My 100th Post – what’s it about? Google slamming me. Hey! Happy New Year. This is SEO 2011. It’s like Fight Club. Or, a mosh pit…
Ever moshed with a guy who outweighs you triple-fold? I’m sure I was that guy to the emo kids at the Nuclear Rabbit concert way back when, or the emaciated strung-outs at Pearl Jam a couple times…it’s fun to be that guy (who outweighs), but otherwise you’re flat on your can wondering if you’re going to get your brains scrambled by someone’s Doc Martens.
Enter Google. He’s huge. That’s why I wrote Chicken Little and Godzoogle a while back – and nothing’s really changed. Except…my winning site is now ranking behind Pluto someplace. You know – the one that made me some rockstar? The one that net me $3500 the close of the year (Nov/Dec)?
Yeah. Apparently she’s an emo kid in Google’s mosh pit, and the big G is in a frenzy. I read from Tracey about how 2010 was a lesson for her in not spamming her sites since she lost a ton of sites that used blackhat methods for linking – and she’s back to using whitehat methods.
Like: Build My Rank, which allows you to pay $59 a month for 1-5 domains, 10 links per domain limit…I’m not an affiliate but she and Dave are. I haven’t used them, but since I trust those two, I don’t doubt it works for the time being.
I am on their waiting list but dunno…I hesitate because I want to see if my methods still “work” or not – and if I sound doubtful, it’s because I am (again). What I did and didn’t do is spelled out below. Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to a monthly subscription unless it’s hosting a reseller account, or Magic Submitter.
Here’s what my rankings were around October (top) and what they are now (bottom)
Google Mosh Pit - You Can't Slam Dance With Goliath
By the way, that is a shot from SEOBook’s “Rank Tracker” plugin – I didn’t believe what Market Samurai was telling me (Market Samurai has a rank tracking feature, a new tool in my arsenal). Market Samurai wasn’t lying, after all…
Holy Swiss cheese, but we ain’t in business, Batman! Before I make you all panic (I am panicked, I watched my passive income dreams go up in flames just now), I want to give a few facts about this site – especially in light of my first (astute!) guest post, from Tyler Davis on the New Internet Marketing Paradigm (fine, he may be right!).
What kind of links did it have?
Forum links:
I’m not a forum spammer. I no likey – yet. This, however, is subject to change…on this site, the ONLY forum links were from a Backlinks Philippines run, less than 100 links, all manually made, back in May or so.
I won’t be joining that revolution just yet, for the same reasons I’ve never really been a fan (except with Backlinks Philippines) – I think they’re easy to detect and discount for Google. They provide NO benefit to searchers that find the links…or to those forum owners who must hate fake meat people and bots named XRumer.
This still isn’t a judgment call against those who do it – like I said, I might join this type of linking methodology – but not yet.
Article links:
I have 30 or so links from EzineArticles, ArticlesBase and GoArticles. I also have used:
Unique Article Wizard (probably 4 articles to the entire site).
ArticleRanks (maybe 4 articles)
One Squidoo lens (I’m telling you, I need to do more linking, but time is an issue)
Magic Article Submitter (one indirect link wheel)
Magic Submitter (one run of the article directories)
All in all – not much, right? I had about 160 links at one point showing in YSE, it’s about 100 right now. That has held for months. But the point is – this is my main way of backlinks, and I didn’t do much.
I’ve not used AMR on this site yet, but yes, I will be.
How big is the site?
Not including the legal pages, I have 7 content pages. My main review is still number one for two main terms, but I’ve stopped seeing the crazy wild click throughs on Commission Junction…
It’s a mistake to have a thin site and sit on it if it’s making money. My fault. (I was going to target this when I take a month off in a little while, by the way: build up and rank reviews on this particular site. Google didn’t get the memo.)
How old is the site?
Over a year, about 14 months. This is my first site…the one that made me believe in Peter Pan, happy thoughts and flying around Never-Get-A-Job-Land…So age is supposed to give you an SEO benefit – it sure doesn’t give you a bullet proof vest.
My mistakes as I see them.
- 7 Pages of Content. Not enough of it . Thin hair and thin sites suck.
- The pages that fell off the SERPs had LITTLE backlinking…for the MOST part. **
- Removed AdSense and replaced with aff links…
- Did not have any social links.
I suspect removing AdSense had something to do with it – but not sure, since I’ve heard from Marika at Jewels of Cyprus (who emailed me and asked about my rankings – which inspired this post because I had no idea) – she tells me this is “going around to Amazon and AdSense sites…”
It’s too early to tell what went wrong, other than an algo change. Just to be safe…yes, I put my AdSense back up and pinged the site. We’ll see…
**Note that the main domain has had the majority of the linking efforts and has fallen from #1 to #18. So this theory of “more links = better rankings” goes only so far. Sure, I beat out over a million sites even sitting at 18, it’s not the end of the world…but still need to re-visit my content on these pages and will analyze the orangutans’ websites that took my banana and I’ll take it back…
I hope.
:twisted:
I’ll be using Market Samurai to do some of this poking around and see what I can do better.
What I think went wrong (SEO Theory Time)
I am not an SEO insofar as I’m an avid student of it – in other words, Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin won’t be looking over their shoulders wondering what on Earth I’m doing any time soon.
But I do have a brain the size of a chicken’s, so I can peck at the corn.
Let me give you my two shakes of a lamb’s tail…First off, if you’ve read Grizzly recently, he’s been talking about organic links and NOT backlinking. I am STILL not on board with his theory 100% – but I’m not Grizz. His recent posts on quality vs. MMO spam have really begun to sink in for me.
Same with Leo Di Milo (I’m pawning you off to these fellas)…the point is: building a business takes some quality assurance, and I’ve mentioned before that I find competitive analysis to be a bit of a joke (like you can’t out-rank THAT turd muffin?).
So speaks a turd muffin (in Google’s eyes apparently).
What I think I did wrong was simply stop building and linking to this site. It’s been 14 months and I got laaaaay zeeeee. Actually I kept telling myself I didn’t have time…well, now I don’t have an income, so that settles that: guess what I have time to do all of a sudden?
I was planning on building it out anyway, I was insane not to (in Dave’s words, anyway).
Besides not adding content – I put in too many affiliate links. What is the magic number? I dunno – but I do know that if there was white space, my chicken brain thought it was the Golden Goose nest and wanted to lay a golden egg…
I actually had a food inspector drop by from the Food and Drug Administration to complain about an excessive amount of spam on the site – it was giving Google a coronary…
It looked like someone went on a Spam binge and puked.
Who’s fault is that? I’ve written Quit Blaming Google For Your Sucky Website and kept “tweaking” this site until I became a hypocrite. I don’t blame Google for that…
I also didn’t have any social media integration (like how I put the Twitter and Facebook integration here? There’s a reason for it: Google recently said they’re weighing these social signals in particular, still tweaking the algo to figure it all out…). The point is: these are signals Google uses to rank websites – how much so is anyone’s guess at this point.
