New Site Launched
I’ve finished the design of a new site (#26) and put in a bit of content so its ready to be indexed.
Normally when a site gets indexed it tends to go straight into page one in Google for a few days and then if Google decides it is worthy of page one it will stay but more often than not it gets shunted down the ranks to page 10 and beyond!
Due to this I now always make sure my site had a fair few affiliate links on before it gets indexed. This means that I have a good chance of converting some of the page one traffic it will gets before Google sends it off to page 10. Another site I launched last week did this and managed to make a few sales before it left page one. Hopefully the sites will return and make some decent sales but its nice to get a few quid out of them before they head off to exile.
This new site is for a type of tool and got 33,100 exact searches in June 2009. If I get to number one in Google I’d expect 5% of that number in hits per month which is equal to 1,650 hits per month. If 10% of those resulted in a sale I could be looking at ( {average comission = £1.50} x {10% of 1,650 hits per month = 165} ) £247 per month. Highly unlikely but worth a punt nevertheless.
Might be worth considering what might be causing the sites to get shunted down that far.
I’ve got a couple of sites that don’t appear till page 4, I know one definetely has a penalty which was most likely caused by me throwing lots of low quality links at it. The other I suspect I might have over optimised for it’s main keyword but it’s too early to tell.
Of course some people will say it’s just Google giving you an early boost, kind of like they are giving you the benefit of the doubt before moving your site further down the serps. And it would seem that the more competitive the keyword the more likely it will happen.
Some of my earlier sites promoted ebay auctions, and I found that as soon as I removed affiliate links from the home page they would start ranking well again, obviously that might not always be possible. Though I would try and limit the number of affiliate links if possible.
I’ve also seen plenty of people advise against putting adsense on brand new sites as it could improve the chances of your site getting a manual review. Not sure how much truth there is to that though.
Never thought that I might be having too many affiliate links.
All my sites have loads of affiliate links on the home page. I’m working on a new design that won’t have any affiliate links on the home page – just links to my other pages which will have the affiliate links on. Maybe this is the way to go?
Why don’t you get your affiliate links masked rather then taking them off your home page?
They are all masked.
@seamaster – how do you go about getting your sites crawled by google in the first place? I’ve done a variety of things like putting a link from another of my websites, posting ads on gumtree and sun local. Or do you just add them to your google webmaster account?
With the more sites I do the more I worry about using the same method again and google realising all my sites are interlinked.
@mac-geek – talking about over optimising, i think i may have a -50 penalty for one of my sites – dropped from #3 on page one to page 5 or 6 overnight for its main term. How do I tell, and can I get it reversed by ‘under-optimising’ it?!
@Tom, I bookmark them in digg or delicious or get a link from Gumtree of post a blog comment on someone’s blog. They get indexed in the end so I’m not too worried about it any more like I used to be!
I don’t use Google Web master Tools in case, like you say, Google brings the whole lot down.
How do you know you have penalty? Can you find it out any where?
not sure about the over optimisation penalty… i guess it might be shown in the google webmaster account but as you say, i don’t want to add the site in!
Google never tells you if your site has been penalised.
You can read about one of my sites penalty problems here – http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/google/ask-kirsty-google-penalty-for-link-spam-on-my-site/
It’s worth checking out some of the other posts on that blog as the author has had her own problems with penaltys, including over optimisation (I think).
Really interested in this “get a good ranking when first indxed thing”. What I am thinking is to build some quick sites on Christmas shopping and get them indexed something liked 10th December.
I’m not sure if it happens every time though. Can anyone confirm?