The Google Factor

Google’s Penguin algorithm change affected my most lucrative sites. I believe I had additional problems caused by the many AdSense error messages. As a result my income dropped before Penguin was released.

Enough of the intro, here’s the scoop. In March I earned $3,237. In April my income dropped to $1,936. That’s a drop of $1,301. We’re not talking small potatoes here.

Rainy Day Fund

Because of the fickle nature of earning money online, over a year ago I created a rainy day fund. At the end of each month, I place the equivalent of 10% of my online earnings. Some months the fund is well fed and other months, like this one, it gets a smaller contribution.

The fund was created to hold me over in the event my income takes a royal plummet like it did last year when eHow closed the Writers Compensation Program. Last year between March and April my income plummeted from $2,799 to $1,338 (de ja vu all over again).

Onward and Upward

My passion for earning money as an online writer has waned significantly over the past few months. I still place content online, but I’m nowhere near as prolific as I once was. My new interests are of the hands on tactile nature with online writing as a secondary or tertiary add on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that life is way too short to force myself into a mold that no longer fits. Who knows, maybe over time my passion will return and the once comfortable mold will become comfortable again, but it the meanwhile, it’s time for me to explore other things.

What I absolutely love about online writing, however, is that even though my interests have changed, the money (although in a lesser amount) is still coming in. How was your April?  I hope it was better than mine.

How Penguin Affected Me

According to Google, the algorithm went into affect on April 24th. Well, I’ve got to say that I noticed a change in my earnings on the last day of March and my earnings have been steadily declining since then.

My decline didn’t have much to do with the Penguin, my issues had to do with tons and tons of error messages generated by the Google AdSense code. For some reason, my sites suddenly started to generate errors and the odd thing about it was I hadn’t touched those sites in months.

Culprit of the Error Messages

The first wave of messages occurred because the code suddenly wanted to find a file located in a folder called doubleclick in my blogs’ root directory. In an attempt to correct the problem, I created a folder called doubleclick and searched Google to download the missing file the code needed.

Whew! All was good for about 24 to 48 hours until the same error messages started appearing again. The error messages weren’t so bad but they had an affect on my income. You see, the 404 “File not Found” errors were generated after someone clicked on an AdSense ad and the subsequent page wouldn’t load.

The subsequent page was the advertiser’s page, but somehow the AdSense code looked for the page on my sites. Of course they wouldn’t find the pages on my site because I don’t have the advertiser’s pages physically located on my blogs.

After further investigation, it seems these errors were generated by image ads. So, to put an end to the nonsense, I modified my code so AdSense would only display text ads. Problem solved (or work around implemented).

Back to the Penguin

It took me a few weeks to figure out my error problem, so by then Penguin waddled into my life. After doing a little reading up on Penguin I made one change to my websites. I moved the 300 x 250 ad from within the top of my posts to the right sidebar.

Somewhere on the Google AdSense Webmaster blog, there was information about the ratio of ads to text above the fold. By moving the ad to the sidebar, more of my content appeared above the fold and the ad still had a prominent place.

When penguin was first implemented I noticed a momentary drop in traffic and search engine ranking, but things seem to be balancing out and the traffic and page rank have normalized (whatever normal is).

Penguin and My Online Strategy

My online strategy is still the same now as it was when I first started 5 years ago. Write quality content. I’m sure social networking and good backlinks help, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a social networker and I don’t actively seek backlinks.

Maybe my time as an active online writer is drawing to an end. I’ve found what makes me happy as an online writer and my “style” may be obsolete. I like to write about certain subjects and I like to write in a fashion to help people. That’s it.

I don’t like to worry about hats (whether black or white), popularity, gaming the system, backlinking strategies and the like. I’m quite selfish in that I want to write about what excites me and hopefully it will help someone else. Sometimes its lucrative and sometimes not.

So, when Google rolls out the Otter, the Hyena, the Cheetah or the Petunia, my writing style and strategy will remain the same. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

I did spend some time writing on the Internet in March, but I placed my work on low or non-paying sites. Of the 27 articles I wrote, 21 were placed on low paying sites and 4 articles were placed on sites that don’t pay at all.

The non-paying sites don’t pay because I haven’t placed ads on them yet. I’m looking to experiment with different ad networks to see how well they pay. I’m still in the research stage. While I’m researching, I’m slowly adding content.

The Beauty of Past Work

If it were not for the work that I put in over the past 5 years, I wouldn’t have been able to earn over $3,200 of residual income in March of 2012.

I know I’ve said it before, but it’s something that’s worth repeating. Even if you are strapped for cash and must write for up front pay, do yourself a favor and squeeze out some time to write a few residual articles. You won’t get an immediate income boost, but it will grow over time.

Losing a Little Steam

It looks like April isn’t starting off where March left off. My numbers seem to be a little lower, but it’s really too early to tell. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue writing at my current pace. It seems to be working for me right now as I slowly regain my writing mojo.

How did March treat you?

It sounds like Google prefers sites to develop natural backlinks. In other words, if you write good and engaging content, folks will naturally link back to your sites. I wrote a post on my backlinking strategy a little over a year ago.

Not Much to Say

I feel for the folks who were affected by the latest change. It’s a blow to wake up one day to see all your hard work flushed down the tubes. However, I fully believe those who take the time to evaluate and learn from the situation will come up with an alternative way to make things work.

There’s not much I can say about backlinking that I haven’t already said somewhere on NJFM.

For folks who haven’t heard, here’s what I’ve said about backlinks:

• Do Follow vs No Follow Backlinks
• Blogging, Writing Articles and Social Networking Traffic
• Google’s View on Article Marketing
• How do You Drive Traffic

Crystal Ball

Looking into my crystal ball, I see an uptick in emails offering guest posting options. Currently I receive about 2 or 3 guest post requests a day. Additionally, I fully expect to receive an increase in requests for reciprocal links. With the demise of popular backlinking networks, folks are looking for alternatives.

FYI, as a rule, I don’t accept guest posts or participate in reciprocal linking strategies. I give one way links to sites I admire and respect and do not expect a link back. You see, this is still my hobby and I treat it as such. If your hobby were building model airplanes, would you want someone to build one for you? No, because the joy is in the creation.

Going Forward

The Internet is fickle and old timers have learned to weather the storms. This is just another storm to be weathered. If you were affected by this latest Google change, I’d be interested in hearing how you intend to weather and survive this particular storm.