There was not social proof that the site existed, and this is what I believe was one possible error on my part, but it’s a new addition to the algo so I think you’ll see more of this. Just a guess.
Though not my “leading” theory, think of it like this: who Tweets a good review of a movie? Or Facebook posts it? I do – just because I’m human…but who Tweets or posts a Facebook status update on a review site? Well: they CAN’T or won’t until I put the Tweet / Like buttons on there, at least…
A recent SEOBook post is pretty interesting – re: Google Products and Google favoring bigger sites, even scraping content (no way? Google scrapes? Mahalo, anyone?!)…this is interesting to me because it appears Google is pushing content down in product “verticals”.
Got a product review site, do ya? Can’t say what this will mean, other than go for the long tails and hope the big fish don’t swim in your pond…(see below).
Interestingly enough – my own reviews that I didn’t link much to – because they ranked pretty decently with just a little love – they got stomped on by authority sites. Before you make a rule, though – my #1 holdings are still on top…
And that’s the ONLY review I linked with a link wheel…
Draw your own conclusions, but the only “rule” I can see is what follows…
Who took my place in the rankings?
This is where it gets fun. All of a sudden, About.com is going Rambo on me and targeting my terms. They take up the majority of my product review SERPs, and my general keyword articles (the supporting / general topics that were all niche related but not product focused).
They were NOWHERE to be found originally when I made this site…
And Google favors – surprise, surprise – authority sites.
What I plan to do after my tears dry up…
Ha! I don’t cry about these things. I vomited, sure, but with every change in the algo, a writer’s life just gets busier.
In other words, I might be killing my nerves a bit more this year with writing like a fiend for clients. I am on the one hand thankful for it (I AM thankful for my clients), but on the other I want to jump off a freaking cliff, since this site presents my way out of this.
Luckily, I’m wising up to what I can and cannot afford to do – and trying to find my place in higher paying gigs. I’m also sure as heck not a quitter – this just brings the fight to my corner, and I’m coming out swinging, dagnabit.
But what about my passive income? Is it “Game Over, Joke’s on You?”
Hell no.
My solution can be found in Tyler’s post – finding quality links. My solution is:
- Backlink everything, starting with the reviews you didn’t do yet.
- Link wheel every review post leveraging Web 2.0′s (like Magic Submitter type stuff).
- Stay away from membership services – including ArticleRanks – until further notice.***
- Incorporate more LSI on purpose.
- Use Scrapebox for blog commenting, then follow through with guest posts in your niche.***
- Incorporate social media, like PingFM and Amplify, and “Tweet Old Posts” plugins.
***Did you say stay away from ArticleRanks?! Uh…yeah. I did. Why? Aren’t I happy with it? Don’t you promote ArticleRanks? Yes, I am! And yes, I do – but I’m going all out on this and taking all my theories to pretend they’re all true.
Let’s say you’re Google. You find Blog Blueprint, another service similar in scope to ArticleRanks (but with shorter posts, etc.). You realize it’s a private network, effectively selling links, then de-index it…maybe even slap the link monkeys who used it.
Of course, if you OWN the search engine and sell your own links (like AdWords, anyone?) you don’t need to compete with blog networks effectively selling links…
Did this happen with ArticleRanks? Not that I know of – but tell you what:
You hear enough stories about de-indexed blog networks…
…then you wake up in my shoes and re-think everything. I’m not going to use ArticleRanks currently. I have no proof it doesn’t work…
But I’m taking stock of these pages that got slapped…and they all have at least one thing in common: they were hit with direct links from ArticleRanks and / or Unique Article Wizard.
I’m canceling my AR subscription the time being, using the money for a HideMyAss proxy (the VPN) for use with my tools like Article Marketing Robot and Bookmarking Demon, Market Samurai and Scrapebox.
I’m being paranoid here – I’ll admit it – and I’m not taking the chance just in case I’m right.
I am also curious how well Article Marketing Robot and my manual link wheel method does in replacing all my monthly subscriptions at the moment – why not start that experiment? I’ll have to post my results as they come in.
****Yes, I bought Scrapebox, the reason being that it can find out other targets I can use to my advantage for blog commenting and guest posting (Amazonian Profit Plan style traffic generation, it’s Google proof since the traffic comes from a popular blog versus a search engine). It will also help me to build up my Bookmarking Demon targets and AMR targets.
So I mentioned link wheels – you can use Magic Submitter for that or other such services (Sara and Michelle are using SEOLinkRobot which they can tell you more about). Personally I’m going manual and will follow my own advice on my link wheel post.
The point of that is to become less search engine dependent and find those places Google does love to give street cred to – and link to your own stuff. This will also help me get my pages ranking, hopefully.
What about LSI and how do you get those keywords?
I wrote about the Wonder Wheel and finding LSI terms from Google – and these should show up naturally if you’re talking about a subject. It’s an algorithm that Google uses (reportedly) to find similar terms used to discuss whatever the blue blazes is on the page.
Read more about How to Use Google Wonder Wheel at SEOSage (I wrote it a while back it’s even more relevant IMHO). There’s a LOT to be said about LSI, and there isn’t a great LSI keyword tool at the moment, like the Google keyword tool.
Micro Niche Finder has a function where they pull from a certain provider’s database to give you LSI terms…but that NEVER works (I talked with them at length: the LSI provider is flaky like dandruff). So good luck with that…
Sara is talking about a Theme Extractor or some sort of tool…she can tell you more in her recent post on how she’s using LSI for her authority site project post (which tells you she’s a smart cookie – I ignored the “authority site” mumbo jumbo until it bit my biscuits).
The issue I have with it is that the tool’s pricey and I’m cheap – but Sara bought it when it WAS cheap (haha). Check out her post and her results, I’m going a “cheapskate” direction and going with Scott Blanchard’s plugin.
It’s called Clickbump SEO and I love her BUT…
If you have SEOPressor and buy this tool on my recommendation, you’ll kill me. Because it practically IS SEOPressor. I think Scott saw it in one of my admin panels when he was helping me with a Clickbump theme install – he asked me what on Earth that was about…
Anyway, it works well – and doesn’t crash my site. SEOPressor doesn’t like my theme or some plugin I have installed here at The Average Genius – and it crashed the site a couple of times. I can’t tell which plugin or if it’s the theme I have that doesn’t play nice with it – but SEOPressor crashes this site.
I’m going to be using Clickbump SEO to suggest my LSI terms. On everything. Why? Because unlike using Wonder Wheel from Google or some other freebie, this plugin (which you can use like any plugin on any theme) will analyze the top 10 Google results for your keywords and those are the LSI terms it suggests.
Presto! It’s currently 1/2 off, and unlike many people in internet marketing, I think Scott will raise the price because he’s done it on ClickbumpEngine (the theme package). Right now it sits at $47 for unlimited domain usage.
