Search Engine Rankings - one hard learned lesson

If you rely on natural search engine traffic, then this is probably something for you. Back in October of last year, I had found new program that I started to use to add pages geared for use with Google AdSense. In my zealousness to add more pages to the site in a short period of about of week, I had added five new sites and about 2500 pages in that same period.

At the time this seemed like a great idea, but I quickly realized the error of my ways, as pages that I had had indexed for a number of years started to disappear, especially from the Google index. Since about 60% of my natural traffic came from Google, that did have a huge effect on the traffic to my site at the time. I went from approximately 550 new visitors or unique visitors every day to only about 200 per day. It didn't seem to have much of an effect on Yahoo or MSN, but since they only accounted for about 25% of my traffic, this wasn't much of a benefit.

What I learned by this is that Google definitely does have a spam filter. I have no idea what the threshold for this filter is, but obviously 2500 pages in one-week was way too many and too short a time. What happened next, I can only describe it as what is commonly referred to as falling into the Google sandbox. Pages that had been indexed in Google for more than three years and were very popular pages on the site, suddenly totally disappeared from the index. As they came back into the index, my traffic slowly increased back to and now above previous levels, but that took about 3 months to accomplish.

Since that time, I have been trying to optimize my pages to get better listings in Yahoo and MSN along with Google, in the hopes that should something like this ever happen again, that the traffic won't so severely drop-off all at once. Now I add no more than one additional subdirectory per week and try to limit the page additions to about 200 or less, which seems to avoid tripping the spam filters within Google. My search engine traffic still come primarily from Google, but I now have a much more respectable with Yahoo and MSN as well.

This allows me to continue to grow my site, increase my traffic, and to continue to increase my Adsense earnings at a respectable pace. I continued to explore new niches and find new ways to monetize the site. More to come.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, Google Spam Filter, Passive Income