Avinashsing Sunkur

Webmasters who have chosen to work with Adsense to generate income from their websites need to understand how volatile the whole Adsense system is. You cannot expect to earn a fixed amount of money with it and that’s in some way a curse and a blessing as well. This means you have the opportunity to get even more cash if you are able to grow your website’s traffic and conversion. However many times you will find that even though you are getting more traffic than before, you are either not getting any more money from the extra traffic or your adsense revenue is decreasing.

The hard work is not paying off and you’re getting frustrated and disappointed as well. This is why it is imperative to understand what may cause fluctuations in adsense income. Below is a list of the reasons why your adsense earnings might have dropped:

You have lost traffic

This means that your rankings as not as good as they were before in the SERPs. You will need to find which keywords have dropped from the search engine results pages and do more SEO work on them. If you have changed the content of your webpages (either by adding/removing text or changing theme/layout of your website), then you may lose your rankings as well. Many times changing the title tag could lead to drop in rankings.

You are being smart priced

Smart pricing is Google’s way to protect advertisers. If the clicks leading to an advertiser’s site are not converting for the latter, then you may be smart priced to compensate for the advertiser’s loss. For example, if mortgage ads are appearing on your site and the visitors clicking to the advertiser’s site are not filling out their mortgage quote form, instead of getting the usual $3 for a click, you may only get $0.50 for the same click. The advertiser defines the conversion that he wants to be actionable on his site and it can be anything from having a sale to signing up to his newsletter.

One way to combat smart pricing is to block the advertiser for at least a week. This works because smart pricing is reset or recalculated/re-applied on a weekly basis. If you do not tackle smart pricing, you may earn considerably less with adsense because one poorly converting ad can lead to your whole adsense account being smartpriced.

US dollars are getting weaker against your local currency

Many people do not realise that adwords accounts are managed in US dollars. So if you’re in the UK, you’re still going to pay in US dollars for the keywords you choose in your adwords campaign. As a publisher, unless you’re in the US, you are going to see your adsense earnings in your local currency, that is, the conversion from US dollars to whatever currency is local to you. This is done on the fly from exchange rates on the day you’re looking at your adsense report.

So if an advertiser was bidding $1.5 for a keyword and the conversion from US dollars to say British Pound was 1:1 (for the sake of simplicity), you will get £1.5 for that click. Now if the exchange rate changes and the British Pound gets stronger (US dollar weakens) and the new exchange rate becomes 1:1.5 which means you get $1.5 for each British pound, you will then receive only £1 for the same click instead of £1.5. Therefore as long as the US dollar remains strong against your local currency, you are fine but the time that it gets weak, you will see a drop in your earnings provided everything else stays the same.

You have seasonal content (Xmas, Easter, Mother’s day etc)

If your website has content which depends on the season, you will see a boost in traffic when that period approaches but when it ends, you will lose the visitors as well as the money. For instance, if you operate a site which deals with Chrismas, weeks leading up to Xmas will be really good for you in terms of keywords searches for Xmas but when that festival ends, you will barely see any traffic stemming from those keywords. Think about it – would you search for Chrismas presents in March? No!

Your website has content to do with trends

If you’re writing news articles, then chances are that when the news becomes outdated, you will lose the traffic. When something is hot or trendy, there are many searches for that particular keyword of interest. If you have content which talks about such things, then you would get a lot of attention from visitors which will nicely convert for you but as soon as the trend is over, you can forget about it all.

Adwords advertisers are stopping their campaigns or reducing their maximum CPC

Depending on what works best for advertisers, they may introduce new campaigns at different times of the year or pulling old ones out. If advertisers find that some months work better for them, they will stick to these months rather than having a campaign running throughout the year. For example, an advertiser will advertise only during March/April for Easter promotions and when that period is over, so will the revenue coming from these promotions. So if you don’t have the advertiser for the keywords for your content, you won’t make a single penny.

The second reason relating to advertisers is quite interesting. Since Adwords works on a bidding system, if there are more advertisers for the same keywords, you will get a higher CPC and if there are only a small number of competitors, then obviously, you will be paid peanuts. However sometimes advertisers may lower the Cost Per Click depending on the time of the day or country of origin for the click. This again has do to with what works best for the advertiser. A UK advertiser may reduce the CPC during night times because he knows there are not going to be any conversions at this time or he may decrease or reject clicks coming from outside the UK because ke knows foreigners will not buy anything from him.