That’s the cheapest solution I can find for LSI, and what makes it different from SEOPressor is one other thing:
Unlike SEOPressor, ClickBump SEO only suggests changes, and gives you a score to how well you’re doing: it will NOT make the changes like SEOPressor will.
For this reason, I think ClickBump’s plugin is a bit better: I’d rather decorate (italicize, underline, bolden, add “Alt” image tag keywords) myself. I also think that’s what crashed on this site – because the Clickbump plugin isn’t causing any trouble here.
On my niche sites, SEOPressor is already installed – but I’ve never really done much about LSI terms. So I’ll be using them in tandem (I do NOT suggest you buy both! I am going to use them both because I have them both, but if you only bought one, I’d recommend Clickbump SEO over SEOPressor for the LSI benefit – it takes too much time to analyze 10 websites and extract their LSI terms otherwise).
That’s it. Not time to panic. Time to re-tool, write LSI and Market Samurai-researched content (that tool has a lot of research opportunities built in), and use Market Samurai to analyze my competitors.
Sure, I got beat by About.com – they’re an authority site…I got replaced by Amazon, too, and Wikipedia…but there’s a reason that these pages all of a sudden out-flanked mine. It’s obvious that they have authority (jillions of pages and deep AdWords spend), Google loves them – but if I can emulate anything they have and use it to kick them off my territory…we’ll see.
Think I’m nuts? I’ve outranked the manufacturer, Wikipedia and several news sites with these terms. I ain’t skeered. Much. Wish me luck, and I’ll be back with the posts I was promising…this just took the dang cake.
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Wow, that really sucks. But probably not a huge worry (yet). How many days have you been down in the rankings? It might just be a minor reevaluation. If I read this correctly, you’ve dropped from position 1 (held somewhat erratically, it looks) to position 29 or so for your main keyword. Hardly a slap. More like a light pat reminding you not to neglect your sites, even after they are ranking well. (I find slowly drip feeding articles out using AMR to work wonders on my older sites that are already ranking, BTW).
My guess (totally uniformed, of course) is that a few of the better backlinks you had dropped away (do you have any backlink number totals for this site? If so, what do you see?). If so, it might take a few weeks or even a couple of months to build your ranking up again (depending on how long it takes you to build new links and for Google to find and index them). (I would also guess it has nothing to do with affiliate links, LSI or any of that other stuff, but that’s just my opinion). I might also add that as far as I can tell, it’s not “going around” on any of my 70+ sites (but I might just be lucky, so far, of course).
I always freak out a little too when one of my big money makers drops temporarily (it’s never been anything other than that for me), so I can relate. I really hope it comes back soon, but also I imagine this probably yet another reminder that you need to diversify so you can ride out these bumps (which I think are inevitable) more easily in the future.
Oh, and thanks for the ClickbumpSEO recommendation. I’m going to use one of those two on my older sites in the next month or two. I imagine what I’m going to find is going to be pretty laughable, given what a newbie I was when I started building my first sites. :)
Keep us posted – and let us know when you’ve returned to #1!
Michelle recently posted..Bringing More Value- My Plans For This Blog In 2011
Wow! You’re quick, M.
I’m not convinced on the link amount…they’ve held steady for a while. I fluctuate up and down maybe 10 links here and there in YSE, the silly thing is I never check Google’s links…
I’m back. I just opened SEOQuake and peeked at my Google links.
There are exactly ZERO. None. Nothing. Nada…not according to SEOQuake anyway.
Google Webmaster tools records more than YSE show (101 in YSE) – that number hasn’t fluctuated in YSE.
But GWT shows 171…which is more than I’ve shown in the past. To be honest, the last time I looked in GWT for my links was in May, right when I got Magic Submitter…
So I’m not sure where SEOQuake gets the data from – but I do remember I used to show 35 or so according to SEOQ (my Google links). That could just be SEOQ being the glitchy freebie it is…
I honestly think the two main things are:
1) Not building enough links over time, and stopping once I had the rankings I was happy with.
2) Changing the content to where I warranted a second glance, perhaps the AdSense changes, not sure.
I did a once-over on my site just yesterday and saw I had made it a spammy piece of spamminess – when before it had more of a reference material feel on the main page.
I have links from Yahoo! Answers and other Q/A sites from people that have used it for a reference – all natural – but that was before I decided to puke links.
From a user’s perspective, I think I helped jack it up, but we’ll see – hoping it’s just a speed bump. It’s a huge change from the end of the year, for sure.
And re: diversification: yes, I have sites I need to see to to build up in 3 other niches, and my wife’s now working on her projects (and now her sister is, too).
Anyway, I didn’t notice the change at all until 3-4 days ago, but didn’t think anything of it until Marika asked me how my rankings are. That’s when I saw the bad news. The first week of January WAS looking like Black Friday, take two…
Then it just dropped. Not too worried, though – if I’m honest, it’s a thin site that was overdue for some attention.
I think one of the reasons your sites are doing well is at least that they have more indexed links, but also: you have a “floor” of content – if I’m not mistaken, you aim for 10 pages at least, right?
Yeah, most of my sites are over 10 pages in content, which might help.
You can’t really go wrong, I don’t think, by creating a better site from the user’s perspective. Changing the content might make you drop a little in the rankings, but in the long term you’ll gain more natural backlinks (as you already know and experienced). With some more natural and “directed” links built, I’m guessing you’ll soon beat that authority site and really lay claim to that #1 slot…
Michelle recently posted..Bringing More Value- My Plans For This Blog In 2011
Thanks for the encouraging words. When I wrote Chicken Little and Godzoogle, and the posts about losing rankings…my rankings bounced back on their own.
Nonetheless, when I see who’s taking my real estate, it starts to seem as if About.com and others have a sudden interest in long tail keywords (which is news to me).
But it’s not time to worry just yet – it’s just happened and too early to say what’s going to happen next week or after some focused linking.
I think that should have said “You can’t really go wrong, I THINK…” :(
Oh, and CONGRATULATIONS on your 100th post! (I think I have you beat by 13 posts, BTW ;) )
Michelle recently posted..Bringing More Value- My Plans For This Blog In 2011
Oh yeah? I have 22 drafts…
;)
Thanks – I just realized after I posted I had another post planned for #100 – but that post made me sound like a sycophant of a number of folks. I puked on my self.
Yes, thanks for the ClickBump referrence. I had been wanting to get SEOpressor for a long time time now, and being the fear motivated individual I am, I was glad you mentioned that SEOP was causing crashes or incompatibilities with your theme or other plugins. (The theme and typical plugins I use for my money sites are like a fine-tuned German engineering peice of art that already seems a little finicky)
Mr. Alias
BTW thanks for putting that Godzilla music video in there, that video is hilarious to me, I dont know why.
Mr. Alias recently posted..Welcome
Mr. A -
What makes SEOP crash my site is the way it introduces auto-decoration for keywords, which feature (someone just mentioned) can be turned off.
Clickbump SEO doesn’t do that, though – it only makes suggestions and gives you a list of LSI terms.
