been totally lost as to what to do next…..anyway, one shoudl always stay positive, Im sure we can all pull together, compare notes and try and get ourselves back on track.
Zaheer
Zaheer,
I am not sure if you are a member of John’s forum but it seems like a significant amount of people have been impacted by the mayday update and then there are a few that have noted no change and are still earning the same amount. I am paying that my sites are just dancing at the moment and that they will return in a few days.
I just want to know how Google is gonna handle the crap keyword sites that are clearly just stripping amazon reviews. A .us site going after one of my keywords is ranking on page 2 meanwhile my original content site is no where to be found. How is that a better quality score? Oh its so frustrating!
As had my worst AdSense day for months yesterday, and have been following the conversations about the MayDay algorithm changes closely. However, I did a run of the rankings for all my keywords today and I generally saw little change in these overall (many are actually doing better than a couple weeks ago). What I do see, however, is a decline in traffic coming from random long tail searches. I’m not sure how much long tails contribute to my overall traffic to my sites since these are not something I track, but if I were to guess (based on a quick check of my search logs), I would say they generally contribute to less than 20% of my visitors to my sites. I’m wondering if you are seeing a drop in your rankings across the board for your keywords, or a drop in traffic? On the plus side, I did have had a really good week with ClickBank sales, and I would definitely encourage you to look at developing some affiliate sites – it’s always good to have a diverse mix of revenue streams in case one is upended for some reason.
Michelle recently posted..Considering My Clickbank Sales: Some Theories and Guesses
I think from a business point of view diversifying is really something to think about. Maybe one answer is to have (as an example) 25% Adsense sites, 25% Clickbank sites, 25% Amazon product sites and 25% other Affiliate sites. It also makes me wonder if this new Google algorithm wasn’t specifically developed to target xfactor sites and other longtail keyword strategies.
Sandy
Thanks for the post Sara. I was wondering what happened to my adsense earnings the past 3 days. I kept checking the positions of my main keywords and they were about the same so I was was wondering the heck was going on.
We looks like matt and the crew have struck again. I hope that what Nettech has said is true, that sites with good in content links will be okay.
Nettech, I have done some preliminary testing with your theory over the past few weeks/months and all 4 sites I used rank within the top 5 right now for their main keywords. My long tails not so much since the update.
Google, you gotta love’em…
It just occurred to me – since I’m the slow kid on the bus (that’s a great title for a blog…hmm) – that this is pretty self-serving of G in that now you’re left not w/SEO but with PPC marketing.
Of course, there are other ways to funnel traffic, other ways to rank a site, including building web 2.0 properties (thinking Web2.0Bot or Magic Submitter, but SENuke and other software would work here also), getting more backlinks…
It seems the big G may be trying to force PPC down the SEO’s throat. But that’s not the point anyway, what they’re trying to do isn’t the issue, but rather what the solution is.
I think G is going to force a lot of people to use black “cap” tactics…as for me, I’m going to try to keep plodding along and seeing how doing what I know works keeps working.
One last parting thought: I’ve made over $600 from one lousy site, just from an aff product. It was marketed with 2 UAW runs 90 days ago or so. Since then I haven’t touched the site…so with 9 websites I got $105 in Adsens3 and $605 and counting for the aff product…not too shabby.
I’m still monetizing both ways. I will say this about the Google Aff Network – they are the toughest to navigate, have the most horrid percentages per sale, and are very un-user friendly…which is repeating myself.
I’ve seen the best play w/CB or Commission Junction.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
I actually lost my CJ account about 6 months ago. They closed my account due to lack of sales and because of their “snobbish” mentality, I would not re-register with them again. The other network I like and have had good success with is Linkshare. I have one site that does about $30 a month in sales and it is a blog that I built, set and forgot about.
I am gonna ask an extremely stupid question! I have heard 2 versions of this answer and maybe someone can shed some light on it:
**Please don’t laugh**
Is a long tail a keyword something that has extremely few searches a month or a keyword that has 3-4-5-+ words in it?
I should have posted as anonymous!
