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How to Resurrect a Deindexed Site

13-Jan-12

Phuket, Thailnd

5 Minutes from my house in Phuket, Thailand

Back again folks. I’ve been living it up large here in Thailand the past 5 months that I just haven’t gotten around to post anything new. Bad bad I know. As much as I’d like to say I’m living the life of the party every single day, my life is actually more spartan than a monk’s! All I’ve been doing is training training training to the tune of about 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, so I actually have a good excuse when I say I had no energy to post!

Ok Ok, enough excuses.

One of the biggest fears people have is having their site deindexed. If you have an entire network of sites deindexed, you can forget about getting every single one of those sites back. But what about a couple of the top money making sites? Or what if you have only a few big sites and they suffer a deindex. Is it possible to bring these sites back from the dead?

I suspect with a big of elbow grease and a lot of pleading with the google spam team, you can. I’ve actually brought a few brand new domains that had some deindex penalty associated with them I back into google’s good graces.

The Basic Process of Resurrecting a Deindexed Site :

1. Take off all monetization (affiliate links and adsense)

2. Ensure the theme/site design looks great, is user friendly, and looks like an authority site. This is critical if you want to bring a site back from the dead. I’ve had Google reject re-inclusion requests for a few of my sites with stellar content because the site layouts were not easy on the eyes.

3. Update site with at least two new posts. You want to try and prove you actually care about the site.

4. Make sure you have at least 10 posts on the site. The most recent article should be huge: 1500 to 3000 words. You don’t want a bunch of articles about the same damn keyword topic over and over either.

5. Ensure post titles are not spammy or longtail phrases pulled straight out of the Google Keyword Tool

6. Include plenty of pictures and links to authority sites sprinkled throughout your posts. A few videos inserted into the post won’t hurt either. Do NOT link to spammy sites or thin sites. We are talking wikipedia/cnn style sites

7. Add your site to webmaster tools and submit it for reinclusion via Google Webmaster Tools’ re-inclusion request. Make sure you write a 2-3 huge paragraphs about how you didn’t know the site was violating quality guidlines and how you are creating the site to benefit the reader blah blah blah. Basically you need to convince whoever looks at your site that it’s a legit site and you won’t be doing anything questionable with it.

There are really two strategies you can try and employ here to “convince” whoever is looking at your site that you deserve a second chance.

Strategy 1: Admit Guilt and Swear You’ve Seen the Light

Complete bullshit, I know, but the goal here is to eat humble pie, tell google you fucked up bad, but you are now dedicated to creating a quality site that will serve the interests of the reader. It’s pretty key that your site has been completely revamped here and you’ve taken off ALL monetization. You won’t play a convincing part if your “reformed site” is full of affiliate links. This is the strategy I’ve taken a couple times.

This is sort of like when a cop pulls you over for going 25 mph over the speed limit. When they saunter up to the window and ask you if you knew you were speeding and you look them in the eye and say “Yes, there’s no excuse I can give you.” What happens is the cop is often quite shocked that you admit this upfront (they hear BS excuses all day long). Because of the honestly you actually might get a warning.

Strategy 2: Claim You Purchased the Website

You can also claim you recently purchased (or was given) the website and have no clue why it’s not indexed. It’s best to do this ONLY if you don’t have it added to webmaster tools (yet). Don’t bother  with this if it’s verified with Webmaster Tools and you have Analytics on it (easy to tell you are full of bullshit).

If you’ve done steps 1-6 right, you should have a pretty good chance of getting your site back. I’ve had a few sites that have been rejected 2 or 3 times, but persistence paid off in the end and I was able to get it re-added (Google is extra picky about the quality of a site when you request a reinclusion. Make sure your site looks REALLY good on the eyes!)

My Case Study

This post is going to be a bit of a case study on how to bring bad a deindexed site. I had the google ban hammer come down one of my old sites about 9 or 10 months ago.

The site was about 3 years old, had 30 or so posts on it, and a few hundred backlinks. Before it was deindexed, it ranked #1 for a generic health term word and #1-5 for variations  on that term. It was in a fairly competitive niche. It was getting over 2500 uniques a day. It was an exact domain for a long tail term (one with very good exact traffic for a 5+ word long tail — roughly 45k exacts per month), but ended up ranking for the short tail term.

