Long-time readers will remember how I created a simple site called the Invisible Fence Guide (or, more formally, the Guide to Invisible Fence) as an AdSense case study. The case study showed how you could develop a small site in different phases, starting first with the content and then gradually building it up into a nice-looking, navigable site that was monetized with AdSense and also with Chitika eMiniMalls. The site essentially tells the story of how we decided to install an Invisible Fence after one of our dogs escaped from our fenced yard. The site is nothing special, but it's the kind of site anyone can create, which was the point of the case study: start your content monetization efforts based on your own knowledge and experiences.
As it turned out, that site was able to quickly rank for the “invisible fence” term, showing up in the Google top 10 list. In fact, in recent months it even made it up to the #2 position. This high ranking attracted the ire of Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers, who threatened to sue me for using their trademark in my domain name, the site name, and on various pages. It didn't seem to matter to them that I was a happy customer and that their product was featured prominently throughout the site. Because I had ads on the site and because those ads were often for competing products (because of course the competitors bid on the keyphrase “invisible fence”) they didn't like my site. Not being in the mood to fight a lawsuit, no matter how frivolous it might seem, I conceded on most of the points and renamed the guide to the more generic-sounding Pet Fence Guide and changed the domain name and some of the content.
Google recently switched to a much more frequent page ranking cycle and over the past month I've watched the site's ranking for “invisible fence” slide down into the top 11 to 20 range. Not surprisingly, the AdSense income's dropped from about $12/day to $3/day, with a similar drop in the Chitika income. This is why you see people fret in the forums about their own ratings drops — because it has a direct and measurable effect on their site's income.
Now, $3/day from a site that requires no maintenance isn't bad. If you had several such sites you'd be raking in some decent money — remember my posting 172 AdSense sites = $5000/month. But this assumes that you can maintain the same traffic levels to all those sites. If they start slipping, so does your income. It's conceivable that over time the Invisible Fence Guide's rankings will slip so much that the income will dwindle down to nothing. Which will make Invisible Fence's lawyers happy, but not me.
So it's one thing to get ranked, but it's another to stay ranked. When I'm done the PLR series, I'm going to start a series on search engine ranking maintenance. We'll look at the different things you can do to keep your site listed and to keep the traffic flowing to it. And we'll use the Pet Fence Guide as our working example. Should be fun!
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.