Yesterday I talked about how I was trying some new methods for pushing aff sales and seeing a good CTR, which I hoped meant conversions were around the corner? I just had my first conversion, and I’m excited.
The first change I made was to create a banner to promote one of my affiliate shops (that’s [...]

Posted in Affiliate Marketing 1 Comment »

I don’t know what the problem is, but this summer my subdomains keep winking out and then coming back online. It happens on more than one host: they’ll be working fine, then suddenly I get “cannot find server” errors for one subdomain or another on a site that’s otherwise working fine.
This is really hitting Project [...]

Posted in Affiliate Marketing 1 Comment »

My site, Project Mai Tai, just got this, like, glowing and detailed review with lots of juicy deep links from a user at Associated Content. Which is a PR 6 site.
I can’t find anything wrong with this, and yet it just feels too good to be true. It’s a perfect, perfect review - [...]

Posted in Blogging No Comments »

Yes! Google finally indexed Project Mai Tai with over 1,000 pages and 4 inbound links.
It’s kinda too bad that puts an end to our “What can you do without Google” study. Not that I’m complaining!

Posted in Uncategorized No Comments »

Project Mai Tai is still progressing about like similar sites I’ve had that weren’t banned by Google. Mai Tai has attracted a link or two from a fairly high-traffic site in its niche, and that seems to be bringing in most of the visitors. Last month, the daily visitors were between about 15 [...]

Posted in Traffic 1 Comment »

Yesterday I reported that I’d done something I hoped would significantly boost Mai Tai’s traffic. While I was at it, I also dugg one of my posts.
The thing I did to significantly boost traffic hasn’t come through yet - we’ll see if it does. The Digg effect, however, brought me 79 new visitors [...]

Posted in Traffic 1 Comment »

For those of you just tuning in, I’ve decided to make Project Mai Tai (domain banned from Google) into an experiment: how far can a decent site get without Google?
I’ve got a couple of fairly regular commenters now.  I’ve had a couple of recent story tips in emails.  My bookmark rate is around 50%, which [...]

Posted in Uncategorized No Comments »

After months of speculation, I reported last week that yes, the reason my Project Mai Tai domain is banned from Google is that it used to be owned by someone else. That left me with two choices: wait - perhaps more than a year - and hope it gets indexed, or port the pages [...]

Posted in SEO 2 Comments »

I was right. Project Mai Tai’s problems are caused by the fact that the domain was owned before I had it. Someone owned it until 2004, I think. Then it just lapsed, and I bought it in 2006. From archive.org, it didn’t look like the old owner did anything that would [...]

Posted in SEO 5 Comments »

Google still refuses to index Project Mai Tai. Oh, somehow, I got one search via GoogleUK or something, but the site is not in the “google.com” index at all.
But it’s got a PR 4. So, yeah, that makes sense.
There’s been another slight change. All along, Google Webmaster Tools has been reporting huge [...]

Posted in SEO No Comments »