I can’t say the site was a huge money maker — I was probably only pulling in 200-400 bucks a month from the site with affiliate sales and adsense. I didn’t optimize it for money as much as I could of as I was busy with a bunch of other projects. However, I probably could have sold the site for a nice 7-12k because of the niche it was in, the keyword it was ranking for, and the traffic it was getting. The site is worth trying to bring back from the dead — if I can manage it, I can try and sell it and will have turned something completely dead into something that could make me 10kish.

To be frank, the quality of the site in terms of content was fine, but there was no way it should have been ranking number one for that single word term with the layout it had. Generally, I’ve found that if you start ranking for “big” generic keywords, your site really has to “look” like you deserve that ranking, otherwise it gets kicked out by the google team. You really want lots of articles, the ability to support a community (f0rums or such), a custom (or at least a well designed layout) layout and such.

Unfortunately, the site was an affiliate site that I had been meaning to convert over to an authority style site. I did not do this soon enough however and as soon as it started ranking for  that single word generic term, it shortly got a manual inspection followed by a deindex. It could be one of the competitors for that term reported the site.

So I will be following steps 1-6 exactly and I’ll report back to you guys with an update in a couple weeks. It usually takes about a week or two for google to process your reinclusion request.

Cheers from Thailand!

Ben

Filed in Blackhat, Case Studies, Content Generation, Internet Marketing, Make Money Online Experiments, Niche Marketing | Tagged , , | Comments (12) »

Is Branding the New Way?

01-Sep-11

Everyone has a different path when it comes to internet marketing. I’ve done a lot in the 3 years. I’ve managed to take myself out of a job I hated and into a pretty decent six figure salary just through my online efforts. I could have done much better though if I had a more solid strategy.

I still get questions (emails and comments) about how one should go about internet marketing. I know from my own experience, it’s a scary world out there when you first start looking at trying to make some money online. As a marketer, you have to adapt quickly to change. The SERPS/Marketing world is dynamic and if you don’t evolve yourself, your boat will sink and you are going to drown. Just look at my own efforts:

2009: Web 2.0 “Bum Marketing”

Worked for about 6 months straight, building as many niche hubpage articles as possible. I ended up with something around 600 hubs. Managed to derrive my first “full time income” from my hub effort. Focus was on Adsense. This sort of marketing really took a nose dive early 2011 when Google declared open war on UGC (User Generated Content sites). This had huge ramifications, one which not only saw rankings for article directories/web 2.0’s tumble but also the tightening up of author rules. My feeling is that there are some legit platforms for user generated content, but on the whole, Google wants information to be disseminated from trusted sites (be the niche specific or general authority with some credence to them) not some joker writing bullshit hubs targeting adword longtail keywords. Really, what would you, as a reader, trust more if you typed in “How to Prevent Herpes”: a hubpage of dubious origin with no editorial monitoring or an article from health.com?

2010: Mini Sites

I spent part of 2009 building mini sites. 2010 I really ramped up my efforts though. In my heyday, I must have had close to 400 mini sites. The focus was on adsense. This model abruptly collapsed when a good 200 sites were deindexed May 2010. It was clear to me at that point that Google was moving in a different trend: brand and authority.

Mini sites really don’t offer too much in the way of user experience. There is nothing a large site (or “branded website”) can’t offer better than a mini site in terms of content, user engagement, or user experience. Many an authority site has started out as a mini-site, but if you don’t bother  growing your best niches beyond the mini-site phase, you are losing out big time and you may lose out completely in the end.

2011+: Brand & Authority

The strategy this year has been to diversify my efforts into building big authority sites with an emphasis on “Brand.” The search engines have really been changing the past couple years — there has been a big shift to Brands having blanket authority. The heyday of the micro site is really coming to an end (it actually did a couple years ago!). The focus here has been affiliate selling, though I’m seriously looking at moving in to the direct advertizing market or offering legit services.

