Some people argue that relying too much on Google for generating traffic to your site can hurt your business if not prepared.  Because I run hundreds of niche sites, I really didn’t care much about it.  When some sites lose SERP rank others would gain.  They usually balanced it out.  But for some reason, one of my biggest income earner lost 4 postions on the first page.  My site ranked either #3 or #4 for over 5 years.  I don’t think it was because of the Panda update, but I’ve never seen such a drop on any of my sites.

SERP Rank Changes

But that isn’t my point here.  I just want you to see the power of SERP rank.  How much difference there is between SERP rank 4 and 8 in terms of organic traffic.  As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve lost almost half the traffic I used to get. My niche keyword ranks at #8 position on the first page. It is highly visible, and yet people still click way less. Since the drop in traffic, my advertising revenue was hit also. It is generating about 70% less than what it used to generate. Yes, 70%!

If you think about that, it’s little bit strange. I just lost 40% of the traffic, and yet, it caused my ad revenue to drop by 70%. I honestly don’t know what could be the reason behind this other than either Google serving more premium ads on top ranking sites or advertisers lifting site targeted ads from mine.

Either way, we can learn that maintaining your SERP is something that you can’t ignore even if you don’t believe in SEO and search engine traffics. Lessons learned.

RSS2HTML has been one of my most favorite free scripts for very long time. I used to use the script on many of our sites to display RSS feeds using keywords. Just recently, I noticed that one of my sites was doing 5-7 sec loading time on average. First I thought the site was slow due to heavy traffic, because I get about 4,000 uniques a day on that site. But it was hosted on a robust dedicated server and it shouldn’t be like that.

Here are the things I tried to track down the problem.
1) I removed Adsense ads one by one to see if one of the ads was causing the problem
2) I removed Analytics code to see if it was causing the problem
3) I installed WP Cache plugin to see if it helped – it did, but I didn’t like the idea
4) Finally I removed RSS2HTML code from the site – now my site’s loading time is less than 0.5 seconds.

Yes, it was RSS2HTML script that was slowing down my website. Now I have no choice but to remove it. I’m sure there’s a way to optimize how the script is called to my website and stuff, but I don’t feel like going through all that. I just simply removed the entire script and replaced it with a WP_Query statement. It works just fine for that particular site because it was not feeding from outside source.

So if your site is slow and happen to be using RSS2HTML, now you know why. :)