WordPress = More Search Traffic [Categories/Tags Really Do Make A Difference]

I’m loving WordPress right now… I’ve known for a while that I needed to get off Blogger (published via FTP) and onto WordPress, but I finally did it last month. My main (personal) blog was pretty easy to migrate and honestly the migration didn’t make much of a difference in terms of traffic - a small bump, but nothing big.

But things were different on my porn blog… The big problem there was that blogger didn’t “page” it’s “labels” pages (aka categories/tags). So pages that I had for say “latinos” or “twinks” would be enormous - so huge that they could actually crash a web browser. On top of that I had been hotlinking a lot of images from sponsor gallery pages that were significantly larger than I needed. I have label/tag pages that are just my posts from a particular site and when users went to one of those pages it would create a huge load on the sponsor’s server which I felt really bad about.

On top of everything else, I had limited myself to a list of labels which was fairly large, but not nearly as large as I would have liked. So the big challenge in migrating the porn blog was that I had to recategorize and retag all 300+ blog posts. That took 20-30 hours of work, but the end results have been totally worth it.

If you look at the graphs below, search engine traffic is WAY up, and Google Images traffic is up as well. I honestly don’t know how long it will last - the bump could just be because all the new URLs are considered “fresh” and so they’re getting better placement. (I am already starting to see a decline in Google Images.) But I think Google knew my old label pages were too heavy and I think they had penalized me for having a bad user experience on those pages.

I’m sure I could have gotten similar results with any blogging platform that has good category/tag capabilities, but tagging done right really does work, and it’s great to get away from Blogger’s lame ass labels…

The other thing I’ve noticed about the migration is that comments are way up. I’m not sure if it’s the design is more engaging (thanks to my boyfriend), or if adding a comment it less difficult with WordPress than it was with Blogger, but I’m now getting a lot more people commenting on the blog posts - both on the main blog and on the porn blog…

The bottom line is that thanks to the blog migration to WordPress I’m seeing a nice bump in sales and doing the best I’ve ever done (even when you take out the effects of GayPay’s $200 and $150 pay-per-sale promotions).

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