Something that most of you don’t know is that I am running a bit of an experiment. People always talk about passive income on the internet so I figured I’d take my shot at it. I built a website about at home fitness and nutrition. I spend a Sunday building the site. It’s pretty basic. I’m not trying to re-invent the wheel just put up a site that I can make some money off of.
A friend of mine got me to try out P90X. It seems to be all the rage now. You buy a workout program to do at home versus paying for gym fees. P90X uses a few dumbbells but all-in-all it’s really all about the push-ups and pull-ups and doing as many as you can. I’ve also tried Insanity, I’m a big fan, which is more cardio but doing a lot of plyometric work. I miss that from my has-been days.
I got my first visitor on this website February 13th. I built my way up to about 20 search result hits from Google. Then something weird happened. On March 17th I got 2 hits from Google. Then March 18th, zero. March 19th, a big fat nothing. There seems to be a problem.
I asked my fellow Yakezie and started searching the internet for answers. What I found out was two things, this happens to a lot of people apparently. After a little while (it seems to be a month) things go back to normal. I didn’t want to wait a month.
I also found out is Google has a supplemental index. I still don’t really understand what that is nor do I think Google wants you to. Basically it seems like a place where they dump links that they aren’t sure about for whatever reason. When your links go into the supplemental index you don’t show up in search results. While my Google traffic disappeared the only way I found myself on Google was to search for the site itself. Keep in mind this is a new site so I don’t rank very high for any keywords yet and no one is searching for the site itself.
The big question is how do you fix it? Which I have seemed to. For the past three days my Google hits are back and in fact I’m getting more hits than ever from Yahoo. Of course, I can’t seem to get listed on Bing. From what I found out about Bing is that they are just slow. I’ve submitted the site and everything and just don’t get anything from them. Maybe somebody can help?
I really did two things that must have been responsible for fixing this.
- I got rid of the little icons at the bottom of my homepage. Remember I’m a novice. I know how important links to your site are so I thought I would join the sites that give you a link and in return you put a little icon on the bottom of your page to link back to their site. Apparently, Google frowns on this. I’m not sure the impact this made but if it could be bad I figured I’d take them down. They weren’t really getting me any traffic anyways.
- I created a robot.txt file. From what I found out about the supplemental index is that one big reason is for duplicate content. With WordPress, which I use, I guess it is pretty common to have duplicate content show up when Google crawls your site. To fix this I installed the KB_Robots.txt plugin which creates the robot.txt file. This file directs Google on what parts of your site to crawl and what parts not to. I also searched around the net to find some things that should be in this file.
Voila. On March 22nd and March 23rd I got 28 hits each day from Google and I’m on my way there today. Hopefully my traffic will continue. What I can tell you from all this is that the most important thing for your site is still quality backlinks. Now I just have to figure out how to get those. This article should help.
I’m not an seo or internet guru by any means so chime in with your thoughts please. Am I on the right track here? What can I do better?
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I knew about the robots.txt file, but I’ve been lazy, thank for the plugin idea!
As for the links to directories at the bottom of the page, I didn’t know that! Thanks for the info, good stuff!!!
.-= Money Reasons´s last blog ..Why Business Owners Should Use Credit Cards =-.
Money Reasons:
I’m not sure about the links to directories. I got rid of them just to be safe. When all your traffic disappears, you try drastic things. It’s back now so I’m not risking it by adding those icons back. The plugin was the only easy way I could find to create and modify the robot.txt file.
I’m glad your traffic is back. Good luck with the site, I looked through it but I didn’t see 6 minute ads. I’ve been looking for it
.-= Jeff´s last blog ..Dear DAD (DeliverAwayDebt) =-.
Jeff:
Funny thing is now my yahoo hits are dropping and those sky rocketed when google hits disappeared. No no 6 minute abs, I think that got beat out by 5 minute abs. There is a cool RevAbs program.
I’m doing Insanity and I loved p90x (althogh Tony is an annoying bugger!)…. Anyway Glad your traffic is coming back. It’s more likely you was just jumping up and down in Google rankings rather than being sand boxed.
Good luck, I signed up to the blog so I can follow along.
.-= Forest´s last blog ..Who To Look To For Help When You Don’t Have God! =-.
Forest:
Insanity is great isn’t it? Does traffic normally go up and down like that? I was building traffic pretty gradually and then the disappearance, it came back strong for a few days and is down the last few. Then yahoo is basically doing the opposite. It spiked while google disappeared. I’m learning as I go.
Well, one thing is for sure, you’re doing the right thing. Getting you site to rank high in a less time and having traffic come from the search engines. I’m also new to this stuff though, so I’m not able to show you any suggestions. By the way, how do you know which search engines the traffic come from?
.-= Benjie @ Zordane´s last blog ..Getting Into Debt Doesn’t Solve Another Debt =-.
Benjie:
I use google analytics. It is listed under traffic sources. I’m still learning as I go.
Thanks for the plugin suggestion. Hope this improves my site a bit
Austin @ Foreigner’s Finances
.-= Austin´s last blog ..Carnival of Money Stories #49 – The Sakura Spring Edition =-.
Austin:
You’re welcome. Hopefully it helps. I’m learning as I go.
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