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However, I see some steady decline in August and less Adsense impressions.
One thing I have done is to remove some internal links (I mean considerable amount) Does this matter very much?
Now I don't know if it's the August, people vacationing or because I removed some internal links.
That said we are running at a record pace this month even though impressions are down somewhat.
This could also be due to a complete overhaul of our ads on our main site. One of the principal changes we made that has been the most successful was to remove the search bar from the bottom border of every page and replace it with a small ad unit.
The results are 4 to 5 times higher.
-August is the peak vacation month in North America.
-Even more so in Europe (some countries almost shut down).
-Most educational institutions in North America and Europe are functioning at a very low level (especially important in my niche).
Once the white collar and educational crowds are seriously back at their desks in September, I always experience a serious bump upwards in traffic.
Needless to say, monthly traffic may vary a lot according to the subject matter of your site. Mine just happens to function at a lower level in August (and July to some extent as well) - others in a different niche may ,however, do well in the summer months.
As far as the internal links go, did removing them impair the ability of your users to navigate your site? Has the number of page views per visitor gone down? If your navigational changes have resulted in a serious decline in page views per user, I might be concerned.
Calman, what happened is that my unique visitors dropped. Honestly I have not calculated yet the pages per visitor stats.
But does this matter: let's say 10000 pages give a link to one page. Those all would be internal links right? So that subject page, would it be ranked higher because 10000 pages linked to it, although all of them being internal from the same site?
Thank you
The network was getting big (100,000+ pages) so removed most of those links and created a couple of new pages that got a link from every page and then linked out to the original pages (which meant they got roughly the same amount of PR).
At first traffic dropped a little, but the growth began again with more traffic due to the new link structure (each page was now more targeted).
The anchor text of links is very important to the page they are on (as well as the page the link points to, most people know the latter now) so you remove a lot of links, the anchor text removed is no longer going to help (or hinder if unrelated anchor text) the pages SERPs.
With the above network this was related sites, but the anchor text of links didn't help the vast majority of the pages. 100,000 pages with 10 or so identical links (same anchor text) isn't going to help many of those 100,000 pages SERPs. So the drop in traffic was mostly due to a small number of SERPs that were helped directly by that anchor text.
When everything was reindexed etc... the PR of the pages remained about the same (due to the links from the new pages) and the sites in general improved because now each page is more targeted (less unrelated anchor text on them).
I'm sure some will be confused now :-))
I don't know your site so don't know how related the anchor text of the links you've removed are. If most of your pages are about widgets and the traffic you are after is like red widgets, blue widgets etc... linking to all the pages about widgets together is a very good idea (all the widget pages benefit). If you have a site like this and you've removed those links you could see a significant decrease in traffic.
On the other hand if you have a diverse site with anchor text that doesn't help many pages removing those links could long term bring more traffic. You'll likely see a drop like I did while it's reindexed.
If you want to benefit a site/network try to link related pages together, so all pages about widgets should link together because the anchor text will help all the widget pages. Also makes sense from a visitor perspective and should target your Adsense ads better.
Try to avoid linking unrelated pages together, you can't stop it completely since most sites have a menu, but you can minimize it so your pages tend to be more targeted.
David
You raise 2 issues:
1) Did the change in your internal link structure (navigation) cause a problem in people staying on your site
and thus decrease your traffic?
You should calculate your page views per user since the decline occurred. If the number of unique visitors and the number of page views per user dropped in the same proportion, it should mean that you did not lose any traffic strictly due the changes that you made in your link structure.
2) Did the change in your internal link structure (a huge decrease in the number of internal links) cause you to be ranked less favourably in search engine results and thus decrease your traffic?
I do not profess to be an expert on linking, but I believe that you probably should not place too much emphasis on internal linking. Quality inbound links to your site are certainly better. At any rate, I would suggest you go over to forum 12 (Link Development) and have a look there. You might also want to look at www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/30555.htm where there is some discussion of internal linking. Also read Brett's article
"Search Engine Theme Pyramids" which is mentioned there.
Sorry, but I think this discussion is now far removed from
AdSense.
These discussions are very helpful.
