Squidoo vs Personal Site

[NikolasNikolaou]

Hey guys I'm Nikolas a newb, just signed up to the pro membership trial after alot of digging on the seomoz blog for months .

First off let me tell you alittle about my story and seo knowledge.

I started off online on the well known squidoo site with revenue sharing, because of my day job I had alot of time to work on my articles and build up to a nice monthly salary of just over 1k in less than 5 months which doubled and trippled in the last few months. Seo is like a 6th sense to me , onpage offpage and the lots. Most of what I read here is not new to me or something I didn't already know about, but its good to freshen up and remember things, as theres alot to search engine optimization.

I have built up to over 500k unique visitors in less than a year and have decided to move on to my own site 4 months ago. The niche is the exact same one I have targeted on squidoo. My site had alot of issues at the start the classic 301 redirection ht_access fix I had to do,content management system building low quality content pages via tags that i have fixed(noindex) and removed with 404s, build up original unique valuable posts, interlink ,onpage and offpage seo the basics I did for squidoo. The problem here is that I can't seem to get any traction from google where as my squidoo search engine traffic is 80% , my sites google traffic is 5-10%. I have the same number of articles on both sites, similar topics , similar onpage offpage optimisation basically identical but have alot better content on my new site.

My bing, yahoo and referral traffic is rising everyday but as I know google is 85% of the market share I am leaving alot of money on the table.

I hope that most of you more dedicated seo's can give me a tip or two and explain exactly what is going on with my situation and if possible take a look at my site hardwarepal .

[TommyTan]

Hi Nikolas,

I wish seo is like 6th sense to me.  I believe you have more traffic from Google to your Squidoo page in the past and not your site is because Squidoo has higher authority than your new site.  Squidoo has more backlinks and content under Squidoo's domain and as you might know backlinks is an important factor in SEO.  Furthermore, your site is still new.  Squidoo has been around for a while and Google also look at the domain age as a ranking factor.  I don't think you can simply create a new site and hope to get as much traffic as Squidoo.  You will need more time, create more content and earn some links.