These strategies are strategies many of us have been talking about for years; the difference now is that NOT doing them can get your site penalized far easier now than in the past.

Strategy 1: Vary the hell out of your anchor text links to your sites

This should be quite obvious to you by now, but if you are slamming links with the same anchor text over and over to your site, you are going to end up on the wrong site of the penguin updates. SEO’s often are faced with choosing a keyword they want to rank for or a keyword they don’t want to rank for when selecting the anchor text for a link. It goes without saying that most choose the later. You should really now be ensuring MOST of your anchor text is for keywords you are not directly trying to rank for.

I’ve given a basic breakdown. This is not necessary scientific or anything, but rather a safer rule of thumb to follow when building anchor text. The basic idea is to keep your exact keyword anchors (especially the main keywords you want to rank) well under 50% of the anchor links you get. I’d say between 10-20 percent of the links should have your exact anchor text. The other 20-50 percent of the time, you vary the exact keyword with other words included, as part of a sentance, or just use semantically related keywords instead part of the time). The other 30% – 40% of the links should straight out just be your domain name exactly with or without http:// (vary it) or without the domain extension and some spaces between each word. The rest of the time, use CLICK HERE, HERE, WEBSITE or some bunk word you absolutely don’t want to rank for.

The whole goal here is to simulate natural link anchor text patters. MOST real natural links won’t have your exact anchor text. This is where having an exact keyword domain comes in really handy for natural link building — many of the links (which are usually your domain name or some variation of the keyword in the domain) will contain the exact anchors you want to rank for. More general sites that don’t have the keyword in the domain will find it much harder to rank for that term.

THE 60%

(40%)

yourdomainname.com

yourdomainname

your domain name

http://yourdomainname.com

(30%)

CLICK HERE

HERE

website

THE 40%

(50%)

(Title of Website)

(related keywords to the main keyword, i.e. “pet clothing” instead of “dog clothing” or “short term loans” instead of “payday loans”)

(50%)

(main keyword you want to rank for)

(main keyword + extra stuff/sentence)

(h2 title of a page on your site)

Strategy 2: Create Related MiniSites to Support Main Site

The idea here is not to set up a bunch of general (and shitty) mini sites and hastily link them to the main site. That’s asking for trouble. Minisites are highly focused sites that often can rank faster for a specific topic/keyword because they are so focused. Yes, they’ve been slammed the past few updates, but with proper links and good content (both in quality and number of content), mini sites can still rank well. The key now is to develop quality mini sites solely to SUPPORT your main site/es.

The basics of a mini-site network:

• Mini Sites are semantically related to whatever they are linking to — Having a “payday loan mini site” link to a “dog training” site will not be a topically related site and may trigger flags now. A general “pet mini site” or a cat website or a website about animals linking to a dog training site IS a topically relevant link and wont’ trigger flags. I’m not saying every link from unrelated sites will hurt, but too many of them will. It’s best to try and keep everything related now.
• Links (preferably quality ones!) to every mini site – if you set up a mini site network with a bunch of new domains that have no links at all to them, don’t expect to shoot up through the rankings. True, the links will count and make some difference (especially if the whole network is a year or two + in age), but not anything like if the mini sites have links to them. The better quality links your mini sites have, the better your main site will rank.
• Min Sites don’t link to each other — you may be able to get away with some linkage, but for the most part, try and keep all the mini sites distanced from each other.
• You don’t have mini sites (and the money site/s) on Google Webmaster Tools, SAME google adsense ID, or google analytics — This is a dead sure way to let google know these sites are all a network.
• Different C-Class IP’s, unique RDNS, and unique name servers. Basically, proper SEO hosting — there’s a lot of debate about SEO hosting, but I’d say bite the bullet and get it if you plan to set up a network of mini sites to support your money sites. You should make sure your mini sites are all on seperate C class IP’s, RDNS’s and name servers. This is most easily achieved with SEO hosting, though you could just get a ton of cheap hosting services and spread things around in a pinch.
• Privacy WHOIS Enabled on Every MiniSite

Strategy 3: GET LINKS SLOWLY

Don’t build links to fast. There is nothing more suspicious than a website suddenly getting dozens or hundreds of links over a short period of time and you could trigger a penalty. As a rule of thumb, one or two new links every few days. This depends largely on the number of links you already have. If your site has thousands of links, then a handful of links every day won’t hurt. If you have 20 thousand links, then you could probably get dozens of links every day. If you have no links or a couple hundred or less, only a couple links every few days!

Strategy 4: Get Different Types of Links (but mostly links from pages/posts)

You don’t always want links from the same source, unless those sources are self-hosted blogs. If your links are ONLY from comments, directories, web 2.0′s, RSS, or other low quality link fodder, you absolutely want to make sure you are getting OTHER kinds of links, mainly links from real sites. I’ll take a properly anchored link from a self hosted blog / static website any day over a comment link, profile link, RSS links, web directory link. Web 2.0 links (ezine articles, goarticles, and such) are better than the lowest tier links (comment/profile), but not by that much these days (the exception being if the web 2.0 actually has some PR + backlinks to it).

And The Game has Changed (Again). Panda then Penguin. Seems like SEO’s/Internet Marketers can’t get no love.

I won’t rehash all that’s been said about the April 24 Penguin update — there’s PLENTY of hubbub online about it. Chances are, if you’ve SEO’ed your site in any significant way the past 10 years, you’re sites will have been smoked. Some less than others, some more than others. Plenty of innocent casualties thrown into the mix as well.

If you’re hoping that Google is going to reverse the update or change anything they’ve done, keep dreaming. They won’t. The update is here to stay, the game has changed again. Hoards of people are bitching about the update, saying the search engine is even worse than it was before the update, that Google is now a giant turd. I hate to break it to you folks, but outside the SEO/IM world, no one gives a damn about this update. Your mom, boss, and ex are still using Google search just like they did before and likely don’t notice a single change. They are not going to sign some dumb petition to get Google to revoke some 50 million dollar update on the bases of a few thousand signatures from webmasters who gamed the system with spam. Sorry, ain’t going to happen. Penguin is not going to fly away anytime soon.

