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After two months of growing AdSense income, (from pennies a month for a year and a half to $2ish/day for the last 4 and largely due to handful of Wikipedia links), I have decided to take those links down because of the recent and constant cat and mouse game I've been playing with one Wiki member who keeps taking my links down. The member in question decided that instead of me posting links to my very relevant, unique, information packed site...I should be spending my time improving Wikipedia articles with the content from my site.
Needless to say, we had a difference in opinion. =)
So in the end, while I've been employing white hat seo/m techniques, my site has basically collapsed due to the loss of the Wikipedia traffic and I've spent most of the weekend emotionally devastated wondering where I go from here. Thinking about everything, I think I was using Wikipedia as a crutch for fast and immediate traffic, and not spending my efforts doing more fruitful things like getting IMPORTANT links. (Ha ha)
So...
Has anyone else suffered a setback like this and come back? Oh-and just as a little FYI, I think I've also come to the conclusion that the keyword I've been targeting for so long, "learn about blue widgets" is a dud because no one is really searching for it. And furthermore, I sat down with the numbers for an AdWords campaign, but as I just have a content site with no affiliate products, I can't find the numbers to make an AdWords campaign profitable.
So I'm really stuck now. I'm not sure where I should go or what I should do to get my Adsense #'s back up...These boards have brought me a long way but I need help now more than ever!
Sorry about the super long post!
With a consistently strong SEO approach, building relevant links, and providing excellent content, you'll gain back your traffic and increase your earnings even more.
I have a suggestion about your Wikipedia posts. Why don't you take up your adversary's advice. Improve the article with content from your website. This will allow you to cite your page as a reference with a link while allowing you to build up your page's credibility at the same time!
Good luck.
I can't know the exact numbers you'll gain from your link, you can though, but I do know this: You'll end up gaining more traffic with a link in the article even if it is as a reference than no link at all.
Then there's the one that doesn't like the fact that I have adsense at all ("too commercial"), although he doesn't object to other sites that have adsense and still maintain a wiki link - apparently, those sites are just trying to pay their bandwidth, while I am trying to crassly rake in a profit of pennies per day (its a very niche disease topic).
And there is one who thinks the writing on my site is sometimes too colorful and creative, but might merit a wikipedia link if only I adopt their bland style and neutral POV on all issues. Too many notes - take a few out, reduce everything to the least common denominator, put everything in an empirical, objectivist tone, then you might be link-worthy. Thanks, but no thanks.
I think ultimately we will see alot of 'post-wikipedia' sites. The content is on an open license, so why not use it to start a specialized wiki on that topic? Rather than scrape wikipedia verbatim (which is pretty useless), take a wiki page as a starting point, and use it to spin off a new website.
This would solve another pet peeve of mine - wikipedia pages get gummed up with gratuitous incest-links to other wikipedia pages. When you are reading the page about widgetitis disease, and it says that dehydration may make the symptoms worse, and drinking more water can sometimes alleviate the symptoms, there are links to the wikipedia page on dehydration and the page on water. But they are stupid, worthless links. The person with widgetitis wants to know how much water to drink to get better, and how much water is too much water - not about the gram molecular weight of water and the unusual hydrogen bond configuration that makes water special! Water freezes at 32/0? Fantastic, but irrelevant to the specialized reader, who deserves a specialized site.
So these spawn-of-wikipedia sites will be customized and be more useful than wikipedia. There could be competing spawn sites - one for alternative approaches to widgetitis where people who like that approach go, and one that focuses on prescription pharmaceutical treatments and their relative merits. Some people think widgetitis is better treated with cognitive/behavioral therapy? Great, start their own wikispawned site.
Ultimately, I think these forks will become more useful than wikipedia. A devoted cadre can often do a better job than a dogmatically open committee, especially if the format gives them the opportunity to expand and customize in a way that wikipedia cannot. These sites will be given cred in the search engines. There will be directories of post wikipedia sites. And who knowns, maybe someday, wikipedia will have a section for links to bonafide wiki-spawned forks that extend the search for useful knowledge?
I'm thinking about doing one of these for my niche disease. Then I can put together a team of people I know and trust not to be nimrods about what is allowed, and what isn't.
Good luck!
W.
I disagree, I get 5% from wiki.
BushMackel: disappear from wikipedia for awhile. Work on content, get links, whatever. After a few months, trying adding a link (maybe to your new content) using a different IP address, but stay under the radar. See if it sticks and go from there.
