Just curious but what do you do to get the backlinks for 100 sites in order to maintain your SEO status in the search engines? Do you buy links or something? Cause I have trouble getting a modest amount of backlinks for 20 sites let alone 100. Ive noticed that your templates aren't too exciting, seem to be using the same ones over and over. Maybe thats why you have such a good CTR rate (anything over 1 is great) cause the visitor is trying to get out.
LOL I like the above 1% comment. I have around 30 good sites which feed off each other, give away a lot of good SEO information and free stuff that generates links. As long as you don't go over the top on the interlinking it works out well. I've made a dozen AdSense/SEO themes for WordPress (which I also sell) and use those on my sites, I tend to stick to the ones that give the highest CTR (Talian being the best with around 5% with the right sidebar layout). David Law
I been hesitant to do too much interlinking because when from the same I.P I thought google didn't put too much importance on those links. Which site is using Talian? I have about 10 sites using adsense and I average less than 1 percent click through rate. Then again I usually use a combination of adsense ads and other ads, so maybe thats why I get below 1 percent.
So you're still having luck cranking out datafeed sites ? Would you condsider them thin affiliate sites? Are you doing anything to add value to the datafeed? I gave up on datafeed sites years ago when it seemed like google cracked down on datafeed and articlebot type sites. I prefer to work on much smaller sites with handwritten content. They're less prone to algo changes. I do kind of miss cranking out the large sites though. Keep in mind the OP said he has over 100 domains. Is it really hard to average $1/day on a site? Not really. You can do this too.
Talian is run on the recipe site with small modifications since it's not really a blog (60,000 recipes and counting, added 7K this week). You can see the Talian sales page with the themes features at http://www.google-adsense-templates...talian-with-adsense-and-seo-optimisation.html (my theme site also runs Talian). David Law
No I'm not having much luck with sites created with datafeeds, (most of mine are using Amazon's XML feed which you can't do much with) but that doesn't mean I'm going to give up trying to find a way that will allow me to use datafeeds that Google doesn't consider thin (pretty much given up on Amazon though, not much you can do with the feed). I basically create a site with an idea of how to get over the thin problem and see if it works, when it doesn't I want for a new idea before building another one: so have a small number of non-Amazon datafeed sites, pointless building them if they won't rank. Sucks that we can't get sites like this one http://www.hp-inkjet-cartridge-refills.com/ (WordPress with a Shareasale datafeed, very easy to make), ranked well in Google, could make a fortune, I'd build hundreds if it still worked. Unfortunately if I ever solve this problem I won't be publishing my success for very obvious reasons so far, no joy Like you I don't hold out much hope I'll crack this one, Google's detection is too good and if it takes a lot of effort to create a site from a datafeed (you could write your own content) that Google will accept, would be better using that time making a real ecommerce store or something. I don't have a 100+ domains all making money from AdSense, would be a bit of a let down to have 100 fully marketed sites and only make $100 a day from AdSense from them! Of my 100 or so domains only a small amount (about 15 with another 10-15 that have potential) make enough money to make them worthwhile from a AdSense perspective. Some of my sites (used to be around 25-30) are from the past and are made using content from the Amazon XML feed, built them a couple of years ago when Google wasn't so anti thin affiliate. Basically had some sites doing really well using Amazon's feed: was making around $120 a day from AdSense and similar amount from Amazon from a few sites with a lot of the money from the Amazon content. So started to build more Amazon sites with an aim to gain similar success long term, (give them a year to gain links and rank well and I'd have been laughing all the way to the bank) unfortunately I got in on that type of site a little late and made most of them just before it got real hard for this type of site (so none of the new ones did well long term: all penalised, including the original ones that did well). So I have over 20 domains that will never rank well because they contain thin affiliate content and many don't make enough from AdSense a year to pay even for domain registration! For example one of my thin affiliate sites has about 