I don't know, vertex. They were organic traffic, and as I recall they were coming for what seemed like relevant keywords. It's been a while, though.
My current site is a micro-site. I and my wife wrote the material. I hand-designed the layout, hand-coded all the html. As a programmer and a writer, I was pretty excited about the idea of microsites a few years ago. Here was a chance to combine my love of writing and programming to create online magazines around particular topics. I envisioned writing dedicated applications, doing some live updating of relevant information, and so on. It was (and is) a pretty cool idea: a spot between a blog and a dedicated topical site. As far as the guts of how the site works, using internal links, scoring highly on search terms, etc? Read that in an article somewhere. The goal is to create a small spider site around a topic such that people land on one page and see the top 3 or 4 related pages immediately, allowing them to browse tangentially if they're in the wrong spot. There's probably a better way to optimize around that than I did, but I never got around to it. And as far as Adsense, I added on ad unit to pay hosting costs. As I said, once I figured out why folks were visiting the idea was to get rid of it. But Google kept emailing and suggesting I bump it up to three units. Go figure.
And yep, Google killed me because everybody else in the microsite business used content farms, cranking out thousands of pages of crap, loading up with Adsense, flash ads, grabbing emails, and so on.
I still think the microsite idea is a great one, although, you are correct, anything that looks like one is going to get penalized. That's a shame. There's still a lot of potential there. Check out my microsite for books that hackers might like for an idea http://hn-books.com (This is also a good example of a totally-static site that still has a database and lots of interactivity)
In either case, Google's algorithm decided my couple of hundred hours of programming, design, and writing effort wasn't worth it. After horsing around with the idea for a year, losing valuable time, I gave up. As somebody who was not out to game the system, I was collateral damage in the bigger war against crappy content.
My current site is a micro-site. I and my wife wrote the material. I hand-designed the layout, hand-coded all the html. As a programmer and a writer, I was pretty excited about the idea of microsites a few years ago. Here was a chance to combine my love of writing and programming to create online magazines around particular topics. I envisioned writing dedicated applications, doing some live updating of relevant information, and so on. It was (and is) a pretty cool idea: a spot between a blog and a dedicated topical site. As far as the guts of how the site works, using internal links, scoring highly on search terms, etc? Read that in an article somewhere. The goal is to create a small spider site around a topic such that people land on one page and see the top 3 or 4 related pages immediately, allowing them to browse tangentially if they're in the wrong spot. There's probably a better way to optimize around that than I did, but I never got around to it. And as far as Adsense, I added on ad unit to pay hosting costs. As I said, once I figured out why folks were visiting the idea was to get rid of it. But Google kept emailing and suggesting I bump it up to three units. Go figure.
And yep, Google killed me because everybody else in the microsite business used content farms, cranking out thousands of pages of crap, loading up with Adsense, flash ads, grabbing emails, and so on.
I still think the microsite idea is a great one, although, you are correct, anything that looks like one is going to get penalized. That's a shame. There's still a lot of potential there. Check out my microsite for books that hackers might like for an idea http://hn-books.com (This is also a good example of a totally-static site that still has a database and lots of interactivity)
In either case, Google's algorithm decided my couple of hundred hours of programming, design, and writing effort wasn't worth it. After horsing around with the idea for a year, losing valuable time, I gave up. As somebody who was not out to game the system, I was collateral damage in the bigger war against crappy content.