The trick now is to game the search engines without actually looking like you are gaming them. Kind of funny really, one could almost call that marketing instead of SEO.

There are all sorts of theories about where to go and what to do post Penguin. Here’s my take on how the new Penguin algorithm works, based on what I’ve seen happen to some of my own sites. I had sites completely untouched and sites that were partially hit, and other sites that were completely smoked from the SERPs.

In general, it’s the sites that had NO SEO done, very light SEO, or careful “natural” link building type SEO that remained untouched by the update. Sites that I went too heavy with on the link networks / spam links, or aggressive link building usually suffered. Not all, but most such sites.

Frankly, I think the Penguin update did a very good job at weeding out many of the shitty, over-SEO’ed sites that shouldn’t have been ranking in the first place (or ranking because some SEO is paying Indians to slam non-stop spam links at the site for a year). However, the winning sites that replaced the victims of this update more often than not seem to be old articles from authority brand type sites or abandoned niche sites that have not had any SEO done on them in 10 years because the author practically gave up on the site.

The truth is that SEO’s/Marketers often put a lot of effort into a site’s content while doing serious SEO to compete.  Which means that more often than not, the sites ranked because of “dirty SEO” were actually pretty decent and certainly better than the abandoned crap that’s replaced them. SEO has kind of been like the website version of steroids: you have to do it because every one of your competitors do it.

Anyways, here are my thoughts on how the update works. I can’t be sure of course!

General

From what I’ve seen with my own sites, the update looked at both external factors and on-page factors. For the external factors, I believe google took a look at the overall quantity of anchor text used for a site’s total links (i.e. the same anchor text over and over) and also deeply evaluated the QUALITY of the link (i.e. where the link came from — good neighborhoods or bad, related sites or unrelated). I suspect google probably profiled other sites in the niche and some sort of bell curve for the expected link profiles for each NICHE. Your site’s one-page and off-page profile went into some sort of quality score which was evaluated against the niche’s bell curve and if you fell outside of a certain range, you get smoked.

Ono how the Penguin treats “bad” links to your site: Google may have simply devalued the (bad/suspicious) links pointing to your site or actually imposed a penalty. It’s either one or the other rather (though it could be some complicated combination of the two). My guess is that it’s probably some combination — bad links are devalued but if a site is way out of the normal range of what a proper link profile should be, a penalty is imposed in addition to the devaluatino (this would explain why some sites didn’t just lose SOME ranking as would happen if links were devalued, but actually were completely tossed out of the SERP’s).

Option 1: Link Devaluation

If it’s devaluation, then you may be able to scoop an increase in ranking by simply figuring out this new algo scheme and getting future links that don’t set any flags off.

Option 2: Link Penalty

If a penalty has been imposed by penguin rather than a link devaluation, you may be looking at a long road to recovery. Mixing in new link signals and modifying any offending on-page content triggers may reduce the penalty and over time a site may recover.  There certainly is probably a time factor involved before any site hit with a penalty can make any sort of recovery (3 months? 6 months? a year?). A penalty scheme gives rise to Negative SEO (more on this later) however, because one can easy simulate “bad/artificial” linkbuilding with run-of-the-mill link automation tools on the competition.

Option 3 (most likely) : Link Penalty and Devaluation

I think this is the most likely scenario and would explain why the whole Negative SEO scare is making big waves. Bad link get devalued but have too many bad links and you get a penalty.

I’ve had sites that have been completely dropped from the SERP’s to the point where they don’t even rank for the exact keyword (and I own the exact keyword .com — i.e. the BRAND of the keyword). If there were no penalty imposed, these sites would lose long tail traffic, but should still rank somewhat high for the domain name itself (but they don’t).

EXTERNAL FACTORS TRIGGERING PENGUIN

Anchor Text Should Have Disproportional Numbers of the Same Anchor Text

I’ve talked about this in the past, but I think it holds true, probably even more so NOW with the new penguin scheme in place. When you build links, you need to imitate the natural link process. And natural links don’t consist of your money keyword as 40%-100% of your backlink anchor text links. Seriously, think about this. If most of your links contain the exact same or semantically close keywords, it’s likely the links are artificial.

I would recommend trying to keep your “money” keywords between 10%-30%. I know most people ignored this in the past because, frankly, it simply worked having your money keywords as the anchor  text in most of the links you acquired.

I suspect you can get away with a higher number of exact keyword anchors in your anchor text IF you have the exact match domain for that keyword. This would make sense since the “name” of your site would more often be referenced exactly natural links to your site.

Too Many Links to Either Just Pages or Domain

Most “viral” links go to a specific page, NOT the domain usually. I’d recommend having most links as deep links (direct links to pages) rather than the homepage.

Links NOT from Relevant/Related Sites

Quite a few people made a habit of spamming links. Most such links ended up on blogs that are not in the same niche / completely unrelated. I would speculate that a certainly number of links from unrelated sites (sites not in your niche) don’t hurt at all (probably helps), but too much may impose a penalty. Unless your site/page goes viral, most natural links you get won’t be from unrelated sites to yours — they will be somewhat related in semantic content.

This also means that links from so called “bad neighborhoods” can actually hurt websites. Read into this, but it’s from this that the whole “Negative SEO” talk has exploded on the web. I’ve seen enough experiments done online to KNOW that negative SEO works. It worked before the penguin update, but I suspect it’s even more devastating now. Sites that are most vulnerable are new sites / medium sites that don’t have a strong link profile to balance any “bad links” out.

