Hi Kirsty

I’ve been reading your blog pretty much since the start of 2009 when, encouraged by Smingle’s a4u posts, I started my first affiliate sites. One of my sites, which I started before the summer, is the one entered above, for 8 ft trampolines with enclosures. I did my research, found it gets a reasonable amount of exact searches, it’s a fairly large item making delivery a sensible option, the .co.uk domain was available and the competition weak.

It started well, and climbed to near the top of page 1 for the main search term in Google. It generated a few sales through Amazon until about 4 weeks after launch it suddenly dropped. It now ranks about page 4 or 5 for its main term, yet ranks better for some of the secondary pages.

Would you be able to have a look and see what you think please?

I have my concerns that it is over-optimised and Google has penalised me for being a thin affiliate site. I didn’t intend updating it really, as the market for trampoline is just for a few months over the summer. It still ranks #1 in Yahoo, and it gets 10-20 UVs a day from which I get the occasional sale, but more than anything I want to learn what I have done wrong so I don’t make the same mistake again!

Thanks

Tom

Website: http://www.8fttrampolinewithenclosure.co.uk

I don’t think you have over optimised this site at all, I reckon you need to put a bit of time into some link building for this site. I also think you need to add a small amount of content on a regular basis.

You do usually see a site getting an initial boost in the rankings when it is first launched. It then “Settles” into the index. Sometimes in a less competitive area it’ll gradually bubble its way back to the top. I’ve had domains do this and take anything from a few months to a year. Clearly though, its desirable to get some results quicker than that!

If you do a little work on getting some links in you should see an improvement. Also, sites that are updated regularly will often be able to achieve better rankings not to mention the all important benefit of some additional organic traffic. It would take you ten minutes a day just to add a quick post of a couple hundred words. I don’t think that’s too much of an additional drain on time to get the site you worked so hard to prepare into the SERPS and doing what you wanted it to do!

I know you said it is a limited market, but I think it is important for me to highlight that very few affiliate sites created on a “chuck it up and leave it” basis will reach their full potential.

I believe that by not putting the time and effort into a little “follow up” promotion lots of affiliates are effectively penalising themselves.  Google doesn’t want to rank sites that people put up and then leave to do their thing, they want fresh relevant content.  If we as affiliates don’t provide it our sites will often fail to reach their full potential.

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