Better conversion rate for the advertiser doesn’t mean more money for the publisher

Adsense tries to serve the ads which would give you the maximum revenue. This does not mean that the adsense ads which appear on your website are the highest paying ads for the keywords matching your content. Contrary to common belief, ads go through the bidding system to elect the highest bidder but at the same time are filtered down to the ones which have a better Click Through Rate (CTR). So you might be serving an ad which gives you 25% CTR but costs $2 a click rather than an ads which has a 10% CTR and costs $5 per click. A high CTR is good because it means the ad is contextually relevant to your content and will give you more money but if you get 100 impressions with a 25% CTR and making $1 per click, you’ll get $25 in adsense revenue compared to $50 for an ad which has a 10% CTR and costing $5 per click for the same number of impressions. So watch out for those supposedly higher CTR ads with lower value or placement targeted ads as they could be eating your income.

Conclusion

There are many reasons why your adsense earnings can drop and the reasons are the more common ones. I haven’t included targeting high paying keywords because I’m focusing here on why your revenue are decreasing rather than how you can make more with Google Adsense. If you’re in a niche with a relatively low CPC, it might be worth trying something else than adsense.

A few days ago, I was trying to update a record in my database and encountered an error message in the form of “Incorrect key file for table xxx.MYI”. Since the update was not really that important, I decided to ignore that warning but this was a very big mistake that I would regret later. I went out for the day and when I came back at night, I found that my traffic has plummetted and when I investigated, I found that the table that was having problems earlier has crashed. So I decided to find reasons why MySql tables would crash and they are as follows:

• Unstable operating system
• Problems with the hardware
• Power failure
• Corrupted data or index files
• MySql server host was killed during an update
• External program manipulating the data or index files at the same time as MySqlId without locking the table properly

There may be other causes for MySql to crash but the reasons above are more common.

How to repair a crashed MySql table?

Fortunately MySql tables which have been crashed can be repaired quite easily. All you have to do is use PhpMyAdmin or another MySql client program and run the repair command on that table (REPAIR TABLE employee). This will bring back the table in a consistent state. You can also use CHECK TABLE employee to see if there are any problems with the tables in your database. There are additional options that you can use when repairing/checking your tables but using the syntax without them should work just fine.

How detrimental can it be to have crashed MySql tables?

The MySql table in my database crashed around 15:00 and it was not until 22:00 that I noticed the problem. That’s the problem when you’re on shared hosting – you don’t get any notifications of problems and when you email support, it takes time for them to get the problem fixed. My website is database driven which means that if the database is down, the whole website is brought down. Running the repair command took less than a minute though and everything was back up after the table was repaired.

However I lost half of my daily traffic within that time and lost half of my revenue as well. Of course, having a website that’s not working is not good for your visitors and losing money is not something that you want but those are not the biggest problems. For the duration of the downtime, search engine spiders (GoogleBot) may be crawling your website and when they encounter problems with the site, they can quickly remove your webpages out of their index and that will cost you even more than 1 day of downtime. Your rankings might suffer as well as a result of the downtime.

Everyone these days seem to have a facebook account. Why shouldn’t they? Facebook has become a central point of communication in our daily life and helps us stay in touch with friends and family and see what they are doing without much effort. Holiday pictures, video albums and latest gossip are at out fingertips and as more people join the network, it becomes even more important for us webmasters to leverage the power of Facebook.

Use Facebook Connect to give visitors an alternative to registering on your website

Let’s face it – nobody likes having to register on websites to access a service, whether it’s for commenting on an article or asking a question on a forum. With so many websites out there, it becomes very difficult to keep track of the different username/password for each site and this is a major put off for a lot of visitors. By allowing the visitors of your site to login using Facebook, you’ll get more people to post on your site or better still engage more. You will get access to the visitor name, email address, friends and a lot more. All the essential details that you want to capture in your registration page will be made available to you with Facebook Connect. Of course this should be used to complement your own registration page because not everyone is on Facebook and you cannot just allow anyone to engage with your site without registration because that’s going to get the attention of spammers but using Facebook Connect will make users engage more with your site.

Let other people know about your content with Facebook Share button

Facebook Share button is a bit different from Facebook Like button and is meant to be used to allow sharing your content even easier. If you display a Facebook Share button on your site and a user clicks it, your content will be made available to all the friends of this user. This is viral marketing in its simplest. The average Facebook user has around 120 friends and that content will be read by that many people if not more. A count of the number of times the content has been shared is shown next to the button as well and this shows how popular was content is.

Facebook Like button is a great way to get more people to visit your website

When people click on the Facebook Like button on your website, it tells you how many people actually like your content and since this is syndicated to the user’s activity in Facebook, you will get other people to your site who want to check what it is all about.  Some people like using the Like and Share button alongside and it’s not that difficult to set up even for beginners.

