Side Income Blogging

Earn income online, on the side

  • Home
  • Contact
  • About
  • Disclaimer
  • Start a Blog
  • Newsletter
  • Topics
    • Blogging News
    • Social Media
    • Niche Sites
    • Traffic Tips
    • Blogging Tips
  • Income Reports
  • Contents

Importance of links – a real example

Most of us know the importance of links and link building when it comes to getting search engine traffic.  Incoming links to our blog or website from other credible websites are critically important to the ranking of your site on Google search engine result pages and on other search engines.  Personally, I’ve known this for some time and link building, while a constantly changing strategy has been a key focus for me on this blog and my niche stores.

While I knew the importance of links, I never really experienced first hand until this weekend.

The impact of losing a valuable link

I logged in on Saturday to check Google Analytics for my various websites.  I checked my number one niche store, as it has been the main income source for for the past few months.  Right after I pulled it up, I said “WHAT?”  I noticed that I jumped from 400 visits on Thursday to 141 visits on Friday.  I tried to convince myself that maybe it was just one of those things where you’ll sometimes see unexplainable traffic hits.  I also wondered if maybe the Google Panda updates had negatively impacted me finally.  In any case I was shocked and confused.

Fortunately I have all of my sites registered in Google Webmaster tools, and headed over there to check things out, thinking maybe my site was down or something was messed up.  Everything looked fine.  I’m not really sure what caused me to do this, but I decided to check out the top 5 sites that had incoming links to me to see if they were up.  I pulled up the first one, the one with 63 incoming links: Website is not available.  What?  Ok, so maybe it’s just down.  I watched it all weekend and it’s still down.  I emailed the owner a couple of times, the email bounced back.

So far, it looks like the site doesn’t exist anymore, thus removing all 63 of my incoming links.  The site was a blog in a similar niche as my store.  The owner and I had done a link exchange sometime back.  I had no idea how important those links were to my search engine traffic.  Losing those links resulted in a 65% drop in search engine traffic to my site.  Here’s the screen shot from Google Analytics:

As I’ve told you before, search engine traffic is directly proportional to income and losing that much traffic from search engines definitely hit my bottom line.  This particular niche store’s primary income earner is eBay Partner network.  Here is the impact to my eBay sales:

The blue line is traffic, yellow line is earnings 🙁

What to do when you lose a valuable link

While I’m still pretty upset about losing the link, this is just an example of some of the hardships you have to deal with on the internet.  Google changes their search engine algorithms, keyword values fluctuate, links appear and disappear, etc, etc.  The trick is to just move on and adjust.  For me, I have to reclaim some of that link juice.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  1. Sent out a few emails to site owners introducing myself and seeing if they would interested in doing a link exchange.
  2. Sent out some emails asking for guest posts along with sending a few ideas for topics I could write on and why I’m a credible source to do so.
  3. I’ve been reading up on some of the newer strategies for link building and planning on implementing these soon.  I’ll share these with you along with my results.
  4. I plan to write and publish more content on that niche stores blog, just in case part of this was a result of the panda changes.  In a nutshell, Panda is putting less focus on sites with low amounts of text content.
The silver lining in the dark cloud of this is that this will be a really great case study to share with you on how to increase search engine traffic to your sites.  So stay tuned!
photo by: Fredo in (((Stereo)))

Filed Under: Traffic Tips

Comments

  1. Bob says

    August 8, 2011 at 11:45 am

    Sorry to hear that larry, it seems that things have been really interesting the last few months with search traffic fluctuating with panda (and stuff like this)…

  2. Larry says

    August 9, 2011 at 9:44 am

    Thanks Bob. First time I’ve really been effected. I’m beginning to wonder now if it was just the link or maybe a combination of the link and the Panda updates. No sense dwelling on it, I’ll just move forward.

  3. Geoff says

    September 21, 2011 at 11:01 am

    Hey Larry, sorry to hear about the loss of all those backlinks, that sucks!

    In case you didn’t know, if it helps, you’re welcome to do a guest post on my blog anytime. Pretty much all the topics you talk about here would fit in great (blog monetization, blog setup tricks, entrepreneurial tips, etc).

  4. Larry says

    September 22, 2011 at 6:12 am

    Thanks Geoff, I think I’ll take you up on that!

Most popular articles

  • How I made over $100 with my first teespring campaign
  • Register your blog with Google
  • Earn money with MyLikes
  • Don’t build a niche store, Google killed them
  • Blogger or WordPress?
  • How to build an Amazon niche site the easy way
  • BackupBuddy – How to restore your backups
  • How to start a blog in less than an hour
  • Types of WordPress themes
  • Monetize your blog with Adsense

Connect with Side Income Blogging

You can connect with me on social media sites like: PInterest and Google Plus.

Disclaimer and Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2021 · All Rights Reserved