One model that I’m really delving into is to buy premium generic domains and work on building a brand on that domain. You get an amazing, top-notch generic keyword domain (helps brand yourself as a player in that niche and people REMEMBER that domain), you get instant “trust” from your readers and more opportunities for link building via networking (people trust you more because you own the generic domain), and you even get natural links because of the domain. This might not be fore everyone though, since many premium generics cost XX,XXX to XXX,XXX but it’s one (of many) strategy you can pursue if you want to focus your efforts on flagship sites. Note that you can still build a strong brand/authority site on a non generic domain or some wacky “brand” domain name too. I find it’s just way easier working with generic domains for a focused NICHE. If you want to go really broad though, a brand-type domain is better. (See my post about exact match domains).

So why all this talk about branding and authority? I know that not everyone can become a quote “Brand” in terms of say TripAdivsor or Amazon. But you can, with some foresight and (a lot of) elbow grease, brand yourself in a niche. Building a “brand” is more than just throwing up some information about a topic. A Brand is more than that. A brand resonates with the users, a brand does not necessary require Search Engine love to sustain itself (though by God it helps).

Now, if you want to successfully tackle a niche, you need to at least try mimicing some of the branding signals. Yes, that means reaching out with social media as a means to engage your readers on some level. That means finding out WHAT the readers are looking for and catering to their needs. That might mean you need to get yourself out of your basement, throw a shirt on (because god only knows how many internet marketers spend all their time locked up inside wearing only their underwear), and actually gets some on-the-ground information.

If you think rewriting someone else’s information is going to give you authority status in a niche, don’t waste your time. Building a real site these days can be a substantial investment of both time and money. You might need to actually hire real writers, real experts about topics, that sort of thing. You might be able to trick your readers (and Google) for a short time, but eventually you are going to be found out for the fraud you are if you go this route. Google (and other search engines) are getting very good at detecting so called “branding” signals. Can you mimic these with SEO? Yes, perhaps, but it’s getting harder and harder. At some point, it’s just so much damn EASIER to go the legit route and do the real thing. You certainly won’t sit around worrying about getting your site canned.

Just some food for thought for you newbies looking to make some money online. It’s still possible and the web is still a bit in that “wild west” phase, but slowly but surely civilization is moving in. Now is the time to get started — in 3-5 years from now, the landscape will be even more competitive. If you stake your claim now and develop a collection of authority sites, you could be laughing in a few years while sitting on a beach somewhere!

Ben

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RIP Hubpages and My other Blog

25-Aug-11

longji_rice

Hubpages Ban

So the “Hubpage Experiment” which launched this blog several years ago officially ended last month when they unceremoniously deleted most of my hubpages and banned my accounts. The Panda Updates freaked them out big time and they pretty much went on a rampage, banning/unpublishing any hubpage with a whiff of internet marketing to them.  Hubpages (for a while) pretty much lost like 90% of their traffic with the Feb panda update. They will (now) aggressively go after what they term low quality hubs. It’s a definition they are pretty loose with.

Some reasons for account termination: linking out to too many domains from hubpages (they like to call these doorway pages now. This wasn’t an issue as of 6 months ago), including affiliate links in your hubpages, writing about too many of the same topics, not having 2000 word articles full of pictures and videos and other bullshit, writing about certain topics, being too promotional with your hubs, or simply because one of the staffers got dumped by his girlfriend that day and they’re pissed as hell the day they review your hubs.

Basically, if you do anything with a marketing bent to your hubs, you might lose your account — especially if you have a lot of hubs.

Word is the hubpages has been able to restore their traffic to pre-panda levels by using subdomains. My feeling though is that the subdomain “fix” is just a short term solution. Google seems to change what they say every six months and no doubt when everyone tries to copy the subdomain solution to Panda (in the case of UGC), google will smash that fix too.

Here’s my final take on parasite hosts like hubpages:  if you want to use them to write legit articles to promote yourself as a brand/author, that’s fine. Some people have made that work for them. They write high quality articles about various topics (especially about topics they know about), they participate in the forums, answer questions, that sort of thing. This is useful if you want to make a name for yourself and funnel traffic to a single site (some people have done this well). Personally, I’m not in the business of becoming part of a community to brand myself. I want to make fucking money, not to spend time chitty chat.

