A Simple Link Trick
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
It’s race day here in Chicago! I’m running my first 5k race. It should be a lot of fun. I jog regularly, so I’m not worried about it from an endurance point of view. And I ran on the cross country team back in high school about 18 years ago, so I’ve been in my fair share of races, so we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck!
As you know, my site traffic and Adsense earnings have been dropping since the latest Google Panda update. For the first 11 days in October, I was averaging about $53 a day in adsense off of about 2,500 page views a day.
But then 3 days ago, traffic plummeted to dropped to about 1,700 page view and $30 a day.
The Panda update is bad, but at least things were moving along at a steady flow…traffic had dropped, but it was pretty steady at it’s new dropped level. So when suddenly traffic and earnings dropped AGAIN a few days ago, I got a little worried.
So I decided to do something about it
I’ve written before about the particular site layout that I use for all of my sites – which looks something like this:
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See at the bottom of the picture, there are blue links to other pages of my sites. I put those links on each page with a bit of php code, using a variable that sits on the master file that ALL my sites reference. That allows me to alter the NUMBER of links on each page of every site I own, simply by modifying one variable on my master file.
One of my SEO secrets is to gradually change the number of links on each page every week so that it looks like I’m constantly adding new content. It’s really easy to do, I simple change the variable in my master file.
The variable looks like this: $page_links = “10”;
If I want each page to have 15 links, I simply change the variable on the master file to $page_links = “15”;
I just have to make the change once, and it instantly gets updated on every page on every website I own. (Thank you php!)
What’s this got to do with Panda?
Good question. And I’m not sure I know the answer. But my thinking was something like this…ever since Panda came out, webmasters have been running around trying to “fix” their sites and get back some Google love. I haven’t made any changes to my sites at all, and traffic started to plummet.
So I thought I’d shake things up a bit. Currently my sites had around 30 links at the bottom of each page. I changed that 3 days ago to only 5 links, then let it sit there for a day or so, giving Google time to spider my sites and notice the change.
Then after a day or two went by, I changed it 40. Since then, traffic has increased to 2,100 and earnings have increased back up to $50 a day.
What Are My Conclusions?
I have none…my tinkering might have had absolutely no impact. My sites might have just been fluctuating. Maybe Google was tweaking the Panda update and then tweaked it back. Maybe it was just dumb luck.
The time period is too short to determine for sure….but maybe, just maybe, my tinkering is what brought traffic and earnings back up.
Who knows…welcome to the world of Adsense!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
**Update: Google just confirmed that they released another update to the Panda at the exact time that my sites tumbled a few days ago…don’t you just love Google?!
