In a message thread about encountering the worst traffic and sales week so far this year, someone else complained that this year has been a real disaster traffic wise especially since the Yahoo / Google split in February or March of 2004. He feels like most people's stories are similar. I wrote this to him:
Vicente,
There is a reason you are hearing so many other tales of misery and woe. Those who haven't experienced the crash you have seen are keeping very quiet for fear of catching "traffic rot" on their websites.....
More and more, Amazon is outranking our sites that are copies of their info from AWS. Amazon is somehow reaping the benefit of the pagerank we are sending them with all of our affiliate links, and google is automatically placing them at the top of more and more results. Even if your site isn't a copy of Amazon's info, how can it compete with the 900,000 possible people that Amazon has with an inventive to link to them.
Every new domain with a copy of the rat script builds up Amazon a little higher.... At least $20,000,000 in annual fees are spent by little people, hoping for the piece of the amazon pie, buying domain names and putting free scripts on free hosting, domains that mostly point at Amazon.
Has anyone else noticed how the Amazon session IDs cloak the google PR of www.amazon.com so that the google toolbar shows no PR at all for them? Does anyone know how to get around this to figure out the real PR of amazon.com and some of their subpages?
How can you compete for links like what Amazon gets, especially when, according to my recent research:
- DMOZ tells their editors "do not list affiliate sites" and gives them lots of instructions about how to sniff out and discover affiliate relationships
- DMOZ metas now are saying that people deserve "only one listing in our directory for any entity (whether business or a person)". They are actually saying that any person of less stature than Isaac Assimov, or Stephen Hawkins, is incapable of writing more than a single site worth listing in their directory. (Don't flame me with examples of people with multiple sites, or even multiple deep listings of a single site, the metas have been asked about this and said those were done under old rules, they generally aren't allowing that anymore, especially not if you ask them to. "The sites that deserve deep links are not the ones that ask.")
- "Independent" Directories like Joe Ant are run by DMOZ refugees who actively discriminate against anyone with a site who is trying to make money on the net. They are free, and so should everyone else.
- DMOZ, despite complaining of not having enough active volunteers, actively discriminates against allowing anyone to be an editor who submits an application "which leads us to believe that the candidate is interested primarily in promoting his/her own sites or those with which the applicant is affiliated." In other words, affiliates need not apply......
- Denied DMOZ editor applications get a boilerplate list of 6 possible reasons for denial, along with a nearly always empty area for reviewer comments. You need to read tea leaves to figure out which one, or none of the above, applies to your app. Take heart though, denying editor applications is the one thing that they do quickly.
- Directories like Zeal are prohibited from accepting sites that look like they make money because that makes the site look commercial, and they are sponsored by entities trying to sell paid inclusion to commercial sites.
- You can apply to be an editor there too, and you'll have to submit dozens and dozens of accepted links to become a real editor. Submit one or two bad, or self promotional, or vaguely commercial links, and you'll loose credit for about a dozen or two good links.
- Directories like Yahoo say, "Come, pay us for paid inclusion, but understand someone has to be at the bottom of the list of 358,000 results for "history books", and it might be you. Come on, certainly it's better to be at the bottom of the list, rather than not in it at all...."
- Yahoo officials have made statements that they are actively trying to scrub their directories of affiliate link farm websites with content derived mainly from feeds from the affiliates whose products they are selling
- Google is rumored to be penalizing sites with high PR for trying to sell text links based on their ranking, by not allowing the PR to transfer to the little sites, so the little sites spend money, but get no help with their rankings.
- Evertime someone talks about penalties like this based on buying links, rumors abound that it might be possible to get your competitors penalized by buying them links from spammy sources.
- Give a reciprical link from your site to such "bad actors", or "bad neighbors", and your site might join in their penalties. If suddenly your listings in google loose their descriptions and titles, is it because of a link you gave to someone a long time ago, who has now done something spammy and been penalized by Google?
- What if you change your site, and then your traffic declines... Is it because of a new CSS style? Is it because of a new piece of javascript? How can you ever know? Those who have asked Google, and have been among the rare few blessed with a reply, have gotten responses similar to "At least your URLS are listed when you search for your site, why are you bothered that they have no descriptions or titles and dont show up in regular SERPs? At least our robot visitor your site to partially index it....."
- Google is working harder to find duplicate sites and automatically penalize them. Could your site innocently fall into such a trap?
- Buying traffic with Google adwords can be very frustrating. Their editors may cancel your best performing ads because of really minor "grammar" violations like missing spaces. You could spend 30 hours, and $60, on targetted traffic just to sell six Amazon books. Some experiments have shown that you can get better traffic, cheaper, and sell more items, by hiring beggars on a street corner to hold a sign "Please click www.BuyClintonsBookOnline?Create.com so I can make money to eat" More about adwords....
Oh script kiddies, the bell is tolling, and it tolls for thee.....
- G.
is there any solution? do i have time to read dozens of forums and thousands of message threads to figure out what to do? Can someone digest it all for me so I can quickly get up to date on what is happening with search engines and web traffic ?
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February 2004 Drop In Web Traffic