#3 makes gaming the SERPS much harder now. If you need to keep links from related sites (especially sites in your niche), that means you are going to have to work your ass off to get those links by:

• Marketing (Linkbait, Social Media, Creating Compelling Content then promoting it, etc)
• Networking
• Paying for Links

Spammy Backlink Profile of Sites Linking To You

This has always been important, but I think google really looked deep into the profile of every link pointing to your site. That means links from strong authority sites (especially sites in your niche) count even more than they did before. Links from shoddy sites (especially sites not related to your site) may not do anything for you, very little, or in quantity actually hurt your site.

ON-PAGE SEO Factors TRIGGERING PENGUIN

Keyword Density Too High in Content

I’ve had sites that had pretty much 0 links to them (ones that were ranking) but with high keyword density for the money term in the content/page titles smoked bad by this update. I can certainly say that ON PAGE factors were taken into account during this update — it’s not just external factors like backlinks that were looked at.

It’s probably a VERY good idea to keep keyword density for your money terms (and LSI terms) low  (2% – 4%). I’m in the process of modifying a few sites that were hit ONLY because of onpage factors. My strategy here is:

• radically reduce keyword density of money terms in content
• remove money keyword from majority of blog titles/headers
• add additional content to site that does NOT necessary relate to the money keyword directly

I suspect there are probably two cases where you can “get away” with higher keyword density terms on a site:

• You’re site is aged and have a strong backlink profile of powerful links
• Your site is an exact domain for a keyword. There *may* be some more flexibility for on-page use of the keyword if you have the exact keyword domain.

Titles / Headers Overuse Specific (Money) Keywords

Basically same as last point.

Overuse of Internal Links Using Same Keyword Anchortext

This is just a wild guess on my part, so take it as it is. But perhaps trying to use your many inner pages on a site to push a specific page higher in the SERPs for a keyword by using the same anchor text (I call this inner keyword sculpting) may trigger some sort of negative quality/seo score. Of course, it’s natural to link to relevant content internally on a site, but when say 20 blog posts (incidentally, the entire content on a site) link to a single page with the same anchor text, that’s a bit suspicious.

A Few Things That WILL NOT Save You From Penguin

*Domain Age Only — I’ve had aged domains that are over 12 years old with good links STILL smoked by this update, going from thousands of people a day to hundreds. If anyone says the key to beating the Penguin update is to have aged sites, this is not true from what I’ve seen. Domain Age (the age of when your site was first indexed, not the age of the registration date) may allow your site to “get away with” more than a new site, but it’s not going to save you or it won’t have saved on it’s own.

*Quality Links Only — I’m absolutely sure that aged links from quality sites were an important factor for ensuring sites fell on the right side of whatever quality score Google gives sites and it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the more quality links your site had, the safer it is/was from the Penguin update. But it’s no sure guarantee. I have two sites to use as an example here. Both are large sites (one much larger than the other, however with thousands and thousands  of indexed pages while the other site has only hundreds). Both sites are at least 6 years old. Both had aged, quality links. The smaller site was hit while the larger site was untouched (I can argue I gained traffic actually since my competition was wiped out while my site was not).

There is no argument that both the above factors influenced whether your site was affected by Penguin, but just because you had an aged site or you had mostly/all quality links doesn’t mean your site was guaranteed a free pass from Penguin. I suspect if your link profile was good but your onpage factors failed, you still would get hit. I’m sure if you’ve got an aged site with awesome links, you’re site has a higher “threshold” before it falls south of whatever quality score dips into negative territory.

*Perfect On-Page SEO – too much on-page overoptimization seems to trigger a penelty (i’ve had multiple sites with no links but really optimized on-page seo get hit). But if you’re on-page SEO was neither too aggressive or nor too little to help ranking, you still may have been caught by Penguin if your backlink profile triggered flags.

*Quality, Lengthy Content — Google can’t tell quality from shit. You could have amazing content, but Google Search being algorithmically driven, there is no real way to ascertain “quality” from “crap” on all but the most crude of terms (keyword density too high, duplicate content present). I’ve had plenty of quality content-rich sites with 4000 word posts hammered out of the SERPs.

So What to Do and Where to Go?

So where does linkbuilding stand as of May 2012? First: people will continue to build links and game the system — that won’t change. However, it’s just going to be a lot harder and you’ll have to be more sneaky about it. For now, the days of automated linkbuilding are probably at an end. I’m sure someone will find some loophole in the current algorithm and the spammers will engineer a means of getting, quick and effective links.

But if you are the average Joe, such complex tactics will be beyond you. And furthermore, one cannot build a sustainable business on the shifting sands that are SEO. I think the only way to really keep afloat of all these updates is to create a quality site that actually rises to the top naturally. As to how “naturally” depends on how well you are able to market the site.

I see a few linkbuilding strategies:

1. Paying for Links — somewhat risky, but it’s a good way to get some solid links FAST. You’ll need to have a budget though to afford buying quality links and you’ll need to target sites in the same niche or at the very least, related sites. Still a shifty way to make a business though and you are risking it.

2. Linkbait — if you can figure out a way to linkbait, you can get natural links. The challenge is coming up with a good way to generate attention; if you can generate a stir somehow, links will follow.

There are a few ways to link-bait (these are just some examples):

*Write Something VERY controversial or offensive (this generate buzz/press). I’ll give one example. Check out Swedenson.com This is a MFA site if I’ve every seen one, but take a look at how many comments this mini site has generated? How and why? Because the guy has made the entire site about trashing Swedish people. You just have to be careful with this strategy though — if you are building a site that needs to have a white washed reputation, you don’t want to come off as a racist, angry, sexist person. In some niches though, this strategy is gold.

*Offer a useful service. That service could be a forum for a community (especially if that niche does NOT YET have a community-based site yet), some sort of service that people find useful (directory, online application), etc.

