Penalized for new site?

I finally started a 2nd site...

[uhwebs]

My site has a small section that I noticed received a lot of traffic and paid well, as well as a lot of searches for, but it was kind of off-topic to the site. So I created a new site around that topic and launched it a few days ago, and advertised for it on my old site.

Now it's getting a few hundred visits daily and a few clicks, made about $5 the first day, but in the last few days my total earnings have gone down!

Would my old site's earnings be affected by the new site?

The new site also has a much lower epc than the old, even though I know they should pay more (maybe just newness)?

[vivalasvegas]

As your site gaines trust the EPC should go up. You can't expect a high EPC on a new site. Also, you can't draw any conclusions from a few clicks a day.

[uhwebs]

Yes but the old site's earnings have seemed to go down which is a concern. Of course, I'm only going off info from a few days so I'll wait and see what happens longer term.
I'm just wondering if it is possible that my old site could be penalized for the new one...

[ecmedia]

Uhwebs, $5 a day is just not enough to draw any conclusions at all (I am concluding that you have essentially no traffic if we look at what a real business must be).

Just focus on creating great content and build traffic -- your websites are simply too small to find any meaningful metrics. Until you reach over a hundred bucks or so daily, it is hard to really understand what goes on.

[vordmeister]

It has been noted in the past by esteemed members of WebmasterWorld that removing ads from poor performing pages resulted in an increase in overall earnings. In my own experience the opposite is also true.

It has also been noted that new pages take a while to attract the most appropriate ads therefore they are poor performing.

If it's not being noted before I'll add that just about any major change seems to mess things up for a while until the system works out what to make of it.

PSSST - ecmedia: I think uhwebs is referring to $5 being the new site earnings rather than existing site earnings.

[nickreynolds]

uhwebs - I did the same when I created my third site. It was based on some off topic pages on my first site. Best decision I made. Developed the site with new content. Earns more than my first site.

[uhwebs]

Ecmedia, I realize that this isn't a lot of stats for the new site as it was just launched (my old site, much larger, makes considerably more) but why would my entire earnings have gone down after launching the new site?
It may just be a fluke, we'll see how this weekend performs (typically my best days).

My question was if the new small site (getting about 300 visits/day, about $5/day) could be affecting the earnings in my entire account.

Nick, that's good to hear. I do think the new one might perform quite well once it gets rolling. I'll keep everyone posted. Even $5, when you think about it, is an easy extra $150 a month which took me about two weekends of work.

[uhwebs]

Today is looking really bad, my whole account is down about 25%... yikes...

why would new site be hurting my whole account like this? This has been over the past 4-5 days. :(

[leadegroot]

why would new site be hurting my whole account like this?

It shouldn't, but I would give it more than 4 - 5 days to let it sort itself out.

How have you handled the site move for those pages? Did you 301 old pages to appropriates pages on the new site?
If you left a bunch of 404s I suppose it is conceivable that Google thinks the site is having problems.
How is your overall traffic? Above what it was before or below?
There are three factors - traffic, ctr and epc/ecpm - how are each of these behaving?

[uhwebs]

I actually didn't move the pages from the old site yet. I just created new ones about the topic (old site has a page on the topic, new site is more in-depth with multiple pages on the topic).
Looks like lag was actually a factor in today, because it's back up to normal now. I'll just have to wait and watch :)