Strange disappearance of sales since July

Webmaster Discussion
#1

Some of you may remember my post from exactly one year ago when I was switching to HTTPS. At the time I thought that the decrease in traffic I was experiencing at that time was caused by that switch, but I think Bjorn and others were right that it was mostly due to some google update that happened at the same time.

Gradually, over the next few months my traffic recovered, and sales with it as well. The period between January and June 2019 was especially good in terms of sales. I would get a few sales every day, or at least they would average a couple of sales per day, when you take a whole week as a time period.

This all started to change in June, although I became aware of something happening only around July 19th or thereabouts. I noticed that sales were gradually disappearing, although the traffic was still decent. The traffic also started to “bleed” over a long period of time and gradually decrease, but it was not a striking change. I think there was a google core update in June 2019, and again the so-called “Maverick” update around July 16th-19th 2019 which made sure that no site would avoid being affected by the June core update.

August and now September look especially bleak in terms of sales. They’ve almost disappeared and I’m kinda happy when I see 2 or 3 of them in an entire week, which is of course a joke and unsustainable in the long term.

The decrease in July this year is noticeable, but if it hadn’t had such an impact on sales I would simply have ignored it and thought it was just some normal fluctuation in traffic.

Have you noticed any similar decrease in traffic and sales around this period on your sites? I just have no idea what I could do about it. This is the first time in more than a decade of doing this job that I’m thinking about giving up.

I recently hired an SEO company that took $700 for an SEO audit, and all that they produced is a bunch of reports that they made in SEMRush (many of which are simply wrong and don’t agree with those that google search console shows). They also advised me not to buy many backlinks that link to the home page of my blog, but instead to make it look more natural to google by obtaining links from within articles/posts that link to a specific page on my blog. Also, they say I should have a bigger diversity of links, not just from adult sites. Such as, links from mainstream sites, for example… But how to obtain those? Of course, they offer help on that as well, but in order to do that they’d like me to sign up for their monthly plan ($700/month), which is in my opinion a total ripoff.

#2

Since the march/April google changes I lost most of my traffic. Thankfully sales have not declined as much, but things are not great.

I did a lot of SEO work and got quotes etc. They all did pretty much what you have experienced but I did not pay, I sent them packing.

I have been around for long enough to recognise that things go from feast to famine. This is a famine, but rebills are my friend and google will have another update.

"This too shall pass’’

#3

My situation is kinda opposite of yours. My traffic hasn’t gone down so much but the sales have. It looks like google uses some filters to filter out profitable buyers and keeps them for themselves or sends them to their paid customers (people who bought ads etc.).

Yes, thank God for rebills but they are also dwindling away over time…

As for SEO companies, I now think most of them are a scam. Some good advice here and there, but $700/month (they actually wanted $1500/mo at first)? Probably not worth it.

Does someone know how to obtain backlinks from mainstream sites, or at least not overtly porn-related sites?

#4

Sales are pretty bad lately, no matter traffic, just something happened… Maybe you’re right about Google. Or maybe visitors have changed their consumer behavior… I’m not sure.

A few tips from me:

  • Do not share too much in forums, because there are enough people who can take advantage of your weaknesses.
  • Never pay for SEO, it is an absolutely useless activity in our industry.
  • Don’t waste your time with paid backlinks, it’s a waste of money and at some point, Google will penalize your site. Exchange links with other blogs related to yours (similar content, same niche, etc.), but never rely on SEO wizards who fix everything with a few backlinks.

I lost thousands of dollars to realize these facts.

#5

Sorry to hear that Ben. The year 2019 is pretty stable for me in terms of traffic and sales, so I can’t say I have similar experiences. On the contrary, July and August were the best two months of the year so far.

Since your traffic hasn’t changed much, maybe it’s something else than the traffic you’re receiving? Is there a big decline in hits to sponsors maybe?

#6

I can’t say the same since total amount I make is about the same this and last year, but can share my observations because it’s not as simple as being stable or not.

Comparing August 2019 with Aug 2018:

  • I’m pushing roughly 15% more traffic to sponsors than last year, this is despite losing traffic overall in Google (so my own traffic is down but outgoing traffic to sponsors is up).

  • Amount of actual sales are almost exactly the same as last year but rebills are up around 8%.

  • Sales ratios have gotten worse, the more traffic I push the less sales I make. My average has gone from 1:269 in 2018 to 1:314.

  • I make less money per hit now than last year, meaning despite having more rebills and same sales I get less overall for the traffic. I used to get about $0.11 per hit and thats down to $0.09 per hit now in 2019.

It’s a bit difficult to interpret this but it can probably be summed up as Google traffic is getting harder to get or maintain, with each Google update you lose some. Despite sending more traffic sales conversions are down which is mainly down to whatever happens at the sponsor site or buying mentality / habits. Income per hit is also down which means I “work” harder for less and can probably be attributed to far too many sales and offers on different sites…

Somewhat related note,

My pet hate is site sales. There seems to never be a month where sponsors are not pushing a sale or discount of one kind or a another… They don’t make any sense to me considering rebills dont last very long and also encourages a different consumer behavior.