*Create contests/Offer Prize Giveaways. A tried and true strategy that can be leveraged into links if you do it right and network with others sites.

*Do/Create something newsworthy. The ultimate linkbait is if you can do something or create something that’s picked up by the mainstream media (CNN, BBC, etc). Perhaps come up with a unique website idea (beautifulpeople.com is one, whatsyourprice.com, etc) that’s controversial or interesting enough that the media will write about it.

Not that just because you offer something linkbait worthy, doesn’t mean it’s going to get picked up. This is where some legwork is required — you may have to hustle online and try and promote your site/service/content to the right audience so it can gain some traction.

*Be THE Expert in a Niche. This works best if it’s a new niche/field and there is not a resident authority site (unlikely these days) present. If you’re the “first” site in a niche, you are often THE authority.

I’ve seen a few examples where a guy with crazy knowledge about a subject joins the major community forums in a niche, debunks bullshit by other so called “experts”, offers tons of free, good advice, then sets up his own site and getting an instant following. Old Grizz did this in the MMO world years back and

If you actually have way more knowledge than everyone else about a subject, you can often make a name for yourself right away online and create a business. I’ve seen this happen in the fight / combat / MMA  niche with the guy who created the website www.8weeksout.com. That guy basically joined sherdog.net forums, started giving away amazing MMA fight conditioning information for free (he’s a trainer for some of the top UFC/Pride fighters), got tons of attention on the forums and became the resident expert after a few months of this, then set up his own site and started selling his own program. Insta business without all the waiting bullshit. Of course, the guy has crazy real world credentials and is a great writer to boot.

3. Networking in your niche — this is the traditional, slow way of building a name for your site. Join a community in your niche and start posting legit comments on related sites/forums. You’ll actually have to participate in real discussions though and likely actually know what you are talking about. Networking rewards hard work though and if you actually have something interesting to say, you can build a name for yourself. Once you do, it’s easy enough to get links from sites in your niche because they KNOW YOU. Take a look at many of the competative niches (say SEO) and you’ll see all the top sites have branded themselves by networking over the years by being active in the community. This can take months or years though, but it’s probably the surest way to generate real links.

4. Private Link Network — this is still a surefire way to rank, and it’s always been this case. Most people simply don’t want to put in the work or spend the money to set up a quality Link Network. And by link network, I don’t mean some low end network like Build My Rank and such. We are talking about your OWN network that only YOU use, usually consisting of blogs/sites topically related. I suspect topically relevancy is even more important now after the Penguin update. That means you want links coming from related sites in the niche or at the very least, pages containing related content. You can control this if you set up your own network of minsites that support your money site. To make this effective, you absolutely need to have SEO HOSTING, privacy enabled on your sites, all mini sites without the same adsense ID (preferably NO adense), not on analytics or webmaster tools. It goes without saying that you want each site in your network to have links to them. You’ve got to treat each site in your network as a legit site — that means no spun content or any shady shit. Put on 10 or so pages of quality content and fill out each site. They should offer value to the public on their own and there should be no “hint” that these sites only exist to send link power to your main site/s.

I suggest you check out my How to Create a Link Network and my Setting up a Blog Farm (this article is a bit dated, I would say that using self hosted sites instead of web 2.0′s is by far the better way to go when it comes to creating a link network).

CONCLUSION

I think the way link building is done is going to have to change. The fact is that most of us opted for the sloppy style of link building — utilizing easy link networks, tiered link pyramids propped up at the bottom by pure spam links, and messy 3 way link exchanges. I think those days are probably over. The fact is that “SEO” has reached the point where it’s simply the risk-reward ratio of greyhat/blackhat is just not really worth the effort anymore.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the name of the game is to market your site in such a way that people find it valuable and are willing to link to it, either at a prompting from you or completely on their own. If you’re site is purely informational based (the standard micro site), you are probably not going to have much luck getting any sort of natural links. You are going to have to think outside the box a bit on how to make your site a linkbait factory. Provide some type of extra service (outside of pure text-based information) that people find very useful (a service, software program, etc) that will have people naturally linking to your site always works well. There is a path to getting links by having amazing, compelling writing, but often this ONLY works for niches that are more “bloggy” in nature (entertainment niches, travel, fashion, etc). If your niche is PURELY commercial, you’ll have to come up with other angles to get those links.

Basically, the line between SEO and “Marketing” is not so distinct anymore. I think to get a site ranked high and to STAY ranked (the keyword here is STAY — what’s the point of getting a site ranked quickly then losing it 6 months down the road in a future Google Update?), you are going to have to actually market your site as opposed to building links. A big difference between the two.

ON the positive side, Google has pretty much reset the search results with this update (ignoring the fact that the huge brands are dominating EVEN more). So most of your direct competition — i.e. other marketers — have suffered the same penalties you have. So cheer up, the bottom 3 spots on the first page not dominated by brands are certainly up for grabs.

On a more serious note, I would highly recommend you look at alternative means of making money OTHER than just internet marketing. Find a way to build traffic / generate income online not directly related on Google. Because if you rely on google ONLY for your income, you are vulnerable. I don’t care if your site is as white hat as they come, you can still end up as collateral damage during an update. Work on a real-world side business that doesn’t necessary need Google, build an online list so you have customers outside of organic search, create a brand/service so people KNOW your site without finding it in the search.

It’s a changing world out there guys and online is the fastest of them all. As for me, I’m still kicking after this. I lost quite a few sites, but I’ve had enough big quality sites that were untouched by the taint of SEO (natural links from the quality content + services the sites offered to the public) that they passed whatever quality score Google has been handing out with the past updates. These sties are still earning money. And believe it or not, some of those old micro sites that have been much lampooned have survived this update (probably because I haven’t done any SEO to them) and still make money. My focus the past few years have been a few big projects that offer services to the public, both online and offline (i.e. stores). This update only has me working even harder to diversify off Google — I HIGHLY suggest you pursue opportunities outside of organic traffic. It’s a pain in the ass at first, but it’s well worth the effort. Build a business that can survive with or without Google!