Having that in my admin panel as I edit a post is good news, but you can also find LSI tools for free (there’s a link in one of these comments for one, I personally want the info in my post editor at the ready – but it’s a matter of preference and convenience).
Hey mate, sorry to be the one to make you puke. That’s a serious job that I didn’t want to take on, alas it happened and now I have one more to my name. ‘the puke maker’. Garrr.
So far I haven’t yet received the hammer but it’s still early. I”m already thinking what to do in case…there are two things really that I can do, coz I’m not going back to a regular job. I started over a year ago with Elance, so if push comes to shove, I’ll go back to it until..#2, which is, start a big authority site using SBI. Those guys never get whacked, ever. I’ve been following them for years now and their sites withstood everything, every Google ‘wave’ (pun intended). Once my big site becomes an authority, I’ll focus on it and leave freelancing be.
Anyway that’s the plan if…push comes to shove. And in the meantime, no matter what, I’ll start a new SBI site. Better get moving and finding some good keywords and a site map for it.
Marika recently posted..Looking Back At 2010 And Moving Forward
Sorry, that should be a ‘site blueprint’. Too early to think clearly yet. Need my coffee and then get cracking on my new authority site.
Marika recently posted..Looking Back At 2010 And Moving Forward
No worries, I just emailed you so I’ll save the long reply and summarize:
I’m not worried. It sucks, but the end of year loot is still lying around: I have time to float and I have skills to get paid.
So I’m not overly worried – and will NOT be going back to a J-O-B like you mentioned, too! I’ll become a local SEO wank before that happens (no offense to those doing local SEO – I know a few of you making some serious coin).
Re: SBI – I think that’s worth a shot, but don’t you use HTML sites with XSitePro 2? It seems like WordPress is getting nailed, but even then who’s to say?
If you check out some posts by Dave at MakingMoneyontheInternetFree.info and Splork at LostBallInHighWeeds.com (he’s a colorful one!) – well, they might do a better job anyway of inspiring some confidence.
Michelle’s no slouch, either – and it seems she’s doing well. So what’s the secret sauce?
Diversify. Have good, thick sites. Link them. Leverage Web 2.0 sites for referral traffic…so much so that Google is less than 1/2 of your traffic.
Just a thought (I’ve just come from Splork’s site and I tell you what, that guy’s got some very on-the-money ideas, esp. if you read the comment section as well, Leo Di Milo had some good suggestions for it but all that to say: Google-independent traffic is something to really think about).
Just realized I suck at summarizing.
Hi James,
I have exactly the same problem with you, but happened on end of october, I have a batch of thin MFA site that got slapped and drop drastically in ranking. Only 2 website survive among my 60 websites. Suprisingly, one of my 2 pages site is a brand name products, with very little backlink initially and no backlink after that. It maintain its ranking until now.
Another that maintain ranking is I forgot to turn on my adsense, it’s ranking #5 before google slap. You know what, just after I turn on the adsense code for a week, it drop to #50 right away. Strange Huh? But, the website manage to climb back to #8 lately with some random link wheel. I assume google adsense has something to do with deciding your ranking, especially MFA site .
For the rest of my sites, I did some backlinking for the top earner, unfortunately non of them rank in top 10, even the easiest keyword I come across. I try profile backlink, high PR comment, open linkwheel, articlerank, adding more content and so on. But it shows little improvement. There’s one site able to climb back to top, but it easily outrank by other site. So, I can only suspect the my site is under some google filtration.
Just to share my own experiement, hopefully it helps. If you come across method to recover your ranking, I am really interest to know. Let’s share the idea.
Hi, Leon –
I know at the end of October (27th or so) there was a major Google Algorithm change, it’s been documented by a number of people – that and the big May Day change were the major changes to website rankings.
This latest one seems new – and comes on the heels of Matt Cutts mentioning something of Facebook and Twitter (there’s a video at the webmaster site, I can’t remember where I saw the video – it was from another’s blog).
But as to your experiments with thin sites – it’s really hard to say, not all my sites got hit. I can guess it has to do with links, with on-page terms and use of LSI terms – but these are just guesses.
My sample size is too small to really make a pattern out of it, but I’m sure in my case I can say it’s increased competition and them leveraging their own internal links – About.com has hundreds of pages to boost any given page, like HubPages or other authority sites.
The only way I can compete in that case with a thinner site is to have better external links and get the trust of Google somehow.
The only way I know to do that is if other websites that Google trusts linked to me (like HubPages, for example, or other niche-related blogs and websites, press releases, whatever). It’s all a theory for me at the moment, but my immediate plan is to build more pages and link them all, using what seems to have worked for the remaining page.
I’ll definitely be sharing results here if I have anything I can report on – and sorry to hear about your 60 sites. Tracey Edwards was saying she had 70 Amazon sites that got hit in 2010…but she’s sticking with whitehat methods for linking (articles and things like that).
Hi James,
It’s really difficult to judge why, we are playing with a black box (google). Things just happen random, but since google mayday update, they are getting clever. I believe google adsense also integrate with their search engine to monitor the worthiness of our site. I just feel thin site is hard to survive, but not too sure whether the big sites has been suffered as well, because google nowadays sounds unpredictable.
Forgot to mention that the site I actively build backlink, all of them rank between #10-#50. Lol. It really make no sense as it is easy keyword to go for. Good luck to you. I share if I make progress on my site. Cheers!
True – it is a black box, good way to put it. Yeah, I think looking at this site’s rankings, 10-50 looks good (sad! I have pages at #198…?!). I had the sense that you do about AdSense and their ranking a site – that if the site is thin or whatever, it will get slapped – but you would know that better than I would.
That’s why Grizzly I think said he didn’t put up AdSense until a site was in place – so he’d rank a site with no AdSense or anything, then put the ads on after it was ranking well.
I haven’t tried that method at all, ever – but this site isn’t new, either. Still, you could be right – if it bounces back out of the blue I’ll be sure to post about it.
I don’t want to keep these things a secret when it’s us vs. Google.
Perhaps is good to get some expert who doing authority adsense site to find out whether they have similar problem, if they don’t it just mean MFA site is some how targeted by big G, regardless of backlink method. But, from my previous experience, my site get slapped a week later after I put in the ads, I pretty confident with adsense is involve in the process, perhaps they track bounce rate. I try to remove adsense code on some of the site as well, but didn’t recover since.
My website that above #50 is after I put lots of effort on backlinking, when my website got slapped, it is no where to be found. cheers. lol.
Yeah, I’d look out for MFA style sites but it’s a risk you take and entirely arbitrary – what does an MFA look like? Where’s the line?
Anyhow, my site’s definitely not MFA – just the one block of ads and if anything, it’s an affiliate site with solid content.
But as to your question of big sites getting slapped – there was a major (is) blogger’s site, something along the lines of Blogengage.com (maybe that was it?).
