Hi Guys,
I haven't been on here in ages: Mind if I throw in my 'two cents' worth? I'm too (stubborn,foolish,cantankerous) to spend a single dime on a blog (Gasp!!), so I'm still playing around with my free-hosted blog. It generates just enough income to keep me happy.
In the past several weeks, my visitors dropped like a rock. Google was penalizing me because I had two homepages (www and non-www). In addition, those Nibble-guys (my free webhost) just re-vamped their entire site.
I decided to take advantage of this lull. I got a 301 redirect, so all clicks to either link come to my non-www homepage. I verified my blog with Google (and my Bing index nearly disappeared) SO, I verified my blog with Bing, too. Their numbers are VERY slow to respond. Now my Yandex index has plummeted. (You can't win).
Since two-thirds of my customers were staying away anyway, I decided to re-vamp all parts of my blog. New theme, new banners, got rid of non-profitable sponsors, and removed 100% of my feed generated content. Now my blog is 85% sponsored videos, and 15% new, larger pics. In addition, I 'Pushed to check' for HTML and CSS errors, dead links, proper meta tags, etc.
Well, I must have done something right, because my numbers have SLOWLY begun to climb over the past few days.
I don't know if input from a 'free-blogger' will be of much use to anyone, but I sure enjoyed sharing anyway.
Thanks for listening. David (Bi4life).
(I wish you guys could visit my 'NEW' blog, but don't think I'm allowed to list the address here). D.