Good luck.

Ben K

Ok, it’s been a few weeks since my last post. I was waiting until the experiment was concluded.  This a follow up to my post about restoring a deindexed site.

As stated in my last post, I committed the following changes to my deindexed website before doing a reinclusion request in the Google Webmaster Tools:

• changed the wordpress theme to a custom theme that looks good
• removed all monetization — adsense + affiliate links taken off
• modified the content to change anything remotely salesy to non salesy
• added 3 new posts (site has a total of about 25 posts). Made sure to include videos and pictures on the most recent post
• filled out the nav bar with more stuff (contact with picture + address, about page, a  forum link)

This took me a couple hours to of playing around with the theme and site to do. I then submitted a re-inclusion request with a long paragraph about how I’ve revamped the site and the current aim is to help people with that health problem and to deliver legit and quality content.

Submitted the request Jan 14th

Statcounter log showed Jan 16th a Google IP from India (i’ve noticed this is where the quality inspectors come from). They stayed on the index page for 0 seconds.

Jan 19th, I received this in my Google Webmasters Mailbox:

Dear site owner or webmaster of [WEBSITE REMOVED]

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider [WEBSITE REMOVED] for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from [WEBSITE REMOVED] may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google’s search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Ok, back to the drawing board for this one. I completely changed the theme, I removed all monetization, I updated the site with 3 new posts each around 1500 words. I included videos and pictures in the latest post. STILL not enough as whoever inspected the site from india still felt the site violated quality guidelines. A few reasons occurred to me:

-the site was in a health niche. Google stated in the past that health type sites need to be pretty trustworthy. Misinformation can have consequences

-the domain name itself was a spammy. It was a 6 keyword domain. It’s easy to argue that “healthcheck.org” is a legit site. But “howtogetridofcornsfast.net” or “howtogetridoftoepain.org” types of domains might be viewed a bit more critically, especially since they are ultra targeted. I’ve stated in the past that search seems to be favoring big general authority sites or big niche specific authority sites. Too specific might land you in trouble if the content and site layout is not appealing, especially if you start ranking for the root keyword and getting lots of traffic.

So I’m a firm believer in trying something until you can get it working. I went back to the site and modified it even more:

• added a custom logo to the site (before it was just a generic text logo) designed with logo software. Logo name was NOT the exact domain name, but more of a brand name (community related to the health problem)
• Changed the site title to something community orientated (not the same as the website domain, which is an EMD for the original term I was targeting).
• added another 3 posts with the last post being 2000 words and full of pictures and videos and LINKs to legit health sites.
• pumped up the sidebar with social media buttons, links to authority sites, some generic tips
• went through the entire site and removed about 10 low quality articles that were first put on the site 2 years ago. These were basically ezinearticle rewrites and the content was pretty similar in theme. Many of these had similar titles — they were basically created to target the long tails from google keyword tool.

All in all, I spent another 4 hours working on the site and designing that custom logo. Total time spent fixing the site up about 8 or so hours. I resubmitted another re-inclusion request January 20th.

I’m a firm believer in showing some proof and giving examples. So here is the before and after shots with site info/information edited out (for obvious reasons guys):

this layout/site was deindexed

This is the final layout after changes made

As you can see, the improved layout is dramatically better in terms of the look. Really, the look of your site makes a big difference to google. Back in the 90′s and early 2000′s, you could get away with a craigslist looking site. Ugly was ok (tripod/geopages for those who remember) and in fact normal. But in the era of wordpress blogs and web 2.0, sites have to look good.

Well February 8th, traffic states suddenly spiked. It had been over 2 and a half weeks since my second re-inclusion request had been submitted and I had not seen any increase in traffic or reviewed any message from the Google team so I assumed I had been rejected again (from past experience, there can be a week or two delay between when they reject/accept your re-inclusion request and when they send you the official letter).

Well I logged into webmaster tools and found this waiting for me in the inbox:

Reconsideration request for [WEBSITE REMOVED]: Manual spam action revoked

February 7, 2012

Dear site owner or webmaster of [WEBSITE REMOVED]:,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider [WEBSITE REMOVED]: for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.

Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

A look into the visitor history on statcounter revealed this:

Interesting to note:

• reviewer spent 12 minutes on the site
• left from a different page (meaning they were browsing around the site quite a while looking at things)
• two and a half weeks after the request was submitted (which was right after the first request was denied).
• it took about two days after the spam action was revoked for Google to start sending traffic again. The third day, traffic jumped by about 20x.

Let’s take a look at the traffic stats:

Now, at the peak of this site’s ranking, I was getting over 2000 visitors a day (sorry, I don’t have the stats for that anymore. I was using analytics. I deleted the site from my analytics account  — I barely use analytics anyways as I don’t trust google — when I made the re-inclusion request).  Now even with the spam action revoke, I’m only getting a bit over 200 people a day now, 1/10th of what I was getting a year ago.  I expect it will take a couple weeks, even a month for the rankings to stabilize. I fully expect that traffic will continue to increase every week. I’m still not ranking for the main two keywords I was before the deindex and it remains to be seens if ALL my rankings will recover. It’s been about a year since the site was deindexed, remember this. Frankly, if ALL my rankings are recovered in time, then that’s a very good sign of hope for some people!

My plans are now to build up the site a bit with more content, send a few new backlinks to it, and sit on it for a few months. If the traffic returns to 1500-2000 people a day (and it certainly could!), I’m going to sell the site and maybe make a quick 8-12k on it. All and all, not bad for a site that was completely traffic dead for a whole year as of about a month ago!

