danny - 9:33 am on Jun 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks for all the feedback, guys.


Londrum asks: i'm just interested to know if your site might be suffering a little bit because of those new preview images in the SERPs. did your traffic drop a little bit when that was brought in?

I didn't notice anything. But I doubt that would be a big enough effect to be noticeable in the regular noise.


AlyssaS: As to why G dropped you - I think it's to do with Amazon links on all your review pages.

That's possible. I doubt the Amazon links in themselves are a problem - every person and their dog has those - but possibly that's an issue when coupled with the fact that I have 1200 reviews in an "organised" structure.

I tried adding Book Depository links briefly but those had no traction, and I've tried B&N in the past, again without much success, so unfortunately Amazon is by far the best affiliate option for me. So I'm reluctant to remove them just on spec.


suggy: Do you have any stats on your bounce rate for (Google) search traffic?

I don't have systematic stats, but yes, there are a lot of people who come in off search engines and view one review and nothing else. I don't see that as a problem, though -- if someone does a search for "<author> <title> book review", then they're probably going through all the reviews they can find online and I don't expect them to hang around on my site. I don't think I'd improve their experience by aggressively pushing "subscribe" options at them. And I'm not convinced that a "shinier" looking page would make much of a difference here, either.


HuskyPup: there's nothing wrong with your site or your urls as suggested by someone, sit tight, don't mess with anything.

That's largely what I'm doing. So far all I've done, apart from trying to DMCA the highest profile duplicate site, is to remove a couple of insanely long "all title" and "all author" pages (with 1000+ links on them). They only existed as legacies from when the site had far fewer reviews, and were hardly useful any more.

[Edit: italicised quotes]

[edited by: danny at 9:57 am (utc) on Jun 13, 2011]