IF you want to just flat out make money via adsense or sell products, hubpages and the ilk are not the best way to do it. Don’t wast your fucking time.  My feeling is that putting work into someone else’s property where you have no control is crazyness. You are too much at risk for getting the boot and losing all that effort. Put the time into your OWN sites and your own network.

My Other Blog

I’ve had quite a few people ask my about my other blog and a few of my landscape photography stuff. Yes, out of boredom I created another Internet Marketing blog last year. It’s called Backlink Reviews and the whole purpose of that blog is to review backlink software that I use/have used. This blog is more of my general make money online/ Internet Marketing. Though, there is quite a bit of cross pollination between the two blogs. So if you want to read MORE of my ramblings about IM/MMO/backlink software topics (and I don’t know why you would want to, I’m a rather boring writer), then check out that blog. I go under the Pseudo-name “Spider” since you know, I like hiding in the shadows and all!

Photography Site?

I’ve also had a few people ask me about links to my photography site. I’m currently working on putting up a landscape photography one. I only have the domain right now and nothing else, and I haven’t posted any photos on it. I will let you guys know WHEN it’s up so you can take a look at my pictures. Right now I’m still in vacation mode over in South East asia, but it’s back to biz next week, regardless of how enjoyable it is living on a comfortable beach drinking coconut water and getting foot massages. Ok, that’s just mean! But if anyone hasn’t been to Thailand yet, I suggest you get your ass over here. It’s like heaven, but without all the holy stuff.

Anyways,

Best

Ben

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The Future of SEO and Making Money Online

28-Jul-11

lake-karakul

guilin1

greatwall

Another random post by yours truly — the laziest blog poster online. Sorry, I’ve  really let this blog go the past year. To be honest,  I’ve created an alter ego writing articles on a different internet marketing blog the past while — so I suppose all the posts I should have put on this site have been going there. But once in a while, that old nostalgia comes back to me and I’ll throw something on this blog. This is one of those posts.

Google and Panda

To make money online, you need to keep evolving your strategies. I’ve learned this over the three years I’ve been doing this. If you don’t change your strategy, you are going to fail online. Sometimes, you need to radically shift the way of doing things.

I first started out gaming the search engines to make easy money. It was easy to spit out a bunch of crap and make some quick money. But that’s not really the case anymore (you can do it, but you’re sites don’t stick around for long). Gaming the SERPs has become harder and harder though, as the the years have gone by. In fact, I would posit that it’s in fact easier to just create solid websites that offer a lot of value to  the searcher and spend time “networking” to build legit links. If you do it the right way (build a legit site, network for legit links, do proper online marketing as opposed to SEO trickery), your work will stick around and you can keep building on it. Eventually, you WILL make money.

The Panda updates have been a real nightmare for many webmasters, SEO’s, and internet marketers.

Let’s see, there’s been

  • Panda 1 — VERY bad for UGC and Webmasters
  • Panda 2  — BAD for smaller websites (longer tail searches)
  • Panda 2.1 — More Bad for Webmasters
  • Panda 2.2 — Bad again
  • Panda 2.3 — Reports of webmasters regaining some of lost panda ranking (an actual positive change)

I think the average internet market has felt the effects of the Panda updates — some have been wiped out, some have been hurt only a little, and some a lot. A few have gained through the Pandas (and likely only those who have really built a solid foundation from the start). There have been a ton of legit sites penalized as well though, so I don’t want to say only good sites have made it through the Panda unscathed — there have been a lot of false positives hit by the Panda too.

Most of these Panda updates are perpetuating the Brandspam that we are all getting familiar with. Large brand names (Amazon, Wikipedia, etc) being given blind authority to rank for anything. It was bad before the Pandas but it’s worse now. Google assumes that Brand = Trust. To some degree, this may be accurate — brand names have more money and will throw more money into online marketing. The quality of the information/products *may* be higher. I would like to say Google will change this in the future, but I don’t see this going away. The solution for the little guy is to “brand” yourself as well. You don’t have to have to be a corporation or have a XXXXXX budget to create a brand. There are some things YOU, the small guy, can do to mimic the brand signals over time so Google things YOU are a brand too. Mind you, it takes time. Perhaps I’ll have a post about this in the future.

