I expected to do weekly updates for the Niche Rivalry, but I realized I didn’t have much to say on a weekly basis. The updates would go something like “I wrote some content, and built some links.” Very exciting. But, over the month since my last update some interesting things have indeed happened.
The First Sale of the Niche Rivalry
I made my first sale, and I believe this is the first sale of the Niche Rivalry. It was for a product I featured, and then whoever bought it also bought a bunch of other stuff on Amazon – gotta love that. It was a nice little commission, but I obviously need to make more sales more consistently to win this challenge. This has been my only sale so far.
Traffic and Rankings
I achieved some solid rankings for some of the “kitchen gadget” related keywords, as well as a couple product keywords. I peaked at around 30 search engine visitors a day before I got slapped, but we’ll get to that in a moment. These visitors were mostly for various “kitchen gadget” related keywords, and as I expected they didn’t convert well at all. I still want to rank for these keywords for domain authority, but these are definitely NOT my money keywords.
And Then I Got Slapped By Google
Earlier this week I noticed my traffic disappear almost entirely. This is a result of a little Google slap. This is not from losing new domain/content bonus because my site is now on the last page of results for “must have kitchen gadgets” indicating some sort of penalty – I suspect it’s related to over-optimization but it’s too early to start to worry about it. Sometimes these things just iron themselves out with time, so I’m going to keep building links and creating content.
| Rank | ||||
| Keyword | Searches | 01/20/12 | 02/02/12 | 02/17/12 |
| unusual kitchen gadgets | 390 | NA | 8 | 30 |
| unique kitchen gadgets | 880 | 66 | 8 | 36 |
| fun kitchen gadgets | 390 | NA | 61 | 46 |
| cool kitchen gadgets | 1600 | 83 | 17 | 62 |
| new kitchen gadgets | 480 | NA | 61 | 63 |
| best kitchen gadgets | 590 | NA | 66 | 81 |
| must have kitchen gadgets | 260 | 50 | 8 | NA |
| weird kitchen gadgets | 140 | NA | 21 | NA |
| kitchen gadgets | 12100 | NA | 70 | NA |
| kitchen tools and gadgets | 480 | NA | NA | NA |
So you can see, I even made it to page 1 for a couple terms. I do still rank for some terms, but even the keywords I still rank for are miscellaneous product pages, and not the home page or category page I’ve set up for these keywords. I take this as a good sign, actually, because it means my site is indeed gaining authority in this niche. On the subject of authority, another good piece of news is that my site acquired a pagerank of 2 with the last update, and has a bunch of PR1 pages now. I have no idea how that happened…
On a completely unrelated note…
If you have a theme that displays snippets or excerpts, like Thesis does, and you want to display “rich” snippets that include your links on the homepage, archive and category pages, I recently figured out how to do this. When you edit a post, you have to go to screen options, and click the check box that says “excerpts” – I believe it’s off by default. This will bring up a new meta box beneath the post editor where you can enter a custom excerpt. You can use HTML in this box, so I switch over to HTML mode on the post I’m editing, copy & paste the section that has the link in it, and post that in the excerpt meta box.
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