Yesterday one of my autoblog networks went up in smoke. I had a WPMU installaation with 100 subdomaines. The network was 3 months old. It had 50,000 pages indexed in google and was receiving about 5000 page impressions and 3000 uniques per day.

It was ranking for loads of long tail keywords and all traffic was coming from google. The network was generating about $30 per day in adsense.

Then yesterday IT ALL STOPPED. The site has NOT been de-indexed but it appears that google has re-evaluated the site and has pushed all SERP positions down about 5 or 6 pages so where I used to rank at #1-#10 for a long tail Im now at #50-#60. Adsense icome dropped from $30 to £0.07 for the day.

Tottally gutted !!

Im not sure weather to abandon the site...or whether to ignore the situation....keep link building and hope it bounces back ???

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated

no one can answer that question buddy... similar thing happened with me yesterday.. from 30 bux a day to 0 ... tough luck for both of us

i think autoblog is already dead

IF ( and I said if ) you have been blasting your networks with mass volume backlinks , you are just experiencing a google dance .
please keep us updated .

Originally Posted by skywalker55

Yesterday one of my autoblog networks went up in smoke. I had a WPMU installaation with 100 subdomaines. The network was 3 months old. It had 50,000 pages indexed in google and was receiving about 5000 page impressions and 3000 uniques per day.

You already have your answer
It's a thin no doubt scraped content set of sites with not much value as far as the search engines are concerned so it was obvious they were going to devalue at some time.

That's why I build both WH and BH sites. The WH are for the long term and the BH for short term profit. Sometimes the BH sites last a long time but they mostly don't. I then use the failed sites either as link drivers or I just drop them.

I love the BH techniques but if I use them I assume I'll lose them, move on and build another bunch to replace them.

Others will no doubt disagree but for me:

WH = Long term profit and I'm building a lasting business
BH = Short term profit / Support WH by linking to tier 2/3 / Disposable assets

Originally Posted by roberteb

WH = Long term profit and I'm building a lasting business
BH = Short term profit / Support WH by linking to tier 2/3 / Disposable assets

I think your right in this approach. Looking back over the last few months I have concentrated all my efforts on building autoblog networks like this and it has proved profitable (via adsense) but after yesterdays experience I can see just how unstable this income stream is.

I have 9 other networks like the one I described above and Im just waiting now for them to go pop too.

The lesson though I think is to retain some value. In reality If I had used the autoblogs to build an email list rather than taking the short term profit that adsense offered then i would be in a much better position now. For even when the inevitable google slap comes I would still have my email list to move onto the next project.

A real lesson learnt. I dont think autoblogs are totally dead. They are just having a shorter and shorter life span. We need to make sure that we retain value from them that we can take into our next projects.

So my thoughts are that I will use my autoblogs to build email lists instead of directly monetising the autoblog itself. Then use the email list for direct monitisation and also to drive traffic to my WH sites.

You get that sometimes. Build constantly and build different to weather out these fluctuations. Can't ever stop hustling.

are the posts not unique?
ping me in pm

in russia many people got such problems

Originally Posted by skywalker55

A real lesson learnt. I dont think autoblogs are totally dead. They are just having a shorter and shorter life span. We need to make sure that we retain value from them that we can take into our next projects.

So my thoughts are that I will use my autoblogs to build email lists instead of directly monetising the autoblog itself. Then use the email list for direct monitisation and also to drive traffic to my WH sites.

Yup getting an email address via some sort of popup before they see the crappy content on your site is always a good idea

Another thing I do which works fairly well is hybrid sites. Some unique content and some scraped. They last longer before they blow up but it does require more work

I would say keep building links but start working on some other projects as well. If you are not de-indexed that's a good sign.

I can't express enough how important diversifying is. Not only blackhat and whitehat, but also various income streams. CPA, Adsense, Clickbank, CJ and Amazon, etc.....

I have a review site, with 8 products that were all ranking on page 1. Amazon sales were not a lot but almost $100 per week then nothing. It wasn't de-indexed but it dropped off of the top 1000!! Then 2.5 weeks it came back. Then 3 weeks later the same thing. The longest time it has disappeared was last month for almost 2.5 weeks - 16 days to be exact. If that was my only project I would have been going nuts.

So I started making other sites, based on other methods, and I just keep building links to the Review site. It's back up now, but I expect it to disappear again soon.

Same with PPC on Adwords, just when I'm making money - boom! I somehow violate site policy....and I'm not talking a lot. Maybe $23 per day and then Blam! I'm on my third Adwords account, because you only get so many chances.

This shzit is like Golf, when my putting, driving and irons all come together - I'm like Tiger Woods. When my Review site, PPC campaigns and adsense blogs come together I have the potential to make $100 / day - but I can never get everything firing at once. .....But when I get home from work I always have money from one of my methods. When I have that $100 day I will definitely be posting to let everyone know what method works the best.

Good luck
-Capp

all that effort for $30 a day.......what does Mcdonalds pay?

Originally Posted by stressfree

all that effort for $30 a day.......what does Mcdonalds pay?

I do not think that's a fair comparison as you not only have to compare the time it took but also the effort and work. I'd prefer working on a computer eight hours a day than working at Mc Donalds for a quarter of that time even if the money is the same. The ranking drops may have something to do with the new algo rollout.