June results & Musings over What Does Google Want Now?

My June Results

I had the best month in June that I’ve ever had online (well since I started tracking my earnings anyway). Amazon was still by far my best earner at just over $5K, and the rest of my affiliate earnings were around $900 (my Clickbank earnings have dropped dramatically since the Google June updates). So just under $6K for the month. Not too shabby for a few hours a day onlne. My goal is to get up to $10K though. Might take a bit more work

While Amazon continues to be great, I’m not sure about the rest of my earnings because Google has dumped some of my information sites …

Google Caffeine Ranking Changes

At the beginning of June a few of my websites that had previously been getting around 100-200 visitors a day from Google suddenly dropped out of the rankings and now G is only sending me around 5-10 visitors a day. (Luckily I still get around 100 visitors a day through article marketing to these sites, but that’s not the point).

So what happened?

I suspect it was nothing that I did, but rather the dreaded MayDay changes to Google’s algorithm’s. Yes Caffeine really did shake things up for us internet marketers.

Now before we go forward, these were not tiny niche websites. They had around 50 or so pages each, all with unique content that I’d written.

So the bigger questions now is, what on earth is Google looking for now?

Now while I cannot say for sure, here are my thoughts on what I, and everyone else, should be looking at in the future.

Linking out has become important. Yes it seems that you’ll need to be more generous in your linking scheme and not try and hog all that juice for yourself. Pages where I have four or five links (even links to other pages on my own site) are doing better than pages that have no links on them. Interesting. By spreading the love, you might just be helping yourself out.

PageRank has come back into play. PR hasn’t been important for a long time but now I’m noticing that those sites that list in the top 10 for certain keywords have good PR. I’m not seeing as many tiny little sites with PR0 there anymore – they seem to have been booted out. Of course this could also be because the larger sites have more backlinks (which in turn increases PR to a site) as well.

Good internal page structure. Call it silo’ing or what you will, but sites with tidy and neat category structures seem to be doing well. I’m yet to figure out the best way to change this on existing sites, but it’s worth taking into account with new sites that you create.

Backlinks. I’m somewhat in two minds about this. On one level I hear that you no longer want 1,000’s of low quality backlinks to your site, you want good quality (preferably from high PR pages) backlinks with the anchor text of your keyword. And that doesn’t mean the PR from the domain, but from the page (unlike those spammy profile links). But I have to say that both still work for me. In fact I have two websites that support both theories. One has just a few high quality links from relevant sites, and the other has a bunch of low quality profile links. Both rank well – and they still do even after the caffeine changes, so I can’t say what I believe here.

I think I’m going to just continue building links like I usually do and see what happens.

IPK Promotion

Those on my list might have seen my last post about the fact that IPK is relaunching this month. I’ve had quite a few people want to promo it too and earn some quick cash, but don’t have a list. Is it still possible to make sales from this is you don’t have a list?

Yes it is, it’ll be a bit harder but it is possible.

I’ll be writing a blog post later this week about how to do it (and also how I’m going to do it) so you can try and get some sales as well.

Stay tuned.