SEO What the Hell Happened?

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I think I figured out exactly what is going on with my website and why it lost so much ranking. It has nothing to do with content vs ads, amount of content on a page, page speed, or any of that other stuff webmasters have been talking about.

It is a combination of a few things: authority, web address, and links.

Authority:
My website doesn't have too many links to the homepage. Other sites ranking higher have more links to the homepage and less on the inner pages. To remedy this, I need to simply get more links to the homepage.

Web address:
Sites ranking higher have the keywords in their web address. Mine only has partial. I'm not going to change this. I'm sure this is something Google will tweak sometime anyway.

Links:
Some of the links which were giving the website so much power are now gone (host went offline or directory listing deleted) or the links have been given less power by Google for whatever reason. Either way, I can't control it. I can only try to get more links.

I've been hitting my head against the wall ever since the Panda Update to find out what the hell happened to the website. But these seem to be the only true reasons.

A month gone by and no noticeable changes

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Since I announced my new venture into starting a new link campaign, I have found that no real changes have been made towards the amount of traffic received. This is horrible. A month long worth of work and nothing to show for it.

I have another angle to take on this and hopefully it works out. However, I'm quite a bit disappointed in this outcome. Perhaps a few more months and this idea would work, but I'm not ready to wait that long for it to turn out. Too much money is being lost right now due to loss of traffic.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Digg's Unbanning

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If I haven't mentioned in the past, one of my websites, PoemofQuotes was banned from Digg. The website was marked as "spam" by the Digg staff for whatever reason (actually, some of the articles were submitted by someone under wrong categories and sought diggs from other users. It wasn't me, I swear! Why would I submit under the wrong category?)

Now that the previous changes killed Digg and Kevin Rose stepped down, the website is no longer banned. Or perhaps it was unbanned long before and I didn't bother to check. I sent them an email before asking why it was marked as spam--I didn't hear back.

Either way, the webpages from PoemofQuotes can now be submitted, as can pages from other sites which were banned previously.

This has led Squidoo pages to getting back in. Now more links and more visits can be had.

This led to the submission of:
Breaking up is hard to do
and
Funny quotes

Gaining Links: Article Submissions for Good Pie

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Mmmm... pie. I love it! Well, actually I don't eat much other than peanut butter pie and the once-a-year pumpkin pie. Anyway, this blog post is about article submissions!

Over the past year or so, I haven't worked all that hard on getting links to Poem of Quotes. I've mostly been working on other ventures, that seems to be a bit of a mistake.

Even though the website's traffic has doubled over the past year, the landing pages have shifted away from poetry towards quotes. I can't help but imagine the "what if" if I would have continued to work on the poetry side. Would it have tripled? Quadrupled? No one knows, but I sure as hell regret it... especially since the other ventures failed miserably.

You want to know what is sad, though? Over the past three years the website's traffic has more than quadrupled, but the income is almost exactly the same. That is how bad the economy is.

Anyway, I've started to write articles as the first step in gaining links. I'll probably write around 10 more, submit them, and move onto the next step.