Facebook API

If you have a website, you’ll need to get a Facebook API key to get the most of what Facebook has to offer you. You can use the Standard JavaScript SDK to enable Facebook features on your site but you’ll need access to that API key. Of course, if you’re a more experienced programmer, you can always code your own things and get more advanced features by querying Facebook.

I was contacted by someone on a popular webmaster forum to buy a link on a .gov.uk site which has a valid PR6. The government site belongs to a council and because government sites tend to link to each other a lot, it has a lot of good quality inbound links. Getting links on such a site can really boost your ranking especially if you use a good targetted anchor text. However they are very hard to come by. Unless you’re a non-profit organisation or offering something unique which would be beneficial for the .gov.uk site and at the same time be relevant, you’re not going to get a link from them.

Part of me wanted to buy the link because I know that it will increase the PR of my site and boost my rankings as well. The price was $150 for 3 months, $250 for 6 months and $400 for 12 months. The link would be placed on the homepage and you get to choose your anchor text. I was curious and wanted to see if other people have purchased links on that PR6 .gov.uk site. All paid links were placed like halfway down the homepage as follows:

As you can see from the above example, all these links look like spam even if it comes from a reputable website such as this .gov.uk one. Placing your website’s link there could do you more harm than good. It is not worth paying $400 a year to get such a link. If you’re already receiving traffic from Google, why would you want to risk your organic traffic and be penalised?

I didn’t include the URL for this .gov.uk site deliberately but the only reason you can buy links on there is because they’ve got an immoral person working for them. Councils are not stupid to publicly do this sort of thing but a staff who has got access to the website (probably an IT guy who maintains the website content) decided to do a little business on the side. I’m pretty sure the council is not aware of this and the moment they find out, they will fire him.

The conclusion is that buying links can jeopardise your website a lot. You’re better off using whitehat techniques and moving up the SERPs slowly but surely than regretting the big mistake of thinking you’re purchasing once in a lifetime link deal to boost your rankings.

Sometime around 28 April 2010 t0 3rd May 2010, many webmasters noticed an unusual change in the SERPs. This has been named the Google Mayday Update. The ranking algorithm was changed to make search more relevant as always. But what was this update all about? This change is most noticeable for long tail keywords rankings. Many large sites have seen a drop in traffic because they were no longer ranking for the long tail keywords (or have been dropped several places in the SERPs) and this has consequently plumetted their traffic.

Before the Google Maydate Update, a website was able to rank for long tail keywords based on domain authority. So if you had a website about finance with a high PR homepage, domain trust and good rankings for your primary keywords, then you would be able to get long tail traffic easily (eg rank for best car insurance for young drivers) if one of your finance articles mentioned a few of the long tail keywords being searched for. This was true even if your article was placed quite far from the homepage (many clicks to get to it) and also if there were few or none links pointing to it.

Solution for the Mayday update

Many ecommerce websites use generic description of products from manufacturers and as you can guess, this give rise to duplication. Now the problem is that as a customer who wants to by a particular product, you don’t want to click on each of the results on google when you have done a search and end up seeing the same description and everything for a product. You want to see something unique, something that’s going to help you in your decision making process. This is why google has started to filter out similar pages with the Mayday Update. This is supposed to help with user experience and bring more relevance to searches.

Your first step if you have been hit by the Mayday Update is to look at the pages on your site and analyse them. If you have the same content that’s practically on everyone else’s site, then you have a problem. You need unique and original content for your site but that might be hard if you have thousands of pages. User generated content is a way to add uniqueness to your product pages. You can give users the facility to review the products on your website. Don’t just show the good reviews and filter out the bad ones though! There needs to be a balance of reviews, both good and bad, otherwise people are going to find it unnatural and you’ll eventually lose potential customers (more on that some other time).

The other thing you should do is create more links to the inner pages of your site. Many people like getting links to their homepage. That’s good if you want your homepage to rank but if your other pages are buried deep down in your site, like requiring 5 clicks to get to it, well then chances are google will not index it but if it does, it may not rank it well. The closer to the homepage the better but if you can’t do that, then you need external links to point to these deep pages. This will show to Google that your page contains worthy content.

Conclusion

What many people fail to realise is that you do not need to stay ahead of Google to ensure long term ranking. Google’s aim is to provide the most relevant and accurate results for a given search query. If you align Google’s aim with your website, you’ve already secured your website’s future. So instead of changing your website everytime Google makes an algorithm change, you just need to focus on creating a better user experience for your visitors and delivering better content/services to help them out.

