The un-googled website

[HWT]

I have half a dozen or so websites with Adsense on that together add to a nice side income. I did a website a few months ago that is easily the biggest and best that initially got a big spike from Google but then dropped off to literally nothing. Unfortunately it now gets quite low traffic and Adsense revenue. It sits at an average of 1200 page views a day at the moment, which I realise is better than nothing but I do want it higher.

Google seems to be finding it again, thanks to some tips from this site

It was in Drupal and didn't have meta keywords, so I've added a module and it has them now. I need to hack the module so that it has the title of each page of 'dictionary' type in the list of keywords, but its a start, as the module automatically adds lots of keywords from the taxonomy.

I've gone back to updating it daily. Since I did this, voila - Google hits again, albeit not many. But I have only been doing extra updates for a few days, so we'll see.

It now has a random word on the front page so it isn't completely static - check out Online Photographic Dictionary | Online Photographic Dictionary and Encyclopedia .

Bing doesn't seem to be affected. I get lots of hits from Bing, but virtually none from Google, which flies against the "just have good content" line. No, you need REGULARLY UPDATED content, it can be utterly crap as long as it is updated often.

Alexa still thinks the site doesn't exist though ...

I've been updating the biggest earning site more regularly too, with a few new sections that users can add content to, and both traffic and revenue have picked up dramatically. It has got high enough in Alexa to actually have a pretty graph drawn for it. Yay. It ranks 472,179 worldwide and 332,859 in the US, with much smaller numbers in India and Saudi Arabia for some bizarre reason.

So there's my tip for the day - frequent updates. It is really noticeable the effect it has when you update often. Google will leave a new site for dead if it isn't regularly updated.

[Brendan]

Spot on HWT..

Regular website updates and unique content all help with search engine indexing.

Your site looks great and seems a lot better since I looked at it last time (maybe 12 months ago?)

Since your site is a photography site, you should also try and get your photos into Google Images.. a great way to do that is to have descriptive ALT and Title tags on all of your photos.

You should also do some social bookmarking on the site - have a look at tools like Only Wire and consider bookmarking all of your pages - only do a few a day as to not look spammy.

Have you done any in bound link work on it yet? Using anchor tags on the links for relevant keywords to your site?

[cashurwheels]

Good to have bumped into your site. I search high and low for all this stuff when I sit down to get creative with my little fella.Like the very name says, it is a simple yet effective pictionary I will surely be visiting there often.

[HWT]

Your site looks great and seems a lot better since I looked at it last time (maybe 12 months ago?)

Have you done any in bound link work on it yet? Using anchor tags on the links for relevant keywords to your site?

I think it is a bit over 6 months old now - its a lot bigger than it was, I think there are about 2500 words on there now. Must say it is very handy when you are talking to someone who isn't a natural English speaker and you are trying to explain what peanut butter is without having to use Wikipedia and bludgeon someone with a vast wall of text in the process.

Its been submitted to a couple of directories and in the burst Google actually gave hits back to it it picked up several incoming links 'naturally'. Its a good site and it does annoy me it ranks so much lower than my main site, which ranks quite well but IMHO isn't as good. I expect if I can get Google to send me some traffic it'll pick up lots more inbound links on its own.

[seopiper]

you have PR3, pretty good rank. Well i like your website, it's kind of simple but great information in it. Good for you, you are earning from this website itself. :-)

[HWT]

Its had PR3 pretty much from the start.

I found out what the problem was - if I don't update it at least once every couple of days, Google stops sending search results to me.

It isn't earning me much though. About $2-3 a month, compared to smaller sites of mine that make well over $100. It is a dictionary, the ads are all completely mistargeted so noone clicks them.

[HWT]

Since Google changed its algorithm I'd had traffic to this site close to triple, and the cute little statistic graph is trending exponential. The vast majority of hits are now from Google. It makes a nice change.

Now I need to crack PR4 to get some better ad revenue.