Are your AdSense earnings down?

If you're serious, get Chris Rempel's Conduit Method report. Very easy to follow/implement (write product reviews, and build backlinks to them.) Once you have some real winners, test out building a list and investigate product creation. Affiliate $$$ > List Building w/ Affiliate $$$$$ > List Building w/ Product Creation $$$$$$$$$$$

Follow that model and Google will no longer be an issue... ever . There's a client of mine who's $90,000 / mo business was saved when his domain was taken away (he was the best distributor for a health product line) but he had his list. We had him back to that number and ranked well selling his own product line in less than 8 weeks... and now's he making more. If he had depended on Google it would have taken over a year to get him to his accustomed / mo.

Get away from the Google dependency if you can.

I'm down also, not that I was making much but its been cut.

After the drop in rankings I've been working very very hard to try and get these rankings back.

For those of you that don't know what happened, Google rolled out its new 'Mayday' update which was specifically targeted to long-tail keywords around June 3rd 2010. In addition to this they also rolled out Caffeine so a bit of a double whammy.

There is no way they are going to roll back so it is what is it.

Just a few tips on what I've noticed.

- Older more established sites were not affected
- I cant say for sure but these older sites also have more prominence now in the top 10 as opposed to all the small Micro Niche sites that have been developed. For example Amazon and the usual suspects are back.

I believe that there are a few things that you can do to try and get your rankings back;

Focus your content around more LSI based keywords. This seems more natural to the search engines and don't just use your exact keyword in your articles. For ideas on LSI keywords, go to Google, type your keyword and then use the wonder wheel. Also, in the search bar type '~your keyword' (without quotes) and then on the left hand side select the 'related keywords' link. This will give you an idea of what G is thinking in terms of thematically based terms.

I've also noticed from XFactor absed sites that were NOT affected that I had an average keyword density of about 2.1% for my highest word. I'm not sure how accurate this is but I have increased the word count from 500 to over 700+ to dilute keywords that were much higher and also integrated some of the LSI terms. A word of caution, don't just stuff it in, make sure you research what you're writing and add value. Nobody likes useless drivel!


Site Structure: Most of my wordpress sites were nothing more than a 'recent posts' widget in the sidebar but lots of useful content ranging from 1-20+ posts. I didn't have any way of organising this into categories. From my sites that weren't affected, I've noticed that those that were organised into categories also did somewhat better. There are many threads about 'Silo-ing' which I am now incorporating. On the same note, I have ascertained that if you have some content that is a little more generic around your niche then this may help G with understanding the theme of your site...again this is not proof, just an observation. A privacy policy and contact form have also seemed to some of the factors in sites that didn't drop with those that did. E.g. those that were ok DID have them those that didn't dropped. I understand this is quite a generic statement. Maybe or maybe not this is one of many factors.


Varying your anchor text: I can't say this one for sure but have read plenty of threads that mention varying anchor text from backlinks. I'm yet to try this under a controlled environment to see if there is any truth to this. To be honest I doubt I ever will find the time to do this so would be interested to know if anyone has any feedback on this.


Ensuring your keywords are interlinked in your content naturally as opposed to lots of links in a sidebar. One of my sites that is about 5-6 months old didn't drop at all, in fact quite the contrary. On my homepage I had an article of 1,000 words and evenly distributed a few keywords using the exact anchor text to keywords within this content.

From an off-page perspective, I'm continuing to see article marketing helping. I've submitted articles as I usually do to the usual directories like EZA, GoArticles, Buzzle as well as Web2.0 properties and seeing a slow increase in rankings.

So moving forward and to summarise, I have taken a close look at my sites and decided that in order to compete, you actually need to strive for bigger, authority style sites that require lots of good quality pages and with a good site structure. In addition, use varying anchor text and obviously plenty of links back to your site. Gosh reading this back its quite embarrassing since this stuff has been around when I first started out in web design in 1996...lol.

In essence my personal feeling is that Google likes sites that are 'REAL' sites, with real visitors and so I am also looking to add twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon and list building to add to the mix. This means a lot more work but overall focussing on less sites.

I don't claim to have the solution and am not saying I'm a Guru but just working hard trying to get my rankings back. Everything I have mentioned above is based on my sites, analytics, rankings and comparisons that I have made. They may be completely different for others. What is apparent is that this time around, the emphasis is on even MORE quality based sites and not a quick 5 pager.

I hope that this somehow helps those that have been affected since this update and realise that in fact its actually a good thing. Being SEO's we have to adapt to change and take stuff like this on the chin, its all part of the fun, otherwise we'd be working a regular 9-5 right?

Zaheer

Recently my visitor numbers and click through rate have remained steady, but earnings per click have plummeted. For example, on one site they fell from about £1 per click to around 20-30 pence. I assumed I was being smart priced, but perhaps its something wider going on.