November 20th Rankings & Earnings Update (After Penguin 3.0)
First off, sorry for the late update, there is a good reason for this I promise. I became a father again just days after Google released their last update, so I have been up to my eyeballs in new born duties and sleepless nights. In fact as I write, I have a baby asleep on my chest!
To answer everyone?s question, yes the site got hit with the last Penguin update. It got hit hard. This came as no surprise and I had been anticipating it for a while.
You can see when it hit traffic just disappeared, all but a bit of Bing and Yahoo. RIP.
Recovering The Site Was Easy
Once I realised the site was over, I set about with the next phase. This was to take a fresh domain that I had prepared a few months back and clone the old site on to it. For this I used a WordPress plugin called Duplicator.
It?s the best plugin I have found so far and makes site cloning a breeze. Prior to the cloning, I did a fresh WordPress install and used some highly unique spun copy in a related niche. This allowed the site to become indexed. This is not necessary but will speed up the process that follows.
Once this was done, I set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. There are a number of ways to do this, the simplest being to set it up using the Cpanel redirect function or to edit the .htaccess script for the old site.
Make sure it?s a 301 and nothing else. Don?t forget to redirect both www and non-www versions. You will find plenty of guides online showing how to do this so don?t panic if you don?t get it.
Once the site was cloned and the redirect was in place, it was just a waiting game.
Luckily it was not too long?
You can see that Google picked up the power of the redirect very quickly and began to send traffic to the site within days.
It caught me off guard when I received a sale alert just 48 hours after the switch over.
As you can see the traffic started off quickly at about a 3rd of what it was. Since then I began to build links using GSA to the new domain, but at a slower rate of a handful a day.
I had been talking to a friend about the sites progress and I sent him some links to see. At this point I had not built many links, but he was like hey man, there are 1000?s of links pointing to the site. Confused, I fired up Ahrefs again to discover this on the non-www version:
At the time it was about 1200 domains but they have started to decay now. At first I thought it was a negative SEO attack but upon closer inspection it was lots of links with Chinese anchors built to non-existent pages.
It did not have the signs of an attack and just seems like a random event. The site wasn?t even ranking at the time.
I am not sure what effect these links are having, but the reality is I am building links like this anyway so it doesn?t really matter.
Results So Far
The site is starting to do a lot better, you can see from the traffic chart that there has been uplift in visits and in the last 2 days about 4 sales have dropped in. This is due to a recent uplift in ranking.
So far the site has:
41 page one terms
29 Position 5 or above
Its still not where it was but it is certainly getting there. The new site has made $200 since launch and is gathering momentum as it gains rank.