May Update

Have experienced a set-back in my quest to increase search traffic. The new "Mayday" algorithm change that Google implemented removed some 4800 hits from my sites - mainly long-tails. Oh well, I guess I just need to change strategy and start specifically targetting long-tails.

There is also some evidence that they are no longer giving as much weight to signature links from forums - again this is a pity as these links were easy to obtain.

I guess it's back to article marketing.

Have also started a new experiment: am going to trial Chitika ads. I need to be selective about where I place them as they display only to US traffic, but I sort of need an alternative to Adsense, and this is one of them.

Their website isn't as user-friendly as the Adsense one: for instance I got completely stuck trying to set up the Chitika premium ads, the screen kept freezing. So have opted for the "whitespace" ads, which display where you have whitespace on your site. Will report back on this experiment.

Finally the Facebook experiment: I've concluded that you definitely get a temporary boost in search rankings if your article/site is posted on a popular Facebook wall and then gets traffic. What happens after that seems to depend on how the page performs. If people going to it from the SERPs don't backspace, you seem to get points for this and it stays in the SERPs longer. Other pages just seem to drop after the temporary boost wears off.