Many people believe that updating your website regularly is the way to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. This is not entirely true and I’ll explain why. As the web index grows bigger and bigger, search engines like Google and Bing are looking for better ways to determine what content is worth including in their index and which ones to drop. Duplicate content is obviously not going to work for rankings and if you’re rewriting content by saying the same thing in a different way, then this will not work as well. You need to be adding something original to your articles to make them stand out from all the other articles about the same subject. This is  the long term strategy and will protect you against future algorithm changes just like Google Caffeine.

Now coming back to why updating your website/blog regularly is not worth it if you’re just recycling content, you need to understand how rankings come into the play. Links play an important role in increasings your SERPs but that’s not everything. Search engines try to provide the best results for any given query; that’s their aim and hence they make algorithm changes every now and then to refine the results you see for a more perfect match. If you were to do a cosmetic surgery for some reason or another, you would go to a professional, wouldn’t you? You would consider a surgeon who is known to deliver results and this can be checked by looking at the success rates and past customer experiences and the like. In the search engine world, the same principle applies. If you own a website about “cosmetic surgery”, then you would need to have pages which talk about the different kinds of surgery available, for example, liposuction, nose job, botox etc. By having multiple pages about the different aspects of “cosmetic surgery”, you show off your expertise in this area. You will be trusted in the “cosmetic surgery” industry and search engines will love you for that. This is how domain authority is achieved.

But wait, it’s not as simple as it looks though. If you’re not providing compelling and original content which is of value of visitors of your site, then you wouldn’t move up the rankings. Each new page that you put up on your site can be a boost for the ranking of your keywords only if it is on-topic and original. Google needs to think it’s good enough to keep in its index and by targetting related things to your keywords, you would increase your power of ranking for those keywords.

Creating new content on a daily/weekly/monthly basis can bring you extra traffic provided your content is unique. If these articles address related terms for the theme of your website, you will see move up the SERP over time as you gain more trust from the search engines due to the targetting of secondary keywords/long tail keywords. However if you’re adding articles just for the sake of keeping your website updated frequently, then you will not see any benefits from it.

New content will definitely bring GoogleBot to your site more often but after Google has crawled your new content, it won’t index it if it offers nothing of value. Therefore it is better to take the time required to write a good quality article rather than rushing to write dozens of articles which people are not going to appreciate. Don’t write for the sake of writing, write to address problems that your visitors may encounter, give information that will be helpful to the visitors and in time, you’ll reap the benefits of this long term strategy.

A lot of people want to be able to run as many sites as they want with just one installation of WordPress. Before WordPress version 3.0, you had to use WordPress MU (Multi User) which was not in line with the actual WordPress codes. So basically you would be able to have any number of sites running on WordPress MU but you may miss out on some functionalities. This was not such a big deal for many people who liked the idea of running many websites/blogs from just 1 installation but now with the release of WordPress 3.0, this has been made even more simple.

The greatest benefit of being able to have a many sites on one single wordpress installation is maintenance. You just need to update your files in one place rather than update it in several places as soon as a new version comes out. It is advisable to upgrade to the latest stable version of WordPress as soon as it’s made available. So this is a big time saver in terms of updating but as well as launching new sites.

When I first tried WordPress MU, I was very keen to get my sites running but I eventually found out that to be able to run different domains on WordPress MU, you need to get a wildcard mapping for subdomains. Now because WordPress MU has been merged into WordPress 3.0, you have the same problem. I remember how difficult it was to set up and I eventually gave up.

So if you have your main blog at www.example.com and want www.myotherdomain.com to be hosted on WordPress 3.0, then you’ll have to do a wildcard mapping. Now if you’ve got a dedicated server, you can get it done quite easily but if you’re on shared hosting, then this may be a problem because some hosting companies don’t allow wildcard mapping. If you manage to do it though, there will be another problem. If you had a subdomain like subdomain.example.com, it will stop working because of the wildcard now. So you’ll have to come up with a way to handle that.

I think the idea of hosting multiple sites/blogs is very appealing especially if you want to create niche websites with just a couple of pages. However WordPress 3.0 is not ideal for that purpose nor is WordPress MU. On the other hand WP Hive which is a plugin for WordPress works brillantly.

When I heard that WordPress 3.0 allows multisite creation, the first thought that came to mind was that WP Hive will become dead (redundant) now but that’s not the case. The official documentation of WordPress 3.0 shows that you need wildcard mapping whereas with WP Hive, you only need to add the domain you want have have wordpress on as an addon domain.

I like simplicity above everything else. For those on shared hosting, I suggest you have a look at WP Hive if having multisites/multiblogs on 1 wordpress installation is what you need.