600 pages indexed in Google from potentially 10s of thousand (uses Amazons feed, so millions of pages available) and gets no real traffic. Been tracking AdSense income from it since Sept 2006 and it's made just $7.24 (from ~2,500 visitors) from AdSense. I should delete it, but hate to delete sites All the domains I bought specifically for an Amazon store script I've got do badly. Have a couple that make a couple of dollars a day from AdSense, but most of that traffic is click thru from the recipe site (so they are penalised as well, Google really hates thin affiliate content!). I also have sites I bought for various SEO tests (must have 20 like that), others that I planned to use for something but either never got to it or changed my mind, so though there's over 100 domains on the server (2 servers now) many aren't doing anything worthwhile. I did come up with an idea to use some of them a few months back and been rolling that out, made over $1,000 last month from a handful of sites that probably made $50 from AdSense in the same period. Don't ask as I don't want this one copying. Now if I had 100 domains with half decent content on them all I'd expect to make a lot more than $100 a day from AdSense. To be honest my AdSense earnings are quite low for the traffic I get, the 100 dollar day my sites received ~25,000 visitors, $100 from 25,000 visitors is rubbish. David Law
100 dollars for 25000 visitors is on the lower end, but Its all about niche though with adsense because some niches pay real good per click and others pay lousy.
$100 for 25k unique isn't too bad if your major site is a recipe site. This has low click payouts I would imagine as its along the same lines of the lyrics, cheats, guitar tabs, those type of sites.
Humour sites also do poorly. I won't ever make a humour site again even though its easy to get traffic. You can get like 10,000 visitors and make only 10-50 dollars off adsense. Plus there is no affiliate programs to cater to that group well so its just adsense only.
How much traffic do you have daily? I have around 1200 impressions per day with around 300 uniques and I'm making around $5 to $7 per day...
Averaging around 20K - 25K visitors a day currently, though the traffic to my recipe site died today!! Yesterday got 10Kish visitors, today looks like it's going to be about a 1/4 of that! It's not been that low in years. Can only hope it's a temporary drop due to the recent server problems, been down quite a lot of time out of the last week or so and moved it to a new server. That in itself could cause a short term traffic problem. Added a lot of new content this year, first from 11k recipes to 35K (earlier this year) then to 50K (couple of months back) and now 60K (over the last few weeks). Trying to get to 100K recipes. Every time I've added content traffic has increased and looked like I was moving up to over 10K visitors a day (up a couple of K) until today. Other than the downtime the only thing I've done that I don't like is removing a plugin that reduced the number of categories on the menu, had it setup to show 26 categories, A, B, C..... Z using a WordPress plugin, a visitor clicking the A Recipes cat would open up other cats under A like Free Apple Recipes etc... this way there wasn't 300 category links on the menu for every page. But this plugin resulted in 600-1,000 extra queries (assuming some code problem as without it, it's around 60 queries!) which was killing the loading time, so had to remove it and WordPress lacks a folding category type function (feature lacking from WordPress for no obvious reason). I could see having 300 category links all with the words Free and Recipes (Free Keyword Recipes) as SPAMMY. So might be that, doubt it though. Guess I have to cross my fingers that this is a temporary problem now! David Law
Maybe your sandboxed, as that sounds like a way to go about it with that many recipes added. I have done that before with a 5 year old site and got sandboxed.
I know this is not the factor for your traffic loss problem, but how did you add 40k recipes in 6-8 months? Duplicate content? Or did you use any kind of automation, to scrap the recipes from web, rewrite it and upload it back to you?
I didn't scrape the content from other websites! I'm not going to tell you how I made that site since others could use the same tools to create similar sites, basically a case of it's not that hard to do, but if you don't know where to start and what tools to use (a couple I had made) it might as well be brain surgery Hard part was getting all the recipes in a database format that was categorized, finding them is easy when you know where to look. David Law
You can collect free recipes everywhere. Scan them using OCR and make a crapload of txt files to auto-feed into your DB.