Shopzilla and Google Updates Galore

Hello good people!

Well it’s been about a week since I talked to you last and I apologize for the lapse. I came down with a pretty nasty stomach flu thing that just wouldn’t go away, but I’m feeling fine now.

Spent the whole weekend with my girlfriend’s family at their massive family reunion here in the suburbs. Good times.

Today I want to play a little catch up and update you on a few things that have happened within the last week; specifically I want to give you a quick update on my shopzilla earnings and also talk about the recent Google update that just got pushed out last week.

Not long ago I wrote an article about Shopzilla as an Adsense Replacement. I said I’d update you when I had some more hard data, and I do. So here’s a snapshot of my shopzilla earnings for the last week or so:

So what are we looking at here? Slightly less traffic then the last time I posted, but definitely more clicks and earnings.

I still think the majority of that traffic is bot traffic, ie search engines spidering pages because I also have adsense ads and amazon ads on those pages and the stats don’t compare between the three groups (and they should be the exact same).

Adsense does a good job filtering out bot traffic from their reports and they show significantly less (though growing) traffic then the shopzilla reports.

Still, I’m encouraged that we’re seeing SOME clicks…but discouraged that the click through rates are so low. I’ll continue to monitor it and report back. Hopefully the numbers will get better soon as the sites get indexed more strongly.

Sometime last week, around the 25th we think, Google pushed out a new Panda update. This isn’t actually an “update” or change to the actual Panda algorithm, it’s a refresh to the data set.

People don’t seem to be complaining too harshly this time. Google says that the new refresh will only affect around 1% of websites. Have you seen a change?

At the exact moment that Google pushed out their Panda refresh, traffic to nearly all my websites increased dramatically (over 2-3 fold) and earnings jumped up several hundred percent. A couple days later things have settled down a bit, but traffic and earnings are still up compared to the last couple months.

Hopefully it will hold.

That’s usually what happens during one of these minor updates. Things spike for a couple days (up or down depending on your luck) and then settle back down either slightly better or slightly worse than they were before.

You can read about this update at webmaster world where there’s a nice discussion here.

I’d love to hear how you fared in this update. Comment below and…

Keep on building!

-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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