Hi all, I've got a student pilot's website that attained a lot of great pagerank this last update (3's on many pages), but for some reason I'm seeing less traffic. I thought maybe more people would hit the site once school started again (aviation majors and such), but it seems I'm getting less hits than I did in the summer. I attribute this to the fact that people fly more often in better weather, especially rookie pilots (like me). Anyway... I've got two pages where I display short descriptions of flying clubs and flight schools in all 50 US states, along with an outbound link to each of them. I do this as a service for my readers, so it's non-reciprocal in 99% of the cases. So my question is this: with 100 pages of 1-way outbound links, how badly am I hurting my SERP's? My pagerank seems not to have suffered - if anything it's gone up - but my hits are lower. Was just wondering if outbound linking affected SERP's directly, or only through loss of pagerank. Thanks!
First of all, nice looking site. You even managed to make the 'grainblue' background tile look good! This is a classic example of why PR does not equate to SERPs. Your outbound links are not hurting you. From what I can see, you took great care in finding them and vouching for those sites. They add context to your site. Like a mirror, you are what you link to. I would not worry about things like the so-called 'PR leakage'. If your site offers a great resource, then people will want to link to it. So far, it looks like you are on the right path. I would suggest 'nullifying' the links to States that you do not have any links for yet. This is the only bad spot in your directory. You have mulitple pages that are basically the same, the only difference is the State name. This may be having a negative effect on the overall value of the directory in the eyes of the SE. As for declining traffic, what are you using to track it with? Just curious. What search terms were bringing them in before, how are those terms ranking now? Also, have you considered adding a forum to your site? Not sure if you have the time for that type of venture, but a forum could get you more traffic in the long run because content is added on a daily basis. More content equals more pages that have a chance to be found. I know you have a Daily Journal. Consider adding a blog to the site and post one or two articles a week. Again, this is about adding content. More content, more ways to be found. Blogs are about the easiest way to accomplish this and pull in readers, some of which may become habitual. Also interact with other blogs (or forums) on a regular basis. Exposure is your ally here.
You've done a very nice job creating that website! Dodger gave already some good advice there. I found a few things that you may want to consider looking at: Your website doesn't have a permanent redirect script (=301 redirect); Your website is a bit heavy on the ads. You might want to cut that down a bit or swap some text ads for small banner ads. Consider also change the colour of the ads to match the shade of blue of the large boxes and to use text ads of a single line instead of four lines. That will probably increase the number of clicks (a bit); Why is the only social-bookmark button on your entire website installed on the resources page of all pages? I think it should be installed somewhere at the bottom of every webpage. Have a look at the free social-bookmarking buttons from AddThis and ShareThis. If you choose to use those, don't forget to select only the useful social websites and to optimise the tags! Submit your website to several popular social-bookmarking website. This will probably get the buzz going. Please, don't do it in the way of that bookmark from user Westgate_Industries on Delicious, because it looks quite spammy!
I Dugg it. ;0) I am wondering how well the social bookmarking sites will pan out. If it is anything like an industry, take roofing for instance, these people generally do not use these types of services, nor would they know how to use them in the first place. Roofers have a hard enough time using a forum. Still, it couldn't hurt. I would probably go with the simplicity of AddThis over the others.
@Dodger: The average user of social-bookmarking websites is young and internet savvy and a bit tech-minded, unlike roofers, so makes the promotion of a website about flying students a lot easier. Why did you digg the resources page?!
Just to get him going! His site does not interest me, topic-wise, but I could see that he takes pains to put out decent content and is passionate about it. I dig that.
Dodger & Larry, Wow... first off, thanks for taking so much time to check out my site. It's rare that anyone spends significant time enough to give constructive feedback, but when they do it really helps. Wanted you guys to know I appreciate that! You're absolutely right here, of course. It takes time to find and review flight academys and clubs, even cursory glimpses, and I've been procrastinating getting the other states done. I think right now I'm up to Hawaii. I'm using Statcounter ducks. Dunno why, I guess I'm just comfortable with it - when I launched my first site it happened to be the first hit counter I found. My site usually gets hits for "flying clubs", "aviation articles", "airport sign markings", "air traffic control terms"... stuff like that. But it's intermittent, and fluctuates a hell of a lot. I'm still trying to lock down the golden keywords, but haven't had much luck. This is an EXCELLENT idea, and a must-do somewhere down the road. The sad part is that the general aviation population is a small bunch, made smaller every day because fuel prices are going bananas. Most aviators congregate to big forums like landings.com and such because there aren't enough pilots/aviators to get smaller forums going. Unless I start producing daily content and updating my site with RSS news feeds and stuff, there will be a really big echo in my forum. (Not to mention I've never added a forum to a website before and wouldn't know where to begin... but I recognize that I have to eventually face that demon). Larry I'm not sure what you mean here, can you explain? Excellent advice, and I'm going to take it. I've been meaning to get around to re-doing SFC's ads, especially since this site was my first foray into AdSense or ads of any kind (translation: I didn't know my ass from my elbow). Still have to learn more about this stuff. I recognized the need for social bookmarking, and wrote a little php include script hoping to scare up some traffic from there. Haven't really concentrated too much on it, or fully understand exactly the best way to work it or optimize the tags(?) My delicious submission probably looks spammy because I have no clue what I'm doing or supposed to be doing. In any case, as Dodger points out, I like to concentrate more on unique content than anything else. It's tough because that kind of thing takes the longest, but I still think it's worth it. Thanks again guys!
Don't worry to place outbound links when they're helpful for your visitors. Google like natural sites. Sites with all NoFollow or no outbound links to related sites are just not normal. Internet is all about linking between resources after all. Don't get too obsessed with PR leaks, etc. do not overdo the SEO thing.
I had a look at the server that hosts your website and it's an Apache server. That means you can use a .htaccess file to 301 redirect studentflyingclub.com to www.studentflyingclub.com and a lot more, but let's stick to the 301 redirect. Create a blank text file, put the following code in it and save it as .htaccess (in ANSI-format and without the .txt extension!): Options +Indexes Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^studentflyingclub.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.studentflyingclub.com/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup): Upload the .htaccess file to the root directory of your account of the server, start up your browser and go to your website. If you see it, then the .htaccess is working fine. If you get an error message, then remove the .htaccess file. Depending on the type of Apache server, you may need to delete the first two lines or use \.com instead of .com. If you want to I can have a look at it or have a look yourself at this excellent tutorial about 301 redirecting a URL on an Apache server. Concerning the tag optimisation: the tagging websites when creating social bookmarks works the same as keyword research for title elements and keyword meta tags. Don't use: "flight, planning, school" but "flight planning school", etc.
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