Hundreds of thousands of views a month – ranking well…but one of the firms they hired to do backlinking for them was using TextLinkAds to generate links…
Google didn’t like it and slammed them, I think de-indexed, not sure. I’m not de-indexed or penalized (according to Google Webmaster tools and another 3rd party tool)…just weird loss of ranking.
Was it the forum profile links from 6 months ago? Not sure. It was less than 100 profile links. Definitely nothing to cry about.
Was it ArticleRanks? Carla doesn’t think so (I have to agree with her summary – those aren’t private blog networks, and the other blogs aren’t de-indexed).
What was it? I dunno. Google changed something and replaced me with a bunch of About.com listings. That’s all I can see from my end – it doesn’t tell me why all my pages did that, though (About.com was in one general keyword basket, the site is an EMD and the EMD is now behind About and other high trust authority sites).
Hopefully I can bring this one back, will just have to see what’s up.
Hi James,
sorry for all the mess you are going through now. Hope you get back on your feet as soon as possible.
I’ve been following your blog and some other blogs over December and Januaray and it seens there is a big trend about “big, content, authority websites” and I do agree with it – there is nothing more frustating than searching for a review on a product and stumbling upon a website that you know it is MFA.
I’ve made a comment on Mike’s last post to see what he thinks about the use of UAW – or any other mass article distribution for that matter – if you want to take a look there as well.
What do you reckon? Do you think by using UAW, AMA, etc. even if you have a +100 pages with good content might get you in trouble? Or is it all about your content and if you have good content even using UAW or any other software, you might get away with it?
I wouldn’t mind sacrificing quick, short term gains by not using any grey hat techniques softwares if I knew that my sites would be safer then. The problem is that probably there isn’t a well defined line here saying “you can only go this far”. It will actually depend on many factors …
Maybe I’ll be focusing more on producing quality content for my own sites – with maybe a few backlinks here and then from more legit, white hat sources – and less focus on backlinks. I know backlinks would earn me more NOW, but I striving for the long run, so I might be better off by improving my websites instead of someone’s else website.
Well, like I said, hope you get back on your feet as soon as possible.
Cheers!
Sorry fogot something.
I believe when you start seeing news about it, it probably means that something will change soon:
http://lifehacker.com/5730396/over-77-percent-of-lifehacker-readers-say-googles-search-results-are-less-useful-lately
Lifehacker made a post about it and there is a lot of people already finding their way around the spam: using stumbleupon and some other techniques. This is definitely something Google wouldn’t want and they will probably be dong something against it pretty soon.
Another website:
http://dashes.com/anil/2011/01/threes-a-trend-the-decline-of-google-search-quality.html
That is it!
Cheers!
No worries, Wix, and thanks for dropping by. I’m not sure about Mike’s method, I think currently he’s experimenting (or just enjoying life, not sure). But I did see your comment over there and will say this – if you are getting good results with UAW (like I did), I wouldn’t worry about this post of mine.
I would just make sure you build a site that targets terms that are worth your time to begin with – if there is money there and you intend to build the site, how many pages you build is up to you.
Test it out and see, a site at a time, knowing that no matter what you’ll see Google dances and everything else. I don’t intend to stop linking, period. If anything, this presses me to link more.
I also don’t think that paying for UAW or ArticleRanks, etc. is going to automatically make your sites get slapped – I’m just reactionary that way.
I might go back to it in the long term – but not sure. I need to see if my system works fine without ArticleRanks – if so, I’ll re-assess.
If I had the money to, I would be a member of Backlinks Genie more than anything else, or Build My Rank and Magic Submitter combined. “Backlinks Genie” is something I read about a while back, a guy I trust recommends it – and it’s “only” $199 a month, but all automated.
My point is, I don’t think you should change your methods until you have reason to believe you should. If you’re ranking is increasing: keep going. I would recommend, though, that you do more than just one type of link or one type of tool.
For me, it’s always a mix, always going to be. Hope that helps: don’t let my post scare you out of linking – I think that would be the wrong conclusion (anyway: I don’t plan on not linking – check out Dave’s recent post “Should You Backlink” or something:
http://www.makingmoneyontheinternetfree.info/should-you-build-backlinks
He makes 6 figures and has my ear from here to Sunday. Or Splork’s posts:
http://lostballinhighweeds.com
Both of those guys are more or less going forward as normal. If anything, the lesson is: don’t get lazy. Keep going.
Wix -
Sorry, I forgot to mention – the whole idea of Google not liking StumbleUpon, etc. – the truth is that Google is not the web. The only thing that Google “controls” is their index.
They control their Ad costs.
They control what results they decide to show in their organic listings…
But that’s why I tagged Splork’s post – that guy doesn’t care about Google or SEO – he gets his traffic from StumbleUpon, from articles, from HubPages, whatever – because there’s already tons of traffic there. It’s the “Web 2.0″ sites like YouTube (OK, fine – Google BOUGHT YouTube, bad example) – but Facebook?
Google doesn’t control Facebook.
It doesn’t own StumbleUpon, or Twitter…Nor HubPages and Squidoo…
You want to make a distinction between links to your site that are meant to boost your ranking in Google’s search engine / SERPs and links that are meant to act as funnels for traffic.
I get, for example, traffic from EzineArticles. In the past two months I’ve made sales on a website that is still new – and it is sitting on page 3-5 for my terms.
How’d I get the sales? From my articles. I wrote / write them to get traffic and links, and to get others to pick up my articles and syndicate them – and it happens, and I get traffic, and I get sales.
I don’t need Google for that: they don’t own the internet (they just want you to think they do).
Anyhow, Splork is one of the few (besides Leo Di Milo) that are talking about getting traffic from these other sources besides Google – and the thing is, Google does eventually rank your site…
So I make sales before I rank – because I write these articles for that purpose. Use Hubpages, Squidoo, WordPress blogs, Tumblr or whatever.
If you hear about a website enough (like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon) and it doesn’t rhyme with “Google,” use it. Get your links, get your traffic, get your sales.
Then take your UAW and bomb those sites with UAW. Then bomb your site with UAW…just keep going. It still works, I’m not convinced it doesn’t yet.
James,
thanks for the quick reply. I’ve just finished reading the comments on Griz’s post, your comments, Dave’s link and Ben’s post (http://www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com/how-to-build-backlinks-naturally/) as well. It is amazing how much buzz Griz can create with a single post. Maybe he did on purpose to attract more natural links so he could then say “I don’t build backlinks” hehe … just a bit of a consipracy theory here …
In the end I think it all comes down to:
- Being creative
- Not being afraid of thinking and testing for yourself
- Hard-work
- Testing and tinkering all the way through untill you hit something that works.