When you have a website, there’s always the possibility that someone will try to hack into your site sooner or later.If you operate a successful site, jealous people will want to bring your site down but that’s not the only reason. Your website could also be hacked into if there’s a security hole. Although I try my best to stay on top of the security of the sites that I operate, one of my website got hacked on the 30th April 2010. The reason of the attack was for the hacker to put some links on my website.

It might seem that the attack was not catastrophic after all since only links were uploaded but if you look at it from my point of view, you will see how bad this hack is. First of all, the hacker was able to delete files from my server and create new directories and files. This was all done through a script which he managed to upload to my site. He deleted only one file on my site but that was enough to bring pretty much the whole of my website down because everything is controlled by the .htaccess file which was deleted. This resulted in 404 errors (page not found) which was not good for my traffic (traffic plummetted to nearly zero), good user experience and the almighty Google. Google crawls my site everyday without fault and it found so many 404s on that day that I was scared it was going to removed all these pages from its index. Fortunately this didn’t happen.

However the hacker created a few directories where he uploaded pages with loads of links on my site. Now my site had nothing to do with recipes but the hacker uploaded recipe links on my site and ping about a 100 servers including Google, yahoo and other search engines. Most of the sites which were pinged followed the request and starting crawling the recipe pages on my site. This is the worst kind of attack because it sets your site as a spamming site. Few days after the attack, Google Webmaster Tools had a message for me which stated that the pages with recipe links that it crawled looked spammy and they were going to remove them from the index which was absolutely fine with me. I was relieved that they didn’t penalise me in any way for having these spammy links on my site.

To make things worst, I was on holiday when my website got hacked. Fortunately for me, I like checking my website stats everyday and when I saw a drop in traffic, I thought it had something to do with my hosting company (the server was down). I was really annoyed at the hosting company because it never happened to me before that my site was down for such a long time but that was not the case in reality. My second thought was that Google was not sending traffic to me (probably some penalty, lost of organic rankings etc). But while I was investigating the problem, I saw that my website was returning 404 pages for nearly every content on the site. This is where it clicked. I looked for the reason and realised my .htaccess file was no longer there. After getting the hosting company to get a backup file up, the website was operating fine again. I then changed all passwords and analysed what went wrong.

I saw files and directories had been created and that could only mean one thing – my password had been compromised. I don’t know how it happened but it could have been worst but fortunately I was able to get the site up and running the following day. If I didn’t notice the problem just after it happened, I would have lost all traffic for at least a week along with the income that the site makes but most importantly, it would take the site a lot longer to rank back afterwards.

When creating adsense ads, I usually tend to omit the part which allows you to display an alternate ad url in case adsense cannot find any adverts to display in its inventory. This can be a costly mistake if your website is showing Public Service Ads (PSA) quite a lot.

The options that you have in adsense is to have a solid colour instead of the google ads if not matching ads can be found or have a collapsing ad unit or supply an alternate ad to display. The solid colour can be used to match your background but the problem is that it will be an empty space which is not going to earn you any money and look rather odd from the layout point of view. The collapsing ad unit is quite clever although there’s a bit of setup to be done and although it’s not going to have blank space, it will nevertheless hurt your earnings. Supplying an alternate url for another advert is the best choice – you can have your own banners to promote your own services/products or have other banners through affiliates which can earn you some money rather than nothing.

I opted to supply my own alternate ad url and decided to log the number of times PSA ads were showing on my website. This would help me understand how much this is impacting my revenue but I also wanted to know which pages were serving these nasty PSA ads as well. So I coded the alternate ad url so that it recorded each time a PSA was shown on my site as well as the page which was showing the PSA. Within 12hrs, I’ve already got 6 PSAs and all of them were coming from the same page. I guess the problem is that no matching ads could be found for that particular page because of the content (text copy) so I probably need to rework the keywords for that page.

I’m quite happy though that I implemented this solution because now I can see where PSA ads are being displayed as well as how many times they are appearing and on top of that, I’m not losing out because an alternate ad is being shown instead of the PSA!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been observing the fickleness of the google uk SERPs and to say that they are volatile is probably the right thing to do. If you are enjoying top positions for your keywords, you may want to keep on doing the good things that you are to stay ahead in the serps, whether it’s providing good content and good marketing (link building).

For those keywords which I’ve been talking about, they are now at #8 on the first page after disappearing completely from the SERPs. It is not so much of a good news when you think that it was #4 a week ago but then again being on the first page among 55 million competing pages is still good and better than being nowhere in the serps. I must admit that I was really inclined to make some changes in the text copy for that webpage because it was gone for quite a while. It took 7 days to come back in the serps. It disappeared on the 22 of March 2010 and it came back today 29 of March 2010. Let’s see what happens next!

Btw indexed pages in google seem to be going up and down a lot lately.