July was probably one of the best months for me in terms of RX affiliate revenue. My sites did really good in the first two weeks of July, but then all of sudden in the third week of July my traffic dropped. I didn’t lose any important links, didn’t do anything odd at all. All I have been doing lately is adding more content to my sites and tweak some stuff to optimize SEO and conversion. My two most important sites were receiving a lot less traffic from Google, and it’s still the same today. My sites are still indexed, Google is updating its cache of my sites and I have built a few more quality links. August is nearing its end, and even though that means summer is almost over I couldn’t be more happy that August will be gone.
Both sites that lost Google traffic are about two specific products. I added new content to one of those two sites, the other one didn’t change a bit over the past few weeks so that can’t be it. The changes I did to that one site could have confused Google a bit, so it’s possible that this loss of traffic is just a temporary thing.
My August pharmacy affiliate earnings will be down a lot because of this important loss of Google search engine traffic for these two big sites of mine. Even though things aren’t looking good right now, I have been investing quite a lot of my precious time and money in my existing sites and similar/new sites. Right now, I’m having a hard time getting some traffic from Google to my newly launched sites as well.
Google PR update coming, that gives hope
I can only hope that Google’s next PR update, which will most likely be going on end this month or in the first week of September, will bring back the good days I had. I know that PageRank doesn’t matter that much (anymore), but it’s the only hope I have right now and maybe this new PR update might trigger something that will improve my SERP again. I’m always using clean, natural linkbuilding methods and don’t do any spamming. Right now it’s quite frustrating for me to see that spammers are almost always enjoying good times while honest affiliate marketeers like me are being punished from time to time. And the more time/money I seem to invest, the less good I’m doing.
Maybe I should consider changing my SEO strategy a bit? Or maybe I just need to give it some more time. Feel free to let me know what you think of my situation and what you expect from Google’s PR update. In the meanwhile, I’ll do what I feel I should do and hope for better times!
From first spot to zero and back to first and…
Another weird thing with one of my sites is that Google places it on the first spot of the first page for a couple of days, and then suddenly it’s gone again for a couple of days. It’s a site that has an important keywords in its domain and which I promote for this one keyword. Sometimes this site gets almost no visitors from Google at all, the following day it starts to get tons of traffic through Google. This trend for this site has been going on for a couple of months now, and more backlinks don’t seem to have any effect.
October 28th, 2010 at 3:18 am
here is one very good lesson I’ve learn withsome of my sites:
If you rank weel, and on the first page for your term and you get good traffic from Google – dont touch it !
It happen to me a few times before – I’m on top of the first page on google, I tweak some stuff and I loose my position!
November 4th, 2010 at 9:32 am
You’re probably very right about that… It’s something I’ve been told by other people in the online marketing industry as well. The same goes with sites that convert well; don’t touch them.
Sometimes it’s so tempting to try to get more out of a site that already does well. It’s important to know when it’s the right time to let your site age and go with the flow.