My whole theory on all the Panda updates is that the early panda’s went after sites that were dominating the single and two word keywords (the mega traffic terms), while some of the later Panda updated targeted the longer tail rankings (which is why some smaller sites/mini sites, were effected since these types of sites usually target longer tails).

Here’s the bottom line with Google: they are not your friend, especially if you are making your sole income. What’s best  for Google is not always best for webmasters. If you want to play this game called Making Money Online, you’ve got to work within those constraints.

The Death of The Informational Site?

Informational types sites, I believe, have a shelf-life. Or at least, the usual small niche sites you see peppering the web have a shelf life. Smallish sites making money from adsense/hawking affiliate products might be make something now, but in 3 years, in 5 years, in 10 years? I think not. The direction of Search seems to be favoring Brands and large scale sites, and expert niche sites. Small sites are getting pushed out.

My feeling is that you have to go big or go home now. You are either going to be an Ant or an Elephant but not in between. And it’s the ants that get crushed by the elephants.

Sorry, the 20 page site that you update three times a year won’t be outranking a dedicated niche-authority sites with daily (insightful) posts. And as we move forward the next few years, it’s GOING to take an niche site that offers the best information online, frequent updates, tons of real articles about the topic, and an active community who end up ranking on the front page for that niche term. That’s the direction we are going. If you are going to make an information site, it’s got to be big, it’s got to offer real value, and it needs to be maintained.

Affiliate Only Sites = No NO

I’ve noticed there seems to be a bit of a craze with some people who have been switching from Adsense mini sites to Amazon mini sites; the reason being, that Adsense is more dangerous and unstable than Amazon. Yes, having Amazon ONLY sites is safer than having adsense because you are not on the “map” as much to Google. But that doesn’t mean you are safe — either form one of the thousands of outsourced Indians working for Google who manually inspect websites. You are also not safe from the various big search updates that come along seemingly every month or two now. They WILL/ARE weeding out affiliate sites from the index.

Because of this, I feel that really pushing the heavy affiliate site model  is NOT the way to make a stable income online. You might make an income, now, (perhaps a LOT of income) but chances are you won’t be keeping that income in the future.

Case in point. I had an affiliate site ranking for a single keyword health term. The site was getting about 1500 uniques per day. Two days ago, Google dedindexed the site out of the blue. I had about 30 posts on the site. The theme was pretty plain (I would even say, a bit ugly and certainly not very pretty). The information was great, the posts were huge (5000 word ones), but I was VERY aggressive with affiliate links through the posts and site. Looks like one of my competitors reported the site (you get that if you start ranking high for competative single work terms) or Google manually inspects sites ranking for competitive terms to make sure they qualify for that position. Whatever the case, it was deindexed. I now have to change the theme, strip out all the affiliate links and sales stuff, add a few more posts, and beg google for a re-inclusion with a sob story.

That might scare some of you people who make money tricking the search engines, small posts ONLY to hawk affiliate products, and create (fugly) blogs with the sole purpose of funneling as many clicks to Amazon, but this sort of model is NOT the way to make a long term income.  Ask yourself this: does my sites provide real value to the searcher or is it simply a funnel to some affiliate product. If the answer is the later, your site might not be sticking around for the long term. YOU WILL LOSE YOUR SITE EVENTUALLY. I’m not just speaking out of my ass here either — it’s happened to me multiple times.

I’m not saying don’t throw on affiliate links on your site or don’t make a site with no intention of making money. We all want to make money. But if you are going to go the affiliate route, you need to REALLY strike a fine balance between affiliate hawking and legit content. To keep an affiliate site that getting a good amount of traffic in the index/ranking, you are going to have to offer EXTRA good content and have a LOT of content that’s DOES NOT CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS.

Google (rightly) views affiliate/review sites with a lot of suspicion because:

1. Affiliate sites often create one more level between the searcher and the product they are looking for anyways

2. Affiliate sites usually don’t provide real information (it’s biased — all focused on getting a click or sale)

If you are going to go the route of an all out “affiliate” site, you may be better off just creating an eCommerce store directly — certainly this seems to be what Google prefers anyways. Ecommerce sites are legit service-based sites. Affiliate sites are parasites (according to google).

