Wordpress vs. Wordpress Direct

[CJ Hingle]

Hi everyone! First I wanna say thanks for all the wonderful tips and training I've found here over the last couple of weeks. I’d still be lost in lala land without you all. I’ll try to make this brief.
I started my IM adventure a couple of months ago with the thirty day challenge. I purchased my own domain and hosting, set up a wordpress direct blog(which I’ll call blog1), and started adding some content. I did a little social bookmarking and was pleased to find that my blog ranked at #8 on Google after just 2 days. I built a squidoo lens, set up a weebly site, hubpages site,etc. all pointing back to blog1. I made a few sales, and for the last 3 weeks I’ve been hovering around the #3 spot. But the problem is that I’m not getting much traffic. So in an attempt to increase the size of my traffic web, I started a blog (blog2) on the other wordpress site.(Wordpress Direct blog1- Wordpress blog2). I linked blog2 back to blog1 and that night blog1 dropped all the way down to #35. I left it alone for a couple of days to see if it was just a quirk, and sadly there was no change. So this afternoon I deleted blog2 and now blog1 is back up to #4. Do yo have any thoughts on what happened? I actually liked wordpress more than wordpress direct.

[nar321]

I googled Wordpress Direct and learned that it supposedly makes easier the blogging process. Any chance that Google thought you where spamming? Or put another way prior to deleting the second blog had you contacted Google for answer to the drop in rankings?

Conversions rather than rankings are the important thing and you probably should have tested conversions before any deletes. Just my two cents and as they say I approved this post

[CJ Hingle]

[LisaHartwell]

With Wordpress Direct were you hosting your own domains or using the free ones?

If you were using the free ones, Google may have become wise to the fact that the set of domain suffixes all belong to the same company and be wary of any that link to each other. If you are hosting your own and they are on the same hosting account they probably have the same Ip address and the search engines can detect that.

Basically, it sounds like you may have been penalised for linking your own brand new site to another site. I would build up the second blog for a while before attempting to link it again, and make sure you create a very relevant link preferably from within a post (not the blogroll) to an internal page (that's a more natural way of linking in blogs).

However, to get to the top of the rankings you need to be increasing your inbound links from more authoritative sources not a brand new blog. Find more sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages and create more links back to your blog (again, not all to your homepage - link internally too). You can also create new pages on sites like Squidoo for some other related keywords. Too many hyperlinks using the same phrase will set alarm bells ringing with Google.

Start linking your authority pages to each other as well e.g. point your Squidoo page at your Ezine article as well as your main blog.

And get on relevant blogs and forums making useful posts about your topic.

Hope that helps,

Lisa

[nar321]

Great advice, hope you decide to put some or all of it into action.

Great Post Lisa, thanks for sharng same