A few points to take from this experiment

- You can recover deindexed sites, even if your site was a load of shit

- You must make prettify your site dramatically to recover your site

• custom logo
• remove old content that might be “thin”
• remove content that’s similar to other content on your site
• don’t have content that’s thinly targetting google keyword tool long tail results
• ensure your site has plenty of content (i’d say at least 10 pages of content, preferably 20ish+)

- Make sure to write a long paragraph in the reinclusion form stating your intent to make a community-based site that’s all about quality

- If your site is about a specif topic (especially in the health niche or about something salesy), make sure to change to site to be something community orientated. Convert the site into a forum only site (you can swap it back after you get back in the index), add a bunch of community features, etc.

- Sites that have spammy domains or real longtail domains may struggle to get reindexed. You’ll have to work extra hard with a site like this. I suggest making sure the logo is a custom one and NOT the domain name. Also change the title to something general.

- If you get rejected, KEEP SUBMITTING NEW RE-INCLUSION REQUESTS OVER AND OVER (could be one quality reviewer might accept what another rejects)

- The Google Search Quality Team that reviews your website will be from India

I made substantial changes to the site the first time around and in my mind, the changes were good enough to get the site reindexed. Apparently not. Now it could have just been the mood of whoever reviewed the site (the first review spent less than 30 seconds on the index page before rejecting my request, the second reviewer spent 12 minutes shuffling through my site). So tinkering with the look of the site and making a couple surface changes might not be enough to fix your site. You can try, but you may have to significantly beef up the content, remove content that’s thin, etc.

I hope this case study /experiment has been helpful to you folks and I’m glad the experiment proved successful. So if you have a money making site that gets the boot, it’s totally possible to restore the site to Google’s good graces. You just might need to revamp the site dramatically and submit multiple re-inclusion requests. There is that saying that’s true: The Squeaky Wheel Get’s the Oil.
Cheers from Thailand

Ben

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. So it’s completely possible to do, and I’m going to prove it from ground up with a real example with this case study.

Now I’m going to get on my soap box here and say this first: if you’ve had a site get deindexed, there’s probably a good reason for it. The google spam team does NOT go around deindexing quality sites that contribute value to readers. If you’ve got a site you’re quite active on, that the community finds useful, and is basically a clean site, and all your links don’t consist of spam, you won’t be bothered by google. If your site is ugly ass, your content is thin (ezine rewrites, dup content, or just basic content non-native speakers pumped out for a couple bucks and article, or fluff content that really says nothing new, and your navigation on the site sucks or tricks people into clicking on google ads, you’re going to have problems.

If your site looks even remotely like one of the following sites below, by the seven saints and their seven beards, you’d have to be a fucking idiot not to realize why your site was deindexed:

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 (3-5 even better). 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!)

Now I’d say Strategy 2 is the last ditch — i’ve been rejected from re-inclusion 5 times sort of attempt. Really though, I feel (and read part 2 of this article to see why), that you can pretty much recover ANY deindexed site if you put some work into it without resorting to a fake “I’m a new owner of this site ploy.”

If you opt for this strategy, you’ll need to follow steps 1-7 above in addition to doing the following:

1. Put your site on a different / new hosting server. Don’t throw it on any hosting that has your other sites and definitely not the same hosting it was on when it was deindexed or rejected from reinclusion if you made an attempt in the past.

2. Change Registars. If you bought it on godaddy, transfer it to some other registar. This is critical as it fits in with the whole “I bought this site from someone else”

3. Change the WHOIS information to something completely new. Change the phone number, email address, and  owner name (you can fake this, but it’s not a good idea to put in fake owner information — you can lose a site in theory that way. Best if you have a business name or you put it in a family’s name or something).

4. It goes without saying that if you do use analytics (and you’ll need to connect the site to webmaster tools to do a reinclusion), you do it with a BRAND new google account that’s not connected to your old stuff. It’s best if you create a new google webmaster account /google account with a different IP. And don’t use the same contact info or email stuff! Whatever you do, don’t use google service connected with your old stuff!

5. You’ll need to do a complete site redesign. I have bought domains from other people only to find out they were deindexed. In one case, I submitted a reinclusion request and was STILL rejected because the new theme didn’t meet the quality guidelines. So the 1-7 guidelines at the beginning of the article still apply.

After you complete the above 1-5 steps, you then submit a new re-inclusion request (not before guys, not before).

Yes, strategy 2 is a lot more work than strategy 1, which is why I almost always employ strategy 1 unless I’ve bought a domain that’s been deindexed already for some reason (happened to me twice and in both times I have recovered gotten the domain reindexed).

My How to Restore a Deindexed Website Case Study

This post is going to be a bit of a case study on how to bring back to life a deindexed site using Strategy 1 from above. 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.

Edit: Part 2 of the experiment is now up.

Cheers from Thailand!

Ben

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

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

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

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

Some travel pictures I took a few months ago to get this post warmed up…..

To see the above picture in all it’s panoramic glory, CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.

Anyways, there’s been a lot of rah rah about Grizzly’s newest post. I thought I would toss out a few of my own musings, for whatever the pennies they are worth.

We’ve seen a bit of an evolution in the way the search engine algorithms have shifted in favor of larger sites and out of favor for the small micro niche sites. A lot of this happened during the Mayday Update last year, but I’ve noticed every update, something seems to shift around each update in an attempt to cull those micro sites with bad link profiles.

Regrettably, I was pretty dead set at one point about making money online via lots of little sites. I had a wake up call when I lost what some people would consider a full time income . This is a small fraction of what I made, so it was survivable, but it was a clear wake up call to me that I was doing things wrong. Because of that, I backed out of typical IM stuff and I also backed out of this blog for a while too, feeling I pushed people in the wrong direction.