Some food for thought anyways.

Value Matters

The key is VALUE right now. The web is very quickly mirroring the real world. The name of the game is NOT SEO, but good marketing. If you can market creatively both online and offline, you can attract interest, visitors, links, and ultimately, money. The new approach is to set up a REAL business online. Sell products directly (not affiliate marketing) offering something that your competition does not or set yourself up as a market/niche expert. For some of you who have some solid sites up and running and have used your time to test out markets, you are in a good position to set up a real business online. Others who are churning out crap and spamming automated links in order to rank — you won’t be around for long. My recommendation is to approach creating a website like you would setting up a real world online business. If your approach is to set up a wordpress blog, outsource 10 articles from the Philippines, run some Article Marketing program, comment spam, and profile spam, you won’t be making any real money in this game anymore.

Do backlinks matter? Of course they do! I really don’t see any way around the backlink issue — they will always be the most relevant (and important) ranking factor. But social factors are going to be a big part of ranking in the future. The quality of the backlinks will be even more important. It’s been getting harder and harder to game google with automated links and this is no doubt only going to become harder in the future as the search engines get smarter and smarter. Having a “clean” backlink profile will become even more important that it is. Why build your empire on sand — and building crappy links IS building your empire on sand.

One issue with gaming the serps is that if you do manage to game your way to the top for some competitive keywords, your competition won’t have any qualms about going through your backlink profile and reporting anything suspicious to the Google spam team. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before your site either gets penalized or deindexed. This had actually happened to me a few times.

Personal Stuff

I’m about a week away from leaving Canada and moving abroad. I’ve been talking about this for a while, but it’s finally going to happen. I’ll be living in Thailand and Bali and making various forays through South East Asia, Nepal, and Tibet over the next year or  two. Yes, I will still be working online while traveling.

For those who are interested, I’ll send a link to my personal landscape photography site so you can keep track of my pictures/journey. No doubt I’ll pop on this blog once in a while when the (rare) mood strikes me.

Work hard guys and make money online.

Ben

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RIP Content Farms

26-Feb-11

It’s been business as usual for me: sitting on beaches and drinking coronas.  commenting on a couple major Google changes the past couple days. A few more pictures from my last trip before we get to the nitty gritty.

sunrise in huangshan, anhui province, china

hiking on the jinshanling-simatai great wall
tashgorgan -- xinjiang, china by pakistan

Now, there has been a lot of talk the past couple months about the quality of Google search engine results. Quite a few major newspapers have been

writing articles complaining about all the thin content and spam sites that pop up in the SERPS.

The New York Times recently called JC Penny to task for sloppy SEO. Now JC Penny is by no means the only major corporation that employs “dirty seo” techniques, but they got pretty lazy about how they went building links (putting links on non-relevant, spammy support sites for one and spamming profile links to the page another). The article pretty much forced Google to openly spank JC penny.

But the fact remains that Google has been getting a lot of bad press lately – and these JC Penny incidents showing how people/companies are gaming the search engine certainly don’t give people confidence in Google.

So with all the publicity generated about google “low quality results” it was only a matter of time before they did something – if only to shutup all the naysayers.

And it happened. About three days ago.

|Google has openly declared war against the content farm model. Thursday, Google made a massive update to their algorithms, absolutely punishing the so called content farms.

Here’s a list of the top 10 most spanked “content farms.” You can see the whole list in sordid detail here

1. wisegeek.com
2. ezinearticles.com
3. suite101.com
4. hubpages.com
5. buzzle.com
6. associatedcontent.com
7. freedownloadscenter.com
8. essortment.com
9. fixya.com
10. americantowns.com

If you are an internet marketer, this change likely affects you in some way. EzineArticles, for example, has been the classic “easy” whitehat linkbuilding strategy many marketers have applied. Write a couple ezinearticles, send a couple links, and end up with a pretty decent backlink. I can’t comment on whether Google has lessened the link authority given from sites like Buzzle, Hubpages, and EzineArticles, but I suspect the links may not be worth as much. But we’ll have to see how things pan out over time, since MANY sites on the web have backlinks from at least one of the content farms on the list. The spank may end up affecting a lot of small sites and marketers promoting their domains via these sites. I pity the poor EzineArticle bum marketers who ONLY made money by promoting stuff via ezinearticles.

