Another 100,000 hits and counting…
In February I reported that my site had had 500,000 hits since I started it. Well I’m pleased to report that it’s had another 100,000 hits since then in only 3 months. That’s 33,000 hits per month! It’s definitely growing. Also when I recently checked my blog’s Page Rank I noticed that it had gone up from a 3 to a 4.
The growth may have been natural, although I expect that using Twitter has helped. Also I started using Feedburner and put the RSS feeds in more prominent position on my blog.
Often business and success coaches say what you measure grows and I know that this is true of things like money so it’s interesting to watch my web traffic stats and see them grow (due to me taking action and implementing things that make them grow).
Page Rank Drop
One major bummer is that I just checked my page rank again and the blog is 2 (down from 4) and the main site is 0 (down from 3) !!! So I believe that I’ve finally been penalized for selling links to gambling sites. My friend Juuso at GameProducer.net warned me that this was a possibility but the money was too good to refuse and way better than the peanuts I get from Adsense. I’ve made nearly $2000 from selling links this year so far (and good money in previous years) – it was easy money because the advertisers approached me and adding a link to the site only takes a few minutes. I never knew it was frowned upon by Google until Juuso told me. Perhaps I “manifested” the drop just by knowing about it 😉
Anyway, I guess that means that I probably won’t get many more requests for ads whilst my Page Rank remains low. Maybe when the ads expire it will pick up again. I think you can request a reassessment from Google so I could try that in a year. I’m not too bothered by this issue right now because my site is still linked to by lots of others and it still shows up well on Google, plus I have lots of loyal visitors who I’m sure will keep on recommending my site. I think the Page Rank is mainly just a number that other advertisers use to check your viability for placing ads.
However, if any of you have advice about this issues, please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks!
May 27th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
What sort of things have you done to drive more traffic to your site? Obviously writing regularly and releasing great games is a start but what other steps have you taken?
May 28th, 2009 at 3:50 am
Hi Alex. I have not done tons of stuff as it’s not been a priority for me because I earn most of my money from my day job as a game developer at BFG and from royalties from games. I submitted my games to shareware sites, did some link exchanges, my site is listed in my sigs on forums, comments on other blogs have my URL in my name, did some blog roll swaps, people link to my articles, I’ve added twitter, published some articles on Digg but that’s about all. So I know there’s a ton more stuff for sure – what do you advise? This stuff is now more important due to Google slapping down my page rank due to the ad links I sold on my site, but I’m not ultra worried about it because this site is not a big revenue stream for me, it’s just fun. I am starting up a new business soon and I won’t accept any paid link on that site in case Google get funny again.
May 28th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
As I understand it Page Rank in itself isn’t really a vital ingredient for getting traffic, it’s more of a guide to how the GoogleBot will crawl your page.
Also Google rankings fluctuate almost daily so you could even find it’s back up to normal again in a week or two as if nothing had happened.
Iain
May 28th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Thanks for the info Iain, I certainly hope that’s the case. In fact I just checked and the main page is up to 2 now, but the blog is still 2. Hopefully they’ll rise some more.