Kelly recently posted..I Jacked my Theme up! UPDATE #1
http://www.marketinghub.info/long-tail-versus-short-tail-keywords/
In short:
“chocolate donut” = keyword
“glazed chocolate donut” = long-tail
There are endless varieties of a kw, you add a modifier to it, such as “for sale” or “online” or “the best…” etc.
The monthly volume is much smaller, the traffic more targeted, and research shows that if you have “pet store” as a kw: 1) You will not be able to rank for it, 2) you will get more traffic if you could optimize for it, but if you’re selling dog sweaters, then you’ll get a lot of people looking for dog food/vaccinations/de-worming…etc. and your CTR or sales will be dismal compared to the long-tail kw.
It would seem G doesn’t like sending free, targeted traffic…i.e.: the sort that we micro-niche Adsens3 people have been targeting…
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
It can be both Kelly. Typically a long tail is going to have a lower search count but obviously it is possible to to find a 3 phrase keyword that has a large monthly search count but I think for the majority a long tail keyword refers to 3 words +. Don’t be embarrassed.
Thank you Sara and James for your answers-this does clear things up. I have a ‘Long Tail’ Sniper that actually moved up a spot to #3. Just put the thing up about 3 weeks ago, and it has 4 back links plus 6 pages of content. My only earner is sitting at the same position but traffic has plummeted!
I just need to befriend a Big G executive and find out the formula……
**evil laughing**kids are scared**hahaha**
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
Quick update all,
I’m starting to see slight increases in rankings, not huge amounts but I think the update it still calculating where pages should be ranked.
Just fired up SEO Elite again and although I have keywords that have dropped from position 4 to 533, it has gone up in the last 24 hours to position 512 (an increase of 21) so I’m a little hopefull that if we do some clever backlinking we may be able to work on bringing them back up. Ok it’ll take a lot longer but I’m in the process of doing some articles for EZA and hubpages to see if it has any effect.
Oh, speakng of hubpages, my hubpages rankings werent affected at all
Hope that helps somehow!
Mike Iser is taking a huge hit with the new changes as well. We just need to suck it up and adapt to the changes.
This weeds out a lot of competition because most people would give up and surrender. Keep it up!
Agreed – but it’s still terrible news. My own numbers don’t make sense, from a “quality” perspective, I had one site that was valued at almost $1k from various evaluations, and has 10 pages of content, deep-linked, was in spot #3-5 (depending on the mood at G?)…about 175 backlinks.
Nowhere to be found.
But that’s the only site that seems to have suffered – all my other sites are 5-8 pages, mostly only 5 pages, long-tail, exact match domains…much less content per page, many of which have moved up, some just stayed still. No other movement, but my Backlinks Philippines experiment paid off.
My trouble site has jumped up 64 spots so far, all this after the MayDay algo change. This site has 6 pages, all outsourced. Not my best site, but not “bad” either…now it’s at spot #120 up from #196 for the main kw.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
Sorry, meant that I agreed with this comment by Kai Lo:
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
What type of sites are replacing you all in the rankings?
I’m seeing mostly authority sites, brand names. I have seen an XFactor site come up in position 11, what was suprising is that the template was typical and it had over 4,000 backlinks….wow!
A lot of the competitors I had before have vanished!
We may be down but certianly not out….going to look at this as a new challenge!
I am seeing authority site inner pages outranking me that do not have even have an exact match keyword phrase in the URL. It might have 2 parts of the 3 word phrase I am targeting but often it is not an exact match or the keywords are mixed around. i.e. if my keyword was “cheap blue widgets” then I am seeing results like:
nextag.com/brand-name-blue-cheap-widgets
nextag.com/sometimes-widgets-with-blue-trim
But I am also seeing other xfactor sites that are newer ranking in #5 or #6 so it makes me believe that some of this dancing is the Mayday update but also the fact that the majority of my sites that are dancing are all the sites I built in February and march.
Same here Sara,
Amazon, NextTag and all the usual suspects seem to have retinaed their top spots. I’ve not seen too many XFactor sites to be honest, but its good you have, at least that gives us some hope!
What have you seen on these new XFactor sites that you think is different to your sites?
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
The one I spotted yesterday and that is still holding the same ranking today is a .org with about a 500 word article on the main page. Its using Clickbump’s template and its a 10 page site. It has 6 backlinks all coming from forum profiles.
having read the thread on webmaster world, it was mainly large authority site owners complaining about the loss of longtail traffic, not micro site owners….