If you’ve been using hubpages to make some coin, you’ll be directly affected by these changes. Hubs, according to some of the stats out there, lost a significant amount of ranking.

In the one link I’ve given, the data shows hubpages went from 150k ranking keywords to around 50k ranking keywords. That’s a pretty big loss right there. EzineArticles, you will note, also had a big drop. I suspect they are going to lose 50% of all impressions over the next month. The owners are pretty much freaking out at this point and are now dead set on making ezinearticles too draconian for anyone to actually bother posting an article there. Interestingly enough, eHow (the one site that’s been getting a lot of bad press as being the king of content farms) didn’t get touched. In fact, it’s actually doing better with the update, and that’s not even counting the fact that most of eHow’s competitors have been knocked out of the competition at this point.

Note: I’ve you’ve been making money with hubpages, you are going to see a crash in your earnings from this – you may end up with around 50% of your usual impressions from now on. Now, the drop in rankings seem to be mostly indirect longtails and hubs with few to no backlinks. Individual hubs with a lot of backlinks won’t have likely been affected.

So What Does This Mean?

When I first launched my hubpage experiment to see if I could make money, I was amazed at just how easy it was to make money by only writing (keeping in mind good onpage seo and internal link structuring). However, it soon became apparent to me that hubpages would eventually get spanked…and they just did, officially.

What can you take home from this? The best thing you can do for yourself as an internet marketer is to build your own websites and not build up third party sites, like hubpages. I’ve seen some people on forums gung ho about building 1000 hubpages or whatever. Big mistake. Seriously, if you are going to devote a few years of your life to build up someone else’s domain, you might as well send them your resume. And we won’t even talk about the money you end up losing by sharing your revenue for the host site and the fact that they can delete your content on a whim.

As I’ve been saying for almost a year, the name of the game now is to focus on a few, quality sites and build them up big time.

Forget about trying to build a zillion hubs to make your money. As I’ve said, Google has publically declared war on the content farm model. That means both the revenue sharing, user generated content model of hubpages  and the churn as many niche articles out as possible “wisegeek” model are a no no. Now to be clear here — About.com or Wikipedia.com were not touched here (let’s forget about the joke called eHow), but these sites really focus on quality and all the article are written by actual experts, rather than some guy sitting around in his underwear in his mom’s basement. I think the writing is pretty clear right now: don’t put a lot of emphasis on 3rd party websites.

Now all things considered, ezinearticles and hubpages (and say Buzzle) actually offered pretty decent articles. Now, it’s more likely that an even worse POS niche articles will rise up to fill the ranking voids. We may see over the next month Google teak the algorithm somewhat so they don’t throw the baby out with the a bathwater and hubs and the like may rank better a bit. But then again, that might not happen.

Forget about building little mini sites – the era of the micro site is finished (you can find a horde of other bloggers online who’ve had their entire networks deindexed or spanked in the rankings just the past few months). I STILL see a bunch of marketers promoting the make money online with mini site method these days, and boy if you are still pursing that model as a serious income source, you better start tossing your resume out there as backup. I see way too many of you guys trying to take shortcut methods to making a stable living online. Fuck the short term and think long term. Building up a quality authority site takes some real sweat and blood. You don’t just throw up couple articles, run spambox and send a few build my spam links and sit back and cash in on your authority site. These type of sites can take a year or three to really build up. But you can make the bank on just one or two such successful websites.

So if you want stability, focus completely on owing a niche with a single site and proving as much quality information to the readers as possible.  That’s all you need to do and as a plus you don’t have to watch your back every time google does an update.

Personally, this is a great opportunity for some of you to rank your own sites even higher seeing as that a large portion of the longtail niche competition just got knocked out. So there is a great deal of opportunity here.

The sky is not falling. Changes are part of the game – for good or for the ill. Do things the right the first time and you won’t pay the price later on.

Ben K

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