Looking at these model sites I don’t think cost is the real issue, people are prepared to spend a lot of money on the content they want, this is something sponsors fail to realise. Instead of focusing their efforts on their core product which is content they fiddle around with sales, changing prices, removing downloads / adding pay-per-download, aggressive cross-sales, plastering adverts over their sites etc… anything other than focusing on what the consumer came to their site for in the first place.

#7

You’re probably right about that. I think this forum is safer than usual because Bjorn has implemented the requirement to register and log in if you want to read the posts… but I guess we can never be totally sure that all the sneaky exploitative people have been weeded out that way.

  • Never pay for SEO, it is an absolutely useless activity in our industry.
  • Don’t waste your time with paid backlinks, it’s a waste of money and at some point, Google will penalize your site. Exchange links with other blogs related to yours (similar content, same niche, etc.), but never rely on SEO wizards who fix everything with a few backlinks.

I lost thousands of dollars to realize these facts.

The people I hired so far for SEO have all said just the opposite of what you say about backlinks. They claim that if you simply exchange links with sites similar to yours (i.e. link trades), Google will notice that and basically ignore those links because they know that it’s due to an agreement between two webmasters, not a “natural” linking. They claim that even more complex linking schemes are now spotted by google as fake, such as ABCD (my blog A links to your blog B; your blog C links to my blog D). Here’s what he said about that very thing:

Link trades, even ABCD trades, don’t work as well as they used to. Google is pretty good at spotting them now. You definitely want to start adding more diversity into your links from now on.

And this is what he said about backlinks in general (those that google considers to be genuine and natural)

I know I probably sound like a broken record, but nothing is more important than strong links. There are other things that are important, but nothing as important.

If you look into any big online marketing agency, you’ll see that 75% of everyone just sits and emails people all day trying to get links. We work with a couple of big sex toy stores, all we do is email sex toy blogs everyday looking to get toy reviews, blogroll links, sponsored posts, hard link banners, anything we can. Another client owns a big well-known paysite which has a few blogs in their network. They use their blogs as internal traffic. All we do for them is email other blogs everyday looking for links. I own a software program too, I spend more time emailing people for links than I do programming.

I don’t claim he is 100% correct, and actually I know for a fact that if someone overdoes the backlinks it can backfire in the form of a google penalty, but I tend to agree that backlinks are important. That’s how google became popular in the first place, remember? They started to take into account the backlinks that a site gets (unlike altavista et al which didn’t use backlinks as a rating factor). I think they still take backlinks as a very important factor for ranking. And so, if you only rely only on link trades with fellow webmasters, those links will be ignored by google (as the SEO guy says), and all that is left are random blogs and social sites posts that link to your blog, and that will be taken into account as your backlink profile. That’s at least how I understand it from all the emails I exchanged with the SEO people.

#8

I just compared hits and submits to the join page for Cashkaboom sites between September this year and September 2017. While there is a slight drop in these hits, it’s not anything drastic and I don’t think this small decrease can account for the decimation of sales.

I also checked whether my jump script works as it should (I use the pretty links plugin for WP), and apparently it works normally. This redirect checker shows that the redirection happens in a correct way for all the links I tested:

https://redirectdetective.com

#9

Of course, they solve everything with a bouquet of high quality links. They probably already have informed you how good .edu domains are and how you should pay another $1000 for high-quality articles on mainstream sites. It’s an old game, you’re just another victim of these… Professionals. At the end of the day, the only one who can optimize your own site will be you. This is my personal experience.

#10

That’s my experience as well, SEO Experts tell you much the same but don’t really seem to know what actually works.

#11

I agree with you and Bgmen that most of the so-called SEO experts are scammers and frauds. But that doesn’t mean that if they say that backlinks are important, we should discard that statement as untrue simply because these people are generally known as frauds. My philosophy teacher tried to explain us in high school this logical fallacy using the following example: Let’s say a known serial killer says something that is true, for example: “The sky is blue and the Sun is round”. Are we going to refuse to believe him about that statement just because we know he’s a bad person, a criminal? Well, the answer is no. A true statement is a true statement, regardless of who declares it. And I think that holds true for the importance of backlinks as well.

Also, what is somebody who is just starting a new porn blog or site going to do about his SEO and google rating? According to Google’s own fairytale, you just need to make sure that your site is of top-notch quality and that will cause other people to link to your sites even if you don’t contact them and offer link trades. Allegedly, everything about SEO is going to happen by itself.

That may have been partially true back in 2009 or 2010 when google still didn’t threaten webmasters to penalize them for link trades or guest blog posts… but several years after that period, when they started to threaten with penalties, almost everyone became reluctant to do link trades or guest blog posts of any kind. How will someone’s new blog get any backlinks if nobody does any link trades with you? It will likely just exist without anyone noticing it… It might get some prominence if you promote it through social media, but in my opinion that source of traffic is overrated, especially for search engines’ rankings.

So in other words, my question is - How to get good backlinks (and good google rankings in general) in 2019, without offending the almighty Google in any way, shape or form? How to do it in the most legit way possible, strictly according to the rules (and be successful at it)?