Hello again 
Did you miss me?
If any of y’all have wondered where I’ve been, I’ve been around, just keeping my paws off the site in order to see what would happen. Specifically, I was curious how my complete absence for a month would effect such things as my standings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and my Google Adsense revenue. Results were both positive and a bit distressing, but I’ll get to my reaction to them in a few moments.
Traffic Results and SERPs-
First, here’s some actual numbers from Clicky Web Analytics-
September Traffic Stats for Philaahzophy.com-
October Traffic Stats for Philaahzophy.com-
To quickly sum up those traffic numbers I had more visitors looking at more pages, but spending less time overall in October as compared to September. And that’s without really promoting the site or doing so much as visiting, much less adding new content. Yes, my last post was actually on October 5th, but that post only received 215 views leaving more than 2,500 new views unaccounted for. And, though it’s not visible in those screenshots I also lost more than 1,500 ‘social media’ views by not actively promoting the site through StumbleUpon. So, where’d that traffic come from? Well, search traffic more than tripled in October from 2,140 to 6,627!
Google Adsense Revenue-
Unfortunately, Google won’t let me share my Adsense earnings with you, but I do believe I can safely say the following: In the almost three years I’ve been a member of Google Adsense I’ve earned a grand total of three payments. I first reached payment threshold in February of this year (about 18 months into my history with the program), my second in August (six months later), and my third at the end of October. In other words, my revenue has consistently increased as I’ve learned more about how the system works and regardless of my continuing to add new content to this site.
I did manage to earn roughly 15% more from Google Adsense in September than I did in October, but I attribute that more to the Adsense earnings from StumbleUpon visitors that I wrote about previously. And, even without any new content, October was still my second best month for Google Adsense earnings by more than 25%.
Conclusions-
So what does this all mean? Unfortunately, I have no idea. Thus the ‘positive but distressing’ comment in my opening paragraph. The results are clearly positive – traffic and revenue are both up – but they’re also distressing because this seems to be happening not only outside my control, but apparently also without my input. It just seems to be an organic occurrence now that I’ve reached some sort of critical mass with this blog.
Yes, it does seem there was a Google PageRank update in October, but Philaahzophy still sits at it’s arbitrarily enforced zero because I dare to state my opinions. This despite the fact Philaahzophy has more backlinks and far more traffic than my PR 2 blog. So, that couldn’t be the cause of all of this.
I do have numerous pages on the first page of search engine results (in Google, Yahoo! and MSN search), but few, if any, of these just achieved those high results. And even if my standing has increased in the SERPs, that simply begs the question of why since I’ve been doing nothing to the site.
The number of new links back to Philaahzophy decreased dramatically in October because I was neither out promoting the site nor generating new content to link to. So that wasn’t it either.
If forced to state a reason behind these increases I’m left with only two options: 1) More people are spending more time searching the internet for topics I’ve written about over the last two years, or 2) Philaahzophy has reached some sort of critical mass. I’m sorry if that informational isn’t exactly helpful, but one can’t always predict the usefulness of an experiment upon initiating it.
For those who actually missed my ramblings: thank you. I do have several posts waiting in the wings that should be appearing shortly.
Post from: Philaahzophy
Google Adsense and SEO Experiment Concludes
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