It is not really about what you do, but how much you do. If you work and produce every day for many hours, eventually you will stumble upon something that works. Then, rinse, repeat and buy yourself a boat so you can sail away on weekends ;)
It is a bit like my experience in the stock market: I’ve only started to make some real money when I stopped reading and following every single piece of advice that came my way and started to take matters into my own hands. After I started analysing and thinking more for myself, results started to show up …
Each person will be in a different situation and will have different likings … For example, I am from Brazil and there is a lot of things that I can’t really apply here, even though most of my sites are in English to make full use of software and other tactics. I do have some sites over here and it is amazing how little competition there is around here …
I do agree with you that I should continue to do what has been working ’till now and as a matter of fact, I’ve just finished another batch of UAW articles ;). My only concern is what Ben has summarized here:
“For the average person, if you don’t linkbuild, you won’t rank your sites. The issue I’m pointing out here is that taking the “quick” path will lead to a short term gain, but may lead to a long term loss.”
Yes, it might be working now, but I would prefer something that takes longer to get going but that it last for many years, than something that makes me money NOW only to fade away in a few months … That is the kind of balance I’m trying to figure out …
I’ll probably be doing a lot of testing and continue to build my websites in several different ways to see what it works FOR ME. I’ll mix micro niche websites in addition to bigger authority websites and see what happens. Ben and Dave’s post were definitely enlightening (specially Ben’s post and comment on Griz’s blog).
Well, enough reading, back to work while trying to make my way through the “web sewer” ;).
Thanks for your comments, highly appreciated!
cheers!
I agree – testing, testing and testing. I try to hedge my bet and say “kick rocks” to the guru state of mind that says we’re supposed to position ourselves as experts – especially in SEO. It’s like saying you’re an expert on extra freaking terrestrials – really? You’ve seen the green men and pink elephants, and now want to lay out the taxonomy of a fictional species?
It’s like that. When you hit #1 a dozen times on one site…then hold the position…even gain more #1 slots for other terms…then you get slapped….
You realize that what you thought you knew and had in the bag is all part of Google, v. 2009, or v. 2010 – they evolved, you’re stuck as a Cro-Magnon wondering where fire came from.
But this IS the game – it’s Tom V. Jerry, and Tom’s a Puma, Jerry’s the field mouse SEO / IM guy with 80 kids. Cynical? No, just painting the picture. SEO isn’t static because the entire field of knowledge is held in one library with a locked front door – you just get to show up and check out a book at a time and hope it’s a recent addition.
The answer? You really hit it; test it yourself. I’ll never be a guru because there is no such thing – not apart from Google employees anyway. What worked 10 minutes ago can change – so what do you do?
Lie down and suck a pacifier? Sure…grab a blankie, too. If you want to get paid, you need to out-think your 800 pound opponent and ask yourself the tough questions and decide if you’re in this fight, or if it’s lay down and take a nap time.
I read Dave’s posts and hang on for dear life because if that ol’ bean can rake in the dough – I’d be a turkey’s giblets if I just sat by and watched.
James,
Thanks for the quick answer.
I’ve just finished reading Ben’s, Dave’s and some comments here and there and I believe in the end it all comes down to:
- Being creative
- Thinking for yourself
- Hard work
It might work for some but it might not work for you, that is why you should try it for your self. Also, I believe you are right and I do agree with you: do not stop doing what has been working so far – as a matter of fact, I’ve just finished another batch of UAW articles ;)
My only concern is something Ben has mentioned:
“For the average person, if you don’t linkbuild, you won’t rank your sites. The issue I’m pointing out here is that taking the “quick” path will lead to a short term gain, but may lead to a long term loss. ”
There it is a line where I’m trying to establish a balance between short and long run. I prefer websites that might take longer to show some results but last way longer than quick-cash that will fade away in a few months. But there might a balance between the two here that I’m looking out for …
I’ll mix micro with more authority sites and see what happens …
Thanks again!
Cheers!
I hate to laugh at your misery but there were some funny lines in that post!
Sorry about the drop in rankings. I know you say you aren’t worried so I will worry for you. I have a feeling Google is fiddling with some of this stuff in a way that normal methods to recover don’t work. But hopefully I am wrong, you know I love playing Chicken Little.
My gut advice would be to add some content pages with no aff links. General articles related to the niche. I know you can bang out content so that should be easy. You may also want to reduce the number of aff links on the site. Also, I would leverage your knowledge and keywords and try to pick up some traffic/sales on Hubpages and Squidoo. I think you do this already, but more couldn’t hurt.
I had a CB site that was ranked #2 for awhile that suddenly dropped to #30-40. I think it is some sort of penalty, but not sure why. At first I thought it could be not enough anchor text diversity on backlinks so I added new links to vary some but nothing improved. My feeling now is that it’s just a thin CB site that Google doesn’t like. The sales were never that great so I’m just going to give up.
Carrie recently posted..December Reflections and 2011 Plans
I am cynical enough to think at this point those aren’t too far off the mark, the comments and theories I mean.
First off, I agree:
There were some real zingers in that post!
:)
But on a much less serious note – the “no affiliate link” posts is an idea worth hanging onto. Since I had NO supporting pages of this sort (without aff links) it would be a great time to start.
I began stripping the links off my front page, which is a supporting page I need to beef up (it wouldn’t be hard, take me an hour tops with Market Samurai or just a simple Google search / research).
The sidebar could use some cleanup – I just wince because I’ve made sales on all my links at this point. Oh, well.
The site’s almost net me a nice sum the first week of January so I thought, “Yippee!” Then I got Marika’s email…
Then I double checked and sure enough – my sales stopped on the sixth of January. I still get CTR on the CJ ads – but it bit my biscuits just a tad.
(With gravy, no less.)
I like to fight Google – SEO is only one form of traffic. Increasing referral traffic can be as easy to do as adding images with LSI terms or keywords in the “Alt” tags…or at least if you’re Sara.
:)
Just food for thought … and you’re right re: the Web 2.0′s – which is what Splork is all about. I just can’t believe I stopped with ONE lens. Ridiculous.
Actually, comparing your site to the CB site I lost, you may be okay. I had one of those +30 drops, came up as a penalty with one of those free checkers (which may be bogus). Yours could be just a re-shuffle.
But yeah, beefing up the site and getting some satellite sites out there can’t hurt. Good luck!
You do know though that the world is suppose to end in May, right (according to Harold Camping)? So don’t waste too much time on this :)
Carrie recently posted..December Reflections and 2011 Plans
Good evening, and welcome to the Open Forum…I am Harold Camping and I used to babysit Methusaleh.
All the stories you’ve heard about pharaoh were true – I was there, and for thousands of years have made a hobby of forecasting the end of time.
Oh, man…I know you did NOT just invoke the name of the mummy…too funny. He has a fun fascination with numerology, that cat.
But he has the raspy voice you might hear in an XBox Zombie killing game…”Brains!!”
(I actually want to see if he is ever outside with the rising of the sun, I have a theory…)
James,
FYI, it looks like there is a free plugin that does what SEOpressor does at http://www.bloggerhigh.com/. Check it out. I can’t vouch for it. Yet.
Thanks, Kerry – I haven’t heard of Blogger High – almost sounds like what the opposite of what I feel after being up all night (like last night, nasty habit when I have deadlines and no time)…only to discover that I have over-caffeinated…and can’t sleep.
