Wow, this month has been a bit stressfull – the Google update definately slapped WPLift down, this month has been our lowest traffic for a while due to Google sending a lot less. I believe this was because sitewide links were devalued in this update, so WPLift must have been receiving a boost from footer links in my free Busby theme ( I did a check and there were around 400k links from this). WPMU got hit pretty bad as well because they also distributed a lot of free themes but they seem to have recovered. Where as WPMU looked like they got hit with a penalty, I think this site just lost any value from those site wide links as our traffic is dropped, but not to such an extreme degree. To be honest, I thought Google discounted sitewide links anyway.

What can I do to recover from this ? Well, in the past I have learnt not to panic – the worst thing you can do is make a load of changes and effect your rankings even worse. I have filed a reinclusion request with Google, explaining the facts, just in case there is a penalty. I upped the posting rate in may so we put out 29 posts, our most in a month yet. I am also working on a redesign which will add some great new features to WPLift and up our traffic (this current design is old & was designed & built in 2 days so its long overdue!).

Another thing to note, we are just getting into summer properly and historically traffic is always lower then, as people are spending less time at their computers – I certainly have been enjoying BBQs and the outdoors more these last few weeks!

You can view past stats reports here.

Traffic and other Metrics

• Posts: 29
• Site Visitors: 95,894  (-28,141)
• Page Views: 166,693  (-51,526)
• Search Engine Visits: 63,675 (-25, 187)
• Alexa Rank: 9,296 (+908)
• RSS Subscribers: 1989 (+81)
• Twitter Followers: 3134 (+540)
• Facebook Fans: 1994 (+44)
• Reader Comments: 356 (+36)

Income

In this section, all display advertising at the moment is handled through BuySellAds. For the affiliate income, there were 24 different sources linked through various posts. If you want to know more about how I monetize the site & which plugins I use, see the article I wrote about affiliate links.

• Display Advertising: $337.5
• Affiliate Income: $2133.82
• Total Income: $2471.32 (-$1242.71)

Conclusion

As you would expect, because Google traffic is down, so is the income for the site. I dont like having the income reliant on a search engine so the next version of WPLift will go some way to rectifying that. I think we put out some great content this month – our social growth is doing great, RSS, Twitter and Facebook are all growng nicely – Im pleased we’re so close to the 2000 RSS subscriber mark now!

Plans for the next month are to continue with our content plan – a mix of roundup posts which do well in the social channels and tutorials / reviews which we always get good feedback on. I think I will also be looking for another regular writer if anyone would like to contribute, please get in touch. I will also try to finish the redesign and begin coding it, its going to be a bit longer than a normal theme as I need some custom plugins written, exciting times!

How did you do last month ? Anyone get Google slapped? Have you recovered ? Let us know in the comments …

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