Reading Dave’s book is an important place to start in decision-making.

He also lays out what kind of office set-up a real world e-commerce operation might need.

I agree 1000%. Most of my sites are Amazon sites and this latest Panda update took out about 25% of my traffic (ouch). I see a lot of people with Adsense only sites down by 70-80% (yikes!). Many of my sites weren’t hit at all. I see no correlation between Amazon affiliate links and a Panda slap.

Add the lack of real evidence for affiliate penalties to the fact that Amazon offers a sweet deal to affiliates and you can bet I’m not going to be moving to ecommerce any time soon either.

“Click the “Adsense Revenue” tab about the table.”

I don’t see that tab.

My adsense account is linked to my analytics but perhaps I’ve missed out a stage?

Thanks for weighing in!

Here’s how my dull brain sees it…

The whole purpose of backlinks is to give your page more authority. I have always seen authority as juice, whether this is simply because that’s how SEO blogs refer to it or not, that’s how I picture it. Keep in mind I’m not talking about page rank here, which is similar but not exactly the same.

The way I see it, all the juice initially comes from Google. One of G’s engineers is responsible for making sure that the juice tap is turned on full pressure at all time. From Google, the juice flows out, initially, to the super authoritative sites. The pipes leading to those sites are super super fat pipes, so lots of juice is able to travel through them. The reason these pipes are so large is because of the number of links pointing to the sites.

Links are “pipe expanders”. Every link that points at a page makes the juice pipe into that page a little bigger, allowing more juice to flow through. It makes sense, then, that you want to make all the pipes to your site as large as possible, and you make them larger by pointing links at the page they originate from (or backlinking your backlinks).

Here’s the problem with this theory – pipes burst. They burst for many reasons. Maybe the site that is linking to you no longer exists, maybe it has been penalized by Google, maybe it loses it’s relevance through change of ownership, or a multitude of other reasons. Let’s say your page has 20 links pointing to it. Let’s say further that you subscribe to the theory of backlinking your backlinks. You decide to point 5 links to each backlink, giving a total of 120 links (20 to your page, and 100 to your links). If one of those 20 links breaks, you’ve automatically lost 6 links. If 5 of them break, you’ve lost 30.

For this reason, the much safer option is to point all 120 links directly at your page. Your page is safer, because it has 120 small pipes leading into it rather than just 20. If one (or 5) of those small pipes burst, it’s going to make very little difference to the amount of juice flowing into your page.

Of course, I can’t prove any of this, but who can prove anything in this game?

BTW, this page is now keyword stuffed with the word “backlink” (42 by my count)…