Internet Marketing Toolbox

Organic listings are those pages that are picked up by search engine robots/spiders and included, free of charge, in the search engine’s index – e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN Live. My placement in these results when people carry out searches there depends on the keywords used on my pages.

I have always relied heavily on these organic (or free) listings in the search engines to drive traffic to my sites, but lately it has become increasingly harder to maintain the same levels of organic traffic to my sites. It’s been ALL over the place, and seriously affecting my bottom line.

But WHY?

When I look at my web server logs, I find that Google is responsible for sending around 75% OR MORE of traffic to my sites!

Check your server referrer logs, and if you web host doesn’t make these available, get another web host!

But what about Yahoo and MSN? Well, they only send a few hundred visitors to each site every month. Google sends me visitors in the thousands! That’s the difference!

So, the moment Google makes ANY changes to their algorithms, chances are you’ll suffer one way or the other.

I thought my sites were “authority” sites - due to the vast range of good content and links provided – because I seemed to be immune to the major “slaps” that affected a lot of people in late 2006 and early 2007.

However, OTHER factors come into play at various time which cause my organic/Google traffic to jump all over the place… with the resulting corresponding drop in my Adsense or affiliate income.

The first one I noticed was in late 2005 when I had thousands of DYNAMIC pages from my sites indexed on Google – these were in the form of:
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/view_page.cgi?id=pageidnumber

Here, the page is generated dynamically from a database - on the fly as a person clicks on the link to see it. It took me a few months back then to realise that many of these pages from my sites no longer appeared in Google’s index.

My organic traffic dropped significantly… along with my income in those months.

While I adjusted the pages so they were now “static” looking with a real URL – i.e.
http://www.example.com/pageidnumber.html
it took several MONTHS for Google to reindex all of these, err… “new” pages and make them available to searchers again.

Many of my sites are directory sites where people have an opportunity to list their online business for free…

This benefits me as these sites grow automatically as new listings (and new pages and hence new Adsense ads) are added, so there’s always something new there for the search engines and my visitors.

But lately (early 2007) it seems Google has gone off of this type of site. Again, a large percentage of my pages have disappeared from their search results… with yet another drop in my organic traffic.

The lesson I learned from this was to keep a close eye on my web statistics – particularly the referrer log pages.

When your referrals from the major search engines change significantly, go there and try to work out WHY!

While I have been able to compensate on some of my sites by adding additional content - eg over 1000 pages of employment vacancies generated from RSS feeds from another site - or by developing even more sites in a variety of niches – it’s still only helping to keep my total traffic to all sites at the SAME level.

For some reason, I’m never able to take it to the next level… I think I know why, and more on that shortly…

But there’s always something that gets in your way… something that knocks the wind out of your traffic sails.

And if it isn’t a change at Google, it’s something else.

Follow this ongoing discussion here

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