- Joined
- Jun 25, 2011
- Posts
- 891
- Reaction score
- 17
Hi Guys, a site of mine which was previously number one for around 7 months dropped to page 10 around a month ago. I decided to not bother touching it in the hope it would bounce back as ive seen things like this happen in the past but it didnt.
So i set out to try and find a way of getting it back to number one! here is the progress so far, hopefully some of it will be useful to others
Some background info (Before it tanked)
The site is a .com
8 Months old
Exact Match domain
Roughly 13 pages on it, all unique content
Ebay ads on it
Google adsense (3 blocks on home page, 1 on all other pages / posts)
Ebay affiliate links were cloaked & opened in new page
No meta tags
No alt image tags
Changes Made
The first thing i did was change the way the visitor gets to the product via the affiliate links. The plugin i use isphpbay pro which is automatically set up so when the affiliate link is clicked a new page opens! It got me thinking that maybe google is clever enough to see sites that have products listed but open links in a new page as affiliate sites. After all, i dont know of any online retailer or shop other than affiliates site that sends its customers to a new page when they click on a product link, DO YOU?
I thought it was worth a shot!! afterall the only thing its going to hurt is the bounce rate which is something im not too concerned about as id rather them be buying items on ebay
As i said above I use the phpbay pro plugin to generate ebay items on the site and when i was checking through the source code, i noticed a lot of the plugin names were displayed in the header including this one!. So if google are looking to penalise affiliate sites, they could easily just look for sites with known plugin names or plugins associated with affiliate sites in the header and wollop them with a penaulty. There was loads of other retarded code there that didnt need to be so i downloaded the following plugin: head cleaner and removed ( feed_links, feed_links_extra, wp_print_styles), Re-checked the source code and it was all nice and clean (The head cleaner plugin can be found here http://wordpress.org/plugins/head-cleaner/)
Next, I have some pages on the site listed under a shop section. This is where i have the phpbay pro plugin set to dominate the pages with products only!, so decided to no follow links to these pages and no index them. (Im not bothered if they are not indexed because there is plenty of content on the site thats drawing the visitors in).
Anyone who uses the inbuilt link cloaker that comes with phpbay pro will find its default cloak text is item- (the ebay item title makes up the rest of the link) For example item-renault-megane-2009. After looking at some of the bigger stores online to get an idea of how their link structures are made up i decided to change the cloak text to: Shop/Product/ID- (so urls would be displayed as http://www.Example.com/Shop/Product/ID-renault-Megane-2009 ). You might be wondering why i bothered doing this when ive set the shop pages to no index!, and the answer is because i use the plugin in the sidebar to show a few items for sale and this is sitewide, so will be displayed on pages that are indexed.
I also altered the site title from Product name - service to product name
####################################################
I Checked the SERPS a few days later and the site had climbed from page 10 to page 7, Nothing to shout about i know but it was progress.
####################################################
I then decided to alter my wordpress theme!, mayb it was overused or something?? so i found a new theme in the wordpress themes section and tweaked it until i got it looking the way i wanted. Because i changed the theme and my adsense was hard coded into the previous one, it meant this theme didnt display any adsense on it at all.I was planing on adding the adsense code to it later that day but something came up which meant i had no time, (and then i forgot lol)
Made one new post.
####################################################
A few days later i was checking the SERPS and was shocked to see the site sitting at the bottom of page one!!. I checked again the next day and it was still on page one but had moved up to position 4.
####################################################
I thought id try my luck with adsense and added advert to it (Hard coded in the posts! but NOT on the homepage), after re checked the SERPS today i noticed the site had moved down to position 5 (Could adsense be causing this negative effect??) ill give it a few more days and see how it goes.
If anyone has any questions or wants to have a look at the site, just PM me
So i set out to try and find a way of getting it back to number one! here is the progress so far, hopefully some of it will be useful to others
Some background info (Before it tanked)
The site is a .com
8 Months old
Exact Match domain
Roughly 13 pages on it, all unique content
Ebay ads on it
Google adsense (3 blocks on home page, 1 on all other pages / posts)
Ebay affiliate links were cloaked & opened in new page
No meta tags
No alt image tags
Changes Made
The first thing i did was change the way the visitor gets to the product via the affiliate links. The plugin i use isphpbay pro which is automatically set up so when the affiliate link is clicked a new page opens! It got me thinking that maybe google is clever enough to see sites that have products listed but open links in a new page as affiliate sites. After all, i dont know of any online retailer or shop other than affiliates site that sends its customers to a new page when they click on a product link, DO YOU?
I thought it was worth a shot!! afterall the only thing its going to hurt is the bounce rate which is something im not too concerned about as id rather them be buying items on ebay
As i said above I use the phpbay pro plugin to generate ebay items on the site and when i was checking through the source code, i noticed a lot of the plugin names were displayed in the header including this one!. So if google are looking to penalise affiliate sites, they could easily just look for sites with known plugin names or plugins associated with affiliate sites in the header and wollop them with a penaulty. There was loads of other retarded code there that didnt need to be so i downloaded the following plugin: head cleaner and removed ( feed_links, feed_links_extra, wp_print_styles), Re-checked the source code and it was all nice and clean
(The head cleaner plugin can be found here http://wordpress.org/plugins/head-cleaner/)Next, I have some pages on the site listed under a shop section. This is where i have the phpbay pro plugin set to dominate the pages with products only!, so decided to no follow links to these pages and no index them. (Im not bothered if they are not indexed because there is plenty of content on the site thats drawing the visitors in).
Anyone who uses the inbuilt link cloaker that comes with phpbay pro will find its default cloak text is item- (the ebay item title makes up the rest of the link) For example item-renault-megane-2009. After looking at some of the bigger stores online to get an idea of how their link structures are made up i decided to change the cloak text to: Shop/Product/ID- (so urls would be displayed as http://www.Example.com/Shop/Product/ID-renault-Megane-2009 ). You might be wondering why i bothered doing this when ive set the shop pages to no index!, and the answer is because i use the plugin in the sidebar to show a few items for sale and this is sitewide, so will be displayed on pages that are indexed.
I also altered the site title from Product name - service to product name
####################################################
I Checked the SERPS a few days later and the site had climbed from page 10 to page 7, Nothing to shout about i know but it was progress.
####################################################
I then decided to alter my wordpress theme!, mayb it was overused or something?? so i found a new theme in the wordpress themes section and tweaked it until i got it looking the way i wanted. Because i changed the theme and my adsense was hard coded into the previous one, it meant this theme didnt display any adsense on it at all.I was planing on adding the adsense code to it later that day but something came up which meant i had no time, (and then i forgot lol)
Made one new post.
####################################################
A few days later i was checking the SERPS and was shocked to see the site sitting at the bottom of page one!!. I checked again the next day and it was still on page one but had moved up to position 4.
####################################################
I thought id try my luck with adsense and added advert to it (Hard coded in the posts! but NOT on the homepage), after re checked the SERPS today i noticed the site had moved down to position 5 (Could adsense be causing this negative effect??) ill give it a few more days and see how it goes.
If anyone has any questions or wants to have a look at the site, just PM me
