God damn my longtails...

Looking over the stats, Most of my loss of earnings doesn't result from losing rankings for main keywords for the home page. Most of those are still in tact. Where I have lost money is the long tails, the very product specific keywords that convert like crazy.

This month I have:

Lower average per product commission from $8 down to $6.
Lower overall conversion from 3.5% down to 2.7%.

I'm not getting half of traffic I am getting around 65% of pre-Penguin traffic, but I am getting less than 50% of pre-penguin earnings. Most of my keywords according to my analytics that have been lost comparing to 2 months ago are all very specific long tails. I am not sure whether I just overoptimized the pages for those keywords or whether I just need to build more links.

It's going to piss me off massively to go through all my pages and lower the keyword density and overall on page optimization but I have no clue what else could be causing this loss of long tail traffic. Most of the long tails I have lost are random long tails not appearing in the G keyword tool so I haven't even optimized for them directly.

I am thinking most of these long tails are now replaced by simple amazon, walmart, bestbuy etc product pages which don't answer the searcher's query.

Jeez I've gotta get this long tail thing solved but like everyone else in penguin I don't really have a f*king clue how to solve it. I mean usually I would just say hey spam more links but now links can harm a site WTF. It's like I woke up and am living in this sick parallel universe where spamming links is BAD for you.

For what it's worth, I've been doing both. Lowering onpage optimization, changing exact match links (that I have control over) and dripping more generic and LSI links.

Some of the pages across several sites have rebounded from 100 plus positions to back in the top ten. They were all first position prior to that damn bird update.

Yes, it's a pain to go through everything, but I want my earnings back!

Exactly what i'm going through. My May's Revenue has dropped by 50%. Traffic still comes in, but the once top spots I used to enjoy now seems to have gone. I did try with writing a new page/article and making sure the targeted long tail is mentioned just twice with some immediate synonyms being sprinkled. Didn't do much, which makes be wonder if its worth spending my time fixing the previous articles/pages.

Not at all wanna do again these kickass tasks. They just ripp me off...

seoguy81 said:

Exactly what i'm going through. My May's Revenue has dropped by 50%. Traffic still comes in, but the once top spots I used to enjoy now seems to have gone. I did try with writing a new page/article and making sure the targeted long tail is mentioned just twice with some immediate synonyms being sprinkled. Didn't do much, which makes be wonder if its worth spending my time fixing the previous articles/pages.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the update seems so random I am quite despondent so I have very little motivation to do all that work to change anything. I am pretty sure if I changed everything it wouldn't make a bit of difference to my rankings, but I have to change each variable, wait, see if there are any ranking changes, change another variable etc. etc.

So far, I have tried adding a lot of links with generic anchor texts and naked url as anchor text. Result: site went from 60 visitors a day, to 7 visitors. i.e. tanked. This is only after a few days but isn't looking promising. I am using a site that was raped by Penguin from 500 visitors a day so I got nothing to lose in this one, and am using it as an experiment test site.

I think backlinks form just one aspect of it. Anyways, just got back here to update that I decided to 'remove' the tags field on my WP site. Did a bit of digging around this morning across various sites in my niche ranking higher.. and noticed not many of them had the tag fields.

I use Yoast SEO.. so while I remove the tag function from the single.php file the tags are still working in terms of meta keywords. Let's see if this might help in any way.

I'm not so sure I'd be changing existing backlinks that you know are indexed by G. I would think that they would see that and it would be a big red flag for your site.

What I've been doing is not changing anything existing, just adding more backlinks with long-tail keywords to diversify the keywords. Basically now if you've got more than 60% of your backlinks with the anchor text for one keyword, G kills your sites ranking for that keyword (and probably most others). Relevancy also plays a much bigger role now.

This may interest you: http://www.micrositemasters.com/blo...need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/