MoparMuscle.net - A year in the making

[Bruceper]

This is a review, but with a background story

MoparMuscle.net was started in mid 2006 and started off as a small collection of my favorite links. Back in August 2006 the site was running IndexU version 3 and received an average of 31 unique visits daily.

When the time came for the upgrade to version 5.4 I wasn't pleased with what might happen, as this would mean a change in the URL's to so called "search engine friendly" URL's.

However the benefit in having some of the new features outweighed some of the losses I would see by search engine traffic. The plunge was made and the upgrade was painless as usual.

Traffic after the time of the upgrade (May 1 2007) dropped 15% which I was able to live with, knowing that search engines would come back and revisit the site. Traffic was now at 89 uniques daily.

Coming forward two months and I find myself looking at a site which is wildly gaining links, traffic and income. Link count is currently at 10244 with 31 categories. As for traffic, June averaged out to 361 unique visitors daily and so far July is averaging 397 unique visitors per day.

The change in traffic is attributed mainly to the change in search engine friendly URL's as there is no paid advertising for this site anywhere. Of course I link to the site from a few other domains, but none of those have changed in months.

Revenue has more than doubled on the site with the increase in traffic as well.

At the moment of writing this review I have 10 sites that run IndexU and I am very pleased with what I can do with the script, and what the script can do for me.

MoparMuscle - Links to restorations, upgrades, magazines, clubs, racing, specs, details and fan pages of Mopar, Dodge, Chrysler, Plymouth, AMC, Jeep and HEMI products

[CEC]

that's very interesting. do you know where the new traffic is coming from (which engine(s))? it does not appear to be google, as you only have about 5 pages not in their supplemental results.

[Bruceper]

A lot of traffic is coming from google, but not how you would expect it.

Since a lot of people are unaware of how to use an address bar, they go to google and search for www.site.com or just sitename with no extension. In many cases moparmuscle is showing up in the top 3 of those searches with the keyword in bold.

Some of the more popular searches from google that go to my site (this month) are
mopar muscle
moparmuscle
darkhorseperformance
charliesdodge.com
bidmopar.com
bidmopar
headersbyed.com
amcforums.com
rallytops

You can see the results, and then you see moparmuscle just below with the bold domain. People are just gravitating to what they can see and clicking. By the way, Mopar Muscle is also a magazine, which is unrelated to me.

As for google results, look at moparmuscle.net vs www.moparmuscle.net

[CEC]

thanks again, bruce.

i see no difference between moparmuscle.net and MoparMuscle - Links to restorations, upgrades, magazines, clubs, racing, specs, details and fan pages of Mopar, Dodge, Chrysler, Plymouth, AMC, Jeep and HEMI products and the supplementals, and both show 10,500 indexed pages.

it is very interesting to see the secificity of search terms through which your site is being found -- this is actually the only way supplemental pages get found (obscure terms) -- for example darkhorseperformance has only 320 competing pages, bidmopar 236, etc.

supplemental results have been a big problem for me -- and i've used every technique in the book to get out. still, out of 20,000 pages indexed, only 120are in google's regular listings (they get found on a wide range on heavy traffic, generic keywords and phrases) -- and i get an enormous amount of traffic to these pages -- and a comparatively minuscule amount to the 19,000+ balance of supplemental pages.

[Bruceper]

One thing I wanted to mention, was that in a single day, Google spidered my entire site, to a tune of 10,000+ pages. 15 days after that is when I started receiving my traffic increase.

I checked some stats out from other directories I have and the same thing has happened to one other. That directory is a lot smaller but a few weeks after Google spidered the entire site traffic doubled. Income on that site has not gone up significantly however.

[inspireme]

nice to hear success stories, im sure if you developed links and promoted the site for 6 months you could get it to a few thousand unique visits a day.

[spin]

I like what you did with this, very nice indeed...Congrats