I started this website as Make Money Online with SEO, but in reality, that’s name sets people on the wrong path.  Perhaps a better name would be Make Money Online with Internet Marketing. Yes combining SEO with internet marketing is a sure way to make a buck online, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that SEO is simply a tool that you, as a marketer, employ.It is not the end all and be all of this business.

We are all of us internet marketers and we need to use MORE than just SEO. We need to use sound marketing tactics too — and that includes in the way you get backlinks. Marketing is, in my limited opinion, about making a connection with the audience, be it for the purpose of sales or to attract “attention” to whatever it is you are marketing. The more “attention” you can attract, the more backlinks you well get, without having to build them yourself. What am I trying to say?

Pull back a bit from the pure SEO aspect of this business and look at ways to connect with your audience/readers. If you can build that connection, links will follow.  The trick is figuring out how to build that connection — and this holds true for any niche out there.

Anyways, I’ve had a few people ask me specifically if SEO is dead and should you still get links blah blah blah.

The answer is NO Seo is not dead and you still need links. The change needs to be in how you get them

Put it this way, it’s not the links you get that are bad but the manner in which you get those links. If the manner in which you get them is clearly contrived (and it’s very very easy to tell if they are), you will probably run into problems in the future. Maybe not now, maybe not in a year, but at some point, you will.

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 is a lot of hurah about “natural linkbuilding” being tossed around on MMO blogs right now as the best way to build links. In fact it’s seems to be this who natural linkbuilding seems to be a new IM buzzword. It’s nothing new, it’s  the oldest way of getting links.

I’ve seen this formula banded about online by some bloggers: Building Links = Bad. Natural Links = good.

But it’s not quite that simple.

The truth is that most of you will target the same old IM niches that every other market goes after. You’ll outsource a cheap writer who will basically recompile a couple ezinearticles or if you are broke, you’ll do so yourself. Say you don’t do any linkbuilding. You just sit around and..wait..and wait..and wait

What will happen? Fuck all. You won’t be getting any natural links.

The bottom line here is that if you the standard niches and set up the regular sort of internet marketing site, you are going to have to actively linkbuild to rank your sites. If you don’t linkbuild, then you are going to have to come up with some other indirect ways of gaining some natural links, which, I admit, can take some time and for non-authority style sites, it’s not worth the time.

You can certainly do quite well linkbuilding, provided you are smart about it (aim to get quality links, watch your link velocity, if you go with spammy links, make sure you filter them through secondary sites). This is search engine trickery, but it’s a powerful tool that you should utilize.

But it’s not the only tool and not by far. Another often ignored way to build links is through natural backlinks. And gosh darn it, you might find that natural backlinks are the best links of all.

Keep in mind there are also more creative ways to linkbuild that don’t involve using Post Spammer, Buld My Spam, Scrapespammer, ArticleSpammer and other mass backlinking methods. But that’s another post that I’m too lazy to write right now.

Now back to topic. If you are building up a “bigger” site, then you have a shot of some natural links. If you don’t have a bigger site that’s clearly not of any sort of quality, then forget about it and go back to linkspamming since that’s the only way you are ever going to rank your site.

Natural links, in my experience, only happen in a couple cases.

1. Your site does something completely new or is perceived as one THE authorities in the niche (not likely for you small fries)

2. You write content in such a way that it attracts links — a couple ways to do this

3. You are in a niche with a huge “passion” factor.

4. Bigger sites = bigger chance of links

Ok, let’s break some of these down a bit.

1. You are THE Authority

If you’re site is clearly the authority in the niche. You will attract links. Keep in mind that most natural links won’t be coming from you via your competitors, especially if they are marketers. There’s been a lot of real info about linkbuilding and real SEO these days. Chances are, anyone ranking for your typical IM terms knows a little something about SEO and they know enough not to promote their competition via links. However, if your site is pretty damn useful, you’ll pick up some natural links here and there. Maybe not a lot, but over time they can add up. A couple dozen natural links from real sites (especially if they are in related niches) can do more for your ranking than hundreds and hundreds of shitty links. What’s even better is that these natural links don’t just up and vanish overnight as spam links (comment spam, profile spam, etc) or backlink network links often end up doing.

The problem is, you don’t just “become” and authority in a niche. It can take some time. This is a whole nother post, but there are several ways to skin a cat.

• Become an authority through Social Marketing

People rag on the whole “social media thing” because it may not translate directly into sales. But you see, if you cultivate social media right (and I’m not just talking facebook/digg/twitter shit, I’m talking about join forum discussions with links back to your site, leaving real and relevant comments on related blogs, and basically involving yourself in the community). Join the community, contribute real advice, write about stuff, build up an audience, and links will come naturally. Or if you don’t get links, you will still build up a reputation/brand and related referral traffic. Quite often you will find that as your online “reputation” goes up, so do  the number of natural links. This should not be a surprise as links are THE main way search engines determine your online value. If people know about you, you get linked to. Let me stress, again, that there is a TIME process involved. You don’t become a perceived authority in anything overnight, especially through social media. As a good example of someone who has done it in this niche, give Leo’s Internet Marketing Blog a look. He’s built himself a very good reputation through a combination of informative, and GREAT content and through socializing with many bloggers in this niche. If you apply the same strategy to other niches folks, you might just find you can build a reputation as well. The kicker is  that you kind of have to know what the fuck you are actually talking about. You can try faking it till you make it, but for some niches, you’re bullshittery will be called out pretty fast (and your reputation as well). For the time and effort you put into the process, you’ll probably want your topic of interest to be a topic you actually care about. I don’t know about you, but I’d find myself hard pressed to find the energy to be the resident “expert” on Over 40 Women’s Cheap Yeast Infection Treatments or some such topic.  You’ll find that those typical “passion” niches that you might be nuts about (say travel) have a million other people interested in them so the competition is fierce. So maybe you should be interested in Over 40 Women’s Cheap Yeast Infection Treatments…

Remember guys, building an authority through “networking” doesn’t mean you are going to automatically rank for top terms. But it’s a fantastic way to get natural links pouring in. In in time, those links will translate to organic search traffic and targeted referral traffic. Social authority translates, in time, into search engine authority.

