Some of our divisions are quite quiet, just slogging along, making money without making a peep.
Case in point: Forum Templates. It just crossed the 100,000 downloads mark yesterday. It employs two people full time.
This incidentally is the one site Google gives no love to. Just filed a reinclusion request, I think it is because the domain was PPCed when we bought it (well over a year ago). At the same time, Google reports ~9200 links to the frontpage, ~50,000 to the phpBB page, and ~97,000 to the vBulletin page. The grand total comes to 157,342 links.
My first ever re-inclusion request (previously when I bought a domain that was PPCed and couldn’t get to rank, I simply moved on to another domain), I will post on how it actually goes (other sites in my sitemaps account account for roughly 150,000 unique visitors a day, so it is in good company).
4 Responses to Site Landmark – 100,000 Downloads
Stefan Juhl
April 21st, 2007 at 1:48 am
When I check, there’s ~3000 pages indexed in Google and it ranks #2 for ‘forum templates’.
I haven’t experienced re-inclusion requests taking effect this quick, so if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your main concern about the site in regards to Google?
Ahmed
April 21st, 2007 at 9:34 am
Well http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:www.forumtemplates.com shows up 42 results. When you click on extended, it jumps to 3000.
BUT – almost all of those are pages from the forums themselves, not the actual template pages.
In sitemaps, we only have 11 queries come up under ‘Top search query clicks’ – and yet page analysis pulls out over 200 different anchor text types.
Just my own experience with the longtail, and the tons and tons of links we have from people using our freebie templates, I just ‘feel’ its been hit because of PPC.
Stefan Juhl
April 21st, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Yeah, I took a deeper look and there’s no doubt that the site is suffering from something. It hardly ranks for anything that it definitely should.
Two things came to my mind while quickly checking out your site. Both of which could trigger some sort of penalties.
1) There’s hardly any unique text on the template pages. Just the template name and the very short description (at least on those I saw).
2) Some links are obtained through free templates, so there’s likely to be lots of sitewide links pointing to your site.
Ahmed
April 21st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
1. True. Not sure what else to do, other than maybe letting users review. It’s a template – the pictures do the speaking. I’m not going to spruce it up with text just to get in search engines (I’m always asking myself – is it good for the user? ;))
2. And thus my worry about the entire paid links issue – its a slippery slope, and it definitely is not black and white. We have a lot of links back, but those are legitimate votes: if our designs weren’t good, people wouldn’t be using them, and we wouldn’t be getting all those link backs.
Our SE traffic has been relatively flat for the last 12+ months, but its been our organic (brand) traffic that has taken us from ~200 to 500+ uniques a day [which also proves its the quality of traffic and what you do with it that matters]. With the SEs I’m sure it would be a lot easier