Nice! It ain’t a blogger high, for sure.
That plugin looks interesting! Having invested $150 so far between SEOPressor and Clickbump SEO, I now officially hate myself and the planet that conspired against me. (I have more punchlines when I don’t sleep).
Good to know, though – and they have a spinner that looks pretty good. A human edited thesaurus? “Spin Robot” – never heard of it. Video was interesting. Don’t necessarily like the pricing structure, and the video suggests that 35% spun content is “good to go…” But for all that, it seemed like a good one, it’s the legibility part that was most interesting.
Thanks for the link, Kerry!
The bloggerhigh plugin does pretty much what the seopressor plugin does, except it’s free, doesn’t keep calling back to a server, and doesn’t crash your theme 50% of the time. It does require a backlink in the footer though. That’s what most themes do of course, and is the equivalent of saying ‘a backlink on my blog is worth $100′, so you pays your money, you makes your choice. BTW, you can turn off the ‘automated’ aspects of both the bloggerhigh plugin and the seopressor one, so that isn’t really the advantage the clickbump fans imagine it to be.
The spinrobot is probably the leading spinner available right now, and is the tool of choice for professionals not least because it allows you to use the jetspin enhancements that stop such problems as ‘shingle ordering detection’ and the like. It’s not cheap, but hey, you get what you pay for. It’s embedded in a number of top of the range VAR products which probably gives you some idea of how good it is.
The next plugin coming out is the autobacklinker, AFAIUI:- a couple of thousand directory backlinks added to your blog automatically over the course of a year.
We’ll see a lot more of this ‘bar raising’ stuff in 2011, I’m sure.
JR
Reese -
HA!!! Now you tell me. I can turn OFF those fun little automated thingies. Imagine THAT.
:facepalm:
Spinrobot did catch my eye for the edited thesaurus, and you’re right about the price: you need to pay for automated spins (which seemed to read legibly so far, I’ll try it out on this next project in a couple days, actually). The free trial thing is the cat’s meow.
If I can just hit spin and get an edited list like that, that’s really something nobody does – but I can’t tell how much you need to pay per auto-spin, which is my hesitation. That could get expensive…unless you normally outsource to guys like myself, then THAT thing looks like chump change.
The autobacklink plugin…that sounds pretty darn Elvis Presley, now….from directories (I do have IncanSoft’s directorybot but – hmm – did I just admit that?). Yeah, I signed up for Blogger High just an hour ago and they have some things I haven’t heard much of, definitely the spinner has my curiosity since I do so much of it.
Nice site, btw – a bit vague, but that’s the hook. Nicely done.
>>>You realize it’s a private network, effectively selling links, then de-index it…maybe even slap the link monkeys who used it<<<<
James,
Yes, I think you're being a little paranoid. I don't think a few links from Article Ranks/UAW is going to get you slapped. Keep in mind that these are all independently owned sites and it is up to the site owner whether or not they publish it.
If you keep your backlink base broad, I think it will be fine.
Another reason About could be outranking you might be due to their internal linking structure.
I posted on this at BLF.com, but I did some research on the page 1 sites for a product niche I'm working on. Most of these are major retailers. Four of them are one company different brands. Their ranking pages rank solely on interlinking between them and links from a handful of directory sites obviously owned by their SEO agency.
Another page 1 result is a 100 year old retailer that is buying blog roll links.
And then two other have links from the same directories I mentioned above.
All of these are footprints as wide as the Grand Canyon, much more obvious than links from UAW.
Layer your links, get links from authority hubs if you can, if not create them yourself.
Carla –
Did you have the link to your post on BLF?
I love that you said that – part of the issue in the game is a lack of confidence when these things happen. The good thing is that right now I can’t do much about the site – so no real major changes will be coming about just yet.
I wrote this post raw on the heels of discovering the ranking loss, pretty significant for some keywords as you can see – and I can’t help but think it’s a penalty, but not a peep from Google Webmaster tools, AdSense – nothing.
I’ll be riding it out for a bit since I have a mountain of writing to do and a blink of an eye in which to do it all – which is GOOD because otherwise I’m tempted to re-invent the wheel in some areas.
Your reply is a shot in the arm (like other comments here). And re: internal links: doubtless.
That’s the beauty of shingling and all the keyword rich internal links, canonical URLs, silo structures, etc. – add that in with domain authority (and deep pockets to hire an army of content generators) – you’ve go a winner for whatever terms are targeted.
This won’t change much for me – I did stop my AR subscription but also for the fact that it coincides with a big project I’m working on for a client. I don’t have the time to justify AR this month – and will be hurling AMR blasts at this site regardless of what just happened.
Buffer sites / AMR full-on assault and web 2.0 link wheels with commenting and possible guest posts – that combined with more pages up – that’s the plan.
I’m Splorking it. (Did I say, “Thanks!” yet? I needed that.)
Hey James, speaking of penalty, have you tried this checker http://tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker/ with your site? Not sure just how effective it is, but I’ve read some good things about it…
Marika recently posted..Looking Back At 2010 And Moving Forward
Marika – that’s a new one to me. I checked – nothing. It just said, “Your site is ranking really low for its key terms – look into that.”
Hm…thanks.
:)
I don’t think it’s a penalty, but the answer’s the same: more content, more links.
Ah ok, it’s just something I found and thought might be useful. Nevermind then, ignore it :)
Marika recently posted..Looking Back At 2010 And Moving Forward
No worries – I just thought it was a funny report to return. It was good news to learn I had no penalty, though – I’m sure I’ll use it, just struck me as funny.
Thanks for sharing the link.
Did you spend money already on the LSI plugin? I hope not…
http://lsikeywords.com/
I have a copy of Web Content Studio ($160 or so) and a couple months after buying the program I first found this website.
The only difference between the two is that I can click a button and see how many times each longtail has (or hasn’t) been used so far.
Other than that, I use this website much more often than the expensive software I bought a while ago.
Cheers!
NICE! Yes, I did buy Clickbump SEO and SEOPressor – because I love to spend money. Actually I suck at searching apparently since I did look for alternatives. Thanks for sharing that, Slov.
James,
Here is the link to the post. It was started by someone with a small retail business and she was sharing her success.
http://backlinksforum.com/main-backlinks-linkbuilding-discussion/4229-thanks-guys.html
The other thing about About taking you on, it could also be that the guide has been studying SEO and wants to boost their earnings and has been stepping up their game. They get paid on a revenue share basis.
AH! Good point, and very astute – didn’t realize that. It would make sense if the guide was a competitor, too – I’ll have to do some digging. Even so – that’s pretty astute.
I didn’t realize that’s how their game was played. I know the NY Times owns About, but I just couldn’t figure out why on Earth they went for my terms (my terms SUCK in terms of what they are estimated to get in Google – since about October, the new numbers are a joke).
Thanks for the link – and your comments made a ton of sense, so thank you for the insight.
Yep. I just checked out your site – so you’ve been at this for a while it seems. No wonder you know what you know I know you know.