I built my first site in 2004/2005 and my memory is terrible, but I do seem to remember seeing a shake up like this before. In the end, alot of rankings went back to their previous spot once Google was finished with their updates.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is trying to negatively deal with a huge growth in micro-sites. But it is also very possible that these drops are temporary and just part of the Big G recalculating. I guess my point is – don’t panic yet. Give it a few more days.
And I am usually the pessimist on this site!
(I’m actually not seeing any effect with my sites beyond normal fluctuation, but I also don’t have many sites and I think my domains are all at least 6 months old).
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
I normally am quite optimistic like you Carrie but this time around I think things are a little different (I hope you’re right and I’m wrong).
We’ve all experienced the Google dance, but this time its a major breakdance, the fact that soo many sites have just fallen from grace is worrying. Normally I don’t care to much cos I know they’ll go back up but this change is definitely here to stay.
Its great that your sites didn’t lose too many rankings. Care to share your site structure and how you’ve basically built them so we can compare notes? Obviously we don’t expect you to reveal your URL.
Zaheer
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Zaheer,
I am the eternal pessimist so I am out of my comfort zone.
I agree that some sort of change will likely stick, but I think some things will return in a few days. Who knows.
The structure on my sites are standard WP stuff – categories and recent posts in the sidebar, privacy and contact in footer. I would have to check but I’m pretty sure all of my sites have been indexed at least 6 months. Sounds like many people are having issues with newer sites?
Carrie recently posted..Building Backlinks with Articles – Article Order
Lol, lets just hope they come back where they are or God forbid ermmmm….I’ll have to get a job….can you imagine that? Hehehehehe.
Zaheer
My niche blogger blogs are not effected at all. Its only my micro niche sites that are under 6 months old that have the most significant changes going on. Although; I do have a small handful of older sites that are dancing at the moment.
I notiiced that for my basic none authority sites the rankings for these long tail keywords varnished overnight but climbed for the comprehensive authority sites.
I guess google wants you to build a high quality site before it can reward you and to me that makes sense.
Dennis’s last blog ..Internet Marketing – Week 16
I have 5-7 page micro niche sites built in october/november 2009 in position #1 and #2. I am giving away one of my sites that holds such a ranking in my post from today only I removed adsense from the site and slapped on amazon products. It has never earned much from adsense so i figure I have nothing to lose.
Anyhow, so not all micro niche sites are being targeted. As I mentioned; I have noticed the largest ranking droppings in sites that are less than 6 months old.
Thats interesting, my first Micro NIche site and my biggest earner was registered in September and dropped like a bomb. Had about 15 unique 500 word articles, all quality content, all nicely interlinked, no spam no nothing. Only a few forum profile links and BANG….Gone!
One of my newest projects about 2 months old is holding onto its rankings, its very hard to work out!…lol
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
Not sure about that, Dan, though it would make sense. Mind you, we’re talking about a computer algorithm, it’s not perfect nor do we know its parameters, I smell a money trail leading to PPC campaigns and Goo’le giving itself a pay raise, but that’s all speculation and neither here nor there.
I don’t think that G is so concerned w/quality authority sites…seeing as how I have several empty blogs set up just waiting for content (besides the title to the blog, there is no meta data that I’ve config’d yet, and NO content. I’ve actually been using them to play w/other WP themes…)….ranking at #13 and #11 for their main KW.
Quality sites? Thanks!
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Got Backlinks? My Backlinks Philippines Results
I got to agree with you there James, I think Google needed a way to capitalise on the lucrative long-tail keywords so what they’ve done is penalised the ‘working class’ person like you and I who were taking a huge chunk of the pie.
Who said this was a free market economy, if Google has its way, seems like its truly the ‘old boys network’ and the old school who will always come out trumps.
Sorry, you can guess how frustrated I am with this whole thing…..
Nettech recently posted..Mayday Mayday Mayday ….a huge drop in rankings, earnings and traffic.
I too am having some site dance around. Many have dropped from first page rankings to 3rd or 4th page. Frustrating, I can’t wait until things start to stable off.