I’m sure many of you reading this have started a new site in the last few months. Now maybe your situation is different to mine but I’ve heard tales of this particular affliction hitting all fairly new sites after a short period. My new affiliate site over at www.barstoolsuk.co.uk had in the last month been receiving around 15-20 visits per day for highly targeted keywords. This was because it was ranking in the top 10 results for specific products; eg. ‘Black Sam Bar Stool’. This wasn’t difficult to achieve, I just used wordpress to power the site and created a new post in a relevant category for each product I was promoting. The theme I am using is a custom theme and has been specifically optimised for on-page SEO so I wasn’t surprised to see an earl rankings boost for individual products.
However, now we’re 5 weeks into the site and practically all visits have gone. Google has dropped the page from its top 10 positions (even for its own domain name) so chances of making any commission from this site over the next few weeks look pretty awful. I’ve read about this problem in a number of forums and have experienced it before for a couple of my sites so I have every confidence that rankings will return in time. In the meantime, I have to keep on adding content and building links to this site though so that when they do return, they return with avengance!
Of course, this now completely hits my earnings target for March, where I had hoped to make £640 revenue from affiliate sites and now that I am one site down, chances are that this target is out of reach.
I’m not so sure that it will hit my earnings too much, however, as currently; in 4 weeks the site has only managed to make 1 sale and £49 commission.
February 13th, 2011 at 10:54 pm
So, did your site recovered their rankings? It’s been passed almost a year since you wrote this post and I am curious what happened to your site. I have experienced the same issue.
February 15th, 2011 at 10:45 am
@Daniel – Well, this is not really a straightforward answer unfortunately, mate. There were periods where the site ranked in the top 10, but then there were periods where the site just vanished. As things stand now, over a year down the line, the site is sitting on about page 13 of SERPs.
I can give you some reasons as to why I think this happened:
1) It happens to all new sites, so don’t worry about yours UNLESS:
a) You have too much keyword spam on the homepage (see barstoolsuk.co.uk) to see what I mean about keyword spam
b) You don’t have much content (a few pages) but have a shitload of links
c) Your site load time is high (takes ages to load)
d) You have lots of duplicate content on your site
e) You are not offering your users anything unique
These are the reasons why my site is shafted. I have tried to correct these issues in my other sites and 1, at least, is dominating top 3 SERPs results for its target terms.
What I would say to you specifically is just build a useful site, avoid spammy tactics and implement a healthy link building strategy – what is a healthy link building strategy? That’s another post!
February 15th, 2011 at 10:17 pm
It is curious because I have this 8 month old site. But for 6 months it had nothing but an article, so I decided to make it a product review site with affiliate links to amazon. All content I wrote there is unique, all reviews I wrote were gathered from customer experiences about the product from different sites. I did not copy the data but wrote it summarizing the most relevant aspects of the product and adding an opinion from me. I even added an option for writing comments and user reviews by the visitor.
So I started promoting my site first, by commenting on do-follow relevant blogs also, I commented on several blogs of different topics. I managed to use commentluv links for this task. Since I started promoting the site, it started having traffic from 0 to nearly 70 unique visitors daily in less than two months, most of the traffic came from Google. So I kept building links in a regular basis of about 6-10 links per day, most of these links come from blogs. I was making good revenue from amazon despite the low traffic the site had, it was doing great. I even got some emails some my visitors giving positive feedback and noticed some other referrals from forums and blogs which is great because it was getting links by itself.
Three days ago, all that was going great, went down. I lost all rankings for all keywords in one day, even the title of the site which isn’t even competitive, is not shown my when you search the term. I do not know what really happened. I have asked in forums and everybody recommends me to keep on as it nothing has happened because this is kind of a dance and my site will recover in 5 days to 2 weeks. Honestly, this is not the first time this happens to one my sites but it usually recovers in few hours or a day. The site is indexed but all their rankings are gone. I just want to know whether it will come back.