Stop by any time, Carla, I have a lot to learn.
:)
I am NOT spamming myself – but wow.
I had a similar rant at Warrior Forum. I won’t share it – instead I’ll post about it. Feeling rantish.
Now I feel validated. I am so part of your fan club.
James,
I haven’t been doing niche affiliate marketing very long, but I’ve published a behemoth of a info portal for my community since 2004. They are completely different models. But doing the niche marketing has added a whole new dimension to what I bring to the table for clients.
But another note on About.com . . . they are definitely doing a push to train their guides on SEO. I looked at another niche of mine today and a new resident of page one is an About page. :(
It does beg the question though of more quality links – the only way I know to game that so far is Build My Rank or using a link broker, and if you’re found out with the link broker…
It’s back to square one.
I plan to get the quality links though from guest posting and doing my thing, using web 2.0′s and all that fun stuff. I’ll worry if that doesn’t work.
Hi James!
My top money making site lost all rankings in July. I coudn’t regain them no matter what I’ve tried. Probably some penalty or so. Looks like it’s easier to create a brand new site than to revive the banned or simialr site. Just like adwords – “we banned you for no reason and we’ll never accept advertisemets from you in the future”.
Depending on one traffic provider is a dead end. google’s feeling like a God and they do what they want without thinking of people whole life income depends on their algorythms.
For me, SEO is just the foundation, I’m slowly moving towards other traffic sources, exploring things etc…
We’ll see what heppens in the future, keep us updated about your site James! I’ve abandoned mine, the only thing I did recently is changed it’s internal linking structure. The site jumped inrankings for 2 weks but then was down again.
Anton recently posted..ClickBank Sales Are Getting Even Better
Definitely, Anton – and I’m with you on going beyond SEO. That’s where I hope the referral traffic comes to play – just bought Scrapebox and I plan to use the blackhat tool for whitehat methods.
Hoping I prove my own theories and get this cash cow resurrected, otherwise: it’s not the only site I have.
I plan on adding more content and linking it…
Beyond that: I did change the Permalink structure (after all this) – to make it more SEO friendly and Silo-like.
Every review will be in one “Product Review” category (a term that itself gets good traffic), and every review will get on-site supporting articles as well as off-site links.
LSI terms and theming is going to be a main part of what I do, too. More on that as it happens.
Btw James, I am getting away from small sites alltogether. If I don’t get hit, I’ll start selling the small sites off one by one at Flippa, maybe one every month or so (this used to be one of my earning options before I decided to stop selling them). In the meantime I am focusing on 2-3 authority site and I don’t mean niche sites with lots of pages. I’ve seen several of those biting the dust this winter as well. I mean real authority sites, focused on people rather than dominating the SERPS with their exact EMDs that small niche sites tend to do.
I guess I’ve finally realized that a real business cannot grow on shaky grounds such as the Xfactor or similar small sites model offers. I’ve joined SBI and funny thing is, while reading their forums dating back almost 10 years, I haven’t really found even one person mentioning that they lost their Adsense account or that their sites have all been deindex or given a penalty. I guess they must be doing something right. I’ll post on my blog soon more about it. I’m quite excited about it actually!
Marika
Marika recently posted..Looking Back At 2010 And Moving Forward
Marika –
I have no idea about SBI one way or another – other than I’ve heard there was a debate from Grizz on the matter a while back that was interesting (haven’t read it).
I’ve heard good things about SBI – as far as rankings go – I’m just not up for another business model on top of what I’m still playing with.
If you’re pushed to quality – that’s great, more power to you! I’m going bigger with my sites, too – but read my recent post following up on this one.
So far what you’re saying just sounds like getting onto a more secure footing – and it’s anyone’s guess if this model of small sites is out of the door (think of all the sales pages out there that are up for years and ranking well – I’m not sure small sites are out of the question).
But more power and best of luck to you – I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with making what you feel are more sound business decisions.
What I need to do is learn some blogging patience…(but it’s fun this way).
:)
Well, SBI will be only for one site that I intend to grow bit. So it’s an experiment to see what is happening with those kinds of sites. I certainly won’t do for now more than one site, as it’s too expensive otherwise. I’ll continue with the way I do now for the rest, sell a few ones that I don’t want to keep and grow the rest. So I definitely don’t move completely to SBI, I’ll just give it a shot with one site in a niche that I actually have a passion for.
Marika recently posted..Cheaper Option To Istockphoto
Will be eager to hear your take on it, Marika. Hope it all goes well – and I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
I am proud to say that I helped provide Scott with ideas on his development of his SEO plug-in and how to improve it. The LSI idea was all me1 lol (Damn, I need to get my affiliate link up on my site!) Its definitely a solid plug-in and I now like it a tad better than Daniel’s only because of the uber cool LSI available with the touch of a button from your post editing panel.
Oh and the verdict is still out on whether or not Xfactor style sites were targeted. I still have a few 5 page sites that are ranking in the top 5 with like no back links but I also noticed that my sites that have 30+ pages of content all improved in rankings during November-January.
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I don’t think XFactor sites are hit. Definitely would say, “Nope.” Not index-wide, anyway – I mean, if they pass a manual review is another question entirely.
Are thin sites hit? Nope. Read my new post in response/follow up – all’s good in the hood.
With Scott – he’s a fun guy to chat with, for sure – he actually listens. The good programmers do.
Well, that’s one of the things I”m really afraid of, to be honest, a manual review. While my sites are no longer with the Xfactor ugly layout,they are still easily recognizable as wanting to dominate the SERPS with a focused, sniper keyword and with content around it. So if a manual review comes my way, the small sites *might not* pass it. Hence me going a few steps deeper into more serious sites, that can hold the water to any reviewer, no matter how strict they are…I think a healthy good mix of various things is the best to go.
Oh and I’ll also do what you said at some point you’ll do, create more Hubpages, Squidoos and other 3fd party earning properties, those are earning without me having to worry about dancing, etc. The more money, the better for us, of course.
Marika recently posted..Cheaper Option To Istockphoto
I think your business model (XFactor or no) always needs to be scrutinized by yourself at all times.
(Of course.)
So if you look at the site and think it’s not going to pass the mustard – then you’re spot on to change it and improve.
I think a lot of us (myself included) got the idea that the system was automatically going to work:
Buy EMD.
Write junk.
Have 1-2 backlinks.
Cash the check.
At some point, someone takes a peek (competitors?) and squeals…or the algo gets wise enough to weed you out.
Hard to say – we are the publishers of Google’s own ad network. On one hand, they need us – on the other hand – no, they don’t.
In other words: they need someplace to put their ads, but they cut the check so they can tell us to clean it all up.
I think they need to cover their own tracks, too – if a site looks spammy and is – then Google doesn’t look good to searchers who think Google is full of spammy sites.
Where the line is drawn I think is between your ears and you have to be your own quality assurance department.
Hopefully we all learn quicker than Google catches up to us – and therefore we can keep cashing the checks.