#1 Traffic

I’ve had some success boosting traffic even with many fewer pages, and several data hiccups which meant that my Analytics code was missing in both Oct/Nov for about 10 days in total. Page views are increasing again. Y-on-Y we’re looking at about 100% growth.

#2 Content

All short articles have been merged, rewritten or removed. I no longer have articles less than 300 words and the majority are now 900~3000 words.

Another hit to traffic in Oct/Nov was the fact I seriously re-organized all the structure into a very simple structure. I’m not sure I’ve got it right yet… as I struggle with categories posts. But I’ve built silos for the main themes.

I’ll never have more than 100 pages on this site again. Thin content is over. I’ll also pare back non-performing content, in favor of content that people read. I have a lot of material to draw on, however.

#3 Income

It’s better than the past but I haven’t broken $40pm yet, probably because all the changes have unsettled my rankings and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to layout my money pages. I’ve tried page links, native ads, and now I’m trying direct image/linktext ads on Amazon.

#4 Server Speed

My pages are loading in about 3~5s, which for the resources I have at my disposal is poor. I’ve tried many solutions but often I lose the Native search ads that I use to generate income. I’m not sure why that is. It happened in the week prior to Cyber Monday… so sales dropped off a cliff, even though Pageviews were up. I finally found out it was Cloudflare’s issue, though I was unable to fix it reliably.

#Conclusion

I’m still auditing my content for DMCA infringements… I’ve found several pages that copy my stuff without permission. I’ve done some backlink removal too. But most of the bad links and illegal copies stuff have long since gone from Google.

If I break 10K pageviews, I’ll post an update. Promise!