This is a part 2 of Google Slaps my niche.

Interestingly, the slap was only temporary. A few weeks later I was reintroduced on page 3, then slapped down several hundred places before I now finally being reintroduced to page 2, which I am hoping is permanent this time.

I slowly climbed up to position 11, but I understand page rankings “snapshots” have been happening recently, which have caused me to slide half way down the page. Hey, I’m still on page 2 and I can climb back up right?

Just need to apply some social bookmarking and get around to a few relevant blogs and the like and see if I can promote my site onto page one. The site is on topic with useful information compared to the other sites which are just retailing products so I think it should be there anyway!

Main focus now has to be building backlinks so I can increase ranking and traffic. I’m also going to hold off applying for affiliate schemes until I do that. Crawl before I walk so to speak.

As google have lifted my site higher in the SERPs, I am getting some traffic through search as well as a trickle through article marketing – and I’ve not even scratched the surface of Article Marketing yet as, I’ve only dealt with Ezine Articles thus far.

So anyway, I guess the main thing when building a new niche site after market research is not to panic and get disheartened if your niche gets a nice ranking position then gets blasted into no man’s land. If you’ve not employed tactics google doesn’t like then you may very well return with a matter of weeks. Keep working on your site in a natural way, and relax!

Google slaps my niche site out of its results. You can now find me in the second hundred list of sites – although from the way the domain is listed (minus “www.”) I assume that’s some sort of historical listing, as it’s supposed to appear with “www.”

Hmm, will have to try this again sometime with 30 day challenge style approach to see if there is a way I can avoid my site being put in a box! I think their vintage electric guitar project never got the google slap.

Am I bothered about my site getting some google slaps? Yes and no.

Yes, because I’m not going to get any organic search traffic for a while now. Not that I had much to begin with, but I did get a few.

No, because as I am learning about article submission and social media. I’m learning that I can generate traffic without google. Google is seen as the be all and end all. “I must get listed in google” blah blah blah, but really, so what? Google should be seen as a chunk of traffic, but not the only source.

In fact if the recent post on SEOBook is anything to go by, google may soon become less valuable to focus your efforts on. The post claims google adjusted their algorithms in January 2009 and is now giving extra weighting to brand names to determine at least the top 10 listings on some search phrases.

Examples given demonstrated in one instance the change in results for a search for “airline tickets” now results in 4 brand name airline companies suddenly ranking in the top 10. So it may be in your best interests to get smarter and seek out new ways of generating traffic. Because these changes might ensure you never even had a chance to begin with.

Another reason why I’m not bothered – I’m very interested in this niche and keep thinking of things I can do to grow it and offer lots of useful content. Of course there’s a chance the efforts may be a waste of time.

But I like to think that by the time it gets reindexed on google, not only will it make it to the first page – hopefully to the first few positions if not the first, but that it becomes great at converting into either affiliate sales or adsense clicks.

I may do away with adsense at some point as affiliate sales are more profitable and reflect the purpose of the site. But at the moment I’m still building content, so affiliate offers wouldn’t integrate well just yet.

Anyway if there is a tecnhique that generally avoids resulting in the google slap, please let me know.

On checking my analytics stats recently I noticed google (organic) and google (referral). I had no adwords campaign running on this, so I was wondering what the heck was going on.

After a bit of searching I found the following direct from the horse’s (google’s) mouth:

Not all referrals from Google.com domains come through organic search or AdWords ad listings. Referrals may come from a variety of sources, including Google Groups posts, base.google.com listings, or static pages on related Google sites. Such visits are tagged as [referral] instead of [organic] or [cpc].

Pity really that the referral can’t be more specific than that. In this particular circumstance I’m wondering whether youtube.com now counts as a google.com referral, as the content viewed the site concerned was related to a youtube video, and that site is still new and unknown so I’d be surprised to be getting a referral from any other “related google  sites” that I’m aware of. Hmm…