• Become an authority through linkbuilding

Well this is the other method and one that most marketers that make money use.  You can certainly linkbuild your way to the top, but you have to be smart about it, depending on the niche. If you backlink your site wrong, you can fuck it up for good. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t backlink.

There are some basic good seo tactics you should follow and it’s a good idea to know different ways to build backlinks so you have some options. In my opinion, the main thing to keep in mind when you linkbuild is you should have a mixed backlink profile. If all your links come from shitty sources (profiles, article directories, comment spam, blog networks), that’s NOT a “natural” linking pattern and can land you in trouble. Even if you don’t end up penalizing your site, there is always the risk that google mass devalues these type of links which, if your site is propped up primary through these kind of links, will plummet. It’s a very good idea to mix in quality links from your own quality support network, have real links from other people (link exchanges, guest posts), and best of all, have a number of natural links with no “connection” to your site in any form. If you have this type of mixed link profile, you’ll rank well and won’t have any problems.

2. You write content in such a way that it attracts links

This is where your creativity comes in and this is where a lot of people hit a wall. There is a term out there that you should know about : linkbait. It’s a term you should know well because this is the key to getting a lot of natural links.

Method 1: The BEST Content

The first way is to have the BEST content in the niche. Look at your competition and see what they do. Then better it. You will never go wrong with this. It takes way more time, but trust me, it will pay you back big time. Sometimes you need more than just great content. Your site might need to cater to a community or provide some sort of service that people can utilize (other than to just read your content).

“Best” is a relative to what else people are doing in the same niche.

The “First Best”

If you are the first website in a niche, we’ll it’s not hard to have the “best” content since your site will have the only content. In this case (provide your site is not some joke of a mini site) your site will be perceived as THE authority and links will come in be virtue of that. This is true for MANY old websites — they often started out as shit sites run by some guy living in his basement walking around in underwear. Fast forward 10-15 years later, these sites are giants in competitive niches and that same guy is now loafing around in basement wearing underwear made with gold while a couple of ex playboy models are bubble bathing in a $100k jacuzzi…

The Do Something No One Else Did Best

For most of you, “The First Best” is not an option. Well, the next thing to look at is to do something no one else has done, or something else no one has the balls to do. For this example, I’ll use this site as an example. Not that I’m saying this site is amazing or I’m an amazing writer, blah blah blah. I swear a lot and I have problems spelling. Not exactly a call to fame or anything. But when I first started this blog, I decided to showcase my progress with real pictures of my income and valid information on how to replicate  that progress for anyone. And in many cases, it was a shock for people to see that you could legitimately make a lot of money with adsense/hubpages. Considering that most people talking about how to make money online don’t actually make any money online or are complete scammers, this brought some attention.

People got talking and the links started rolling in. I’ve done 0 SEO on this site, ZERO and I believe I have close to 4k raw backlinks to the site.

Now, I’m not saying I’m ranking for a zillion things or anything, but I’m just pointing this out to show that if you head into an established niche and do something new and interesting (whatever it may be), you can get natural links from related sites.

Method 2: Write Something Dramatic/Controversial

Another tried and true method is to write something very dramatic or controversial. For a prime example of the “dramatic” style linkbait, just look at Grizzly’s newest post that I linked to at the beginning of the article. He had something interesting and dramatic to say (i’ve was wrong, I never “link build anymore” etc). And people, including myself and a lot of other people who are in this “niche” respond (and send natural links). This works BEST if there is a community in the niche where you can milk links from. It’s harder to do  this if there is no community, but still possible.

Another variation of this is to attack someone or something. Grizzly was famous for doing this to guys like John Chow and Darrin Rowse. For a prime example of this sort of linkbait. There was an incident where Liz from Passive Income wrote a really negative site build it review that brought down the site build it community en force to defend their piece of shit scam system. Pitting one community against another community is a great thing to do — it can really bring in the links and lots of comment content. The only downside is you end up really pissing off one of the communities (sorry, hard to play both sides if you do this). One of my favorite linkbait tacits here is to look at a niche I’m targeting to see if there is something I can say  that excludes one group. For example (DISCLAIMER: and only and example here I’ve made up on the spot) , If I had a work at home site, I might write an article with a catchy title along the lines of “5 Reasons Why Women Are Not Suited for the Workplace”. Pissed off a lot of you women with that title eh? Exactly, and maybe enough get some of you ladies to link to “that bad mouthed, pig headed blogger guy.” Now of course, there are the moral implications of something like attacking a gender for the sake of backlinks, but I’m just giving that example to show you what can be done if you are creative. You don’t have to choose a subject that’s offensive to people, but I will say the more offensive it is, the more links you get. Sad but true.

Now I’ll admit, there are some niches that even with great content, those natural links won’t pour in.

So if you are in a niche where people won’t link to you, what can you do?

Method 3: Write Linkbait Outside of Your Niche

One “trick” is to write a catchy article of some sort that just begs to be linked to, especially by people outside of that niche (since your competition won’t be linking to it). The distinction here with Method 2 is that you are not targeting a specific community in your niche — this is to attract links from outside your niche. Now I know for you people with Cheap Toaster Sales, it’s pretty hard to write something that will be picked up an linked to.

This is where the creativity has to kick in and a lot of elbow grease used. You need to come up with an “angle.” That angle might be something like “Top 10 Ways to Die From a Toaster”. This type of title might be familiar to you — say cracked.com. There is a reason those guys get a shitload of comments and links — because their articles are interesting to read. Now I know that an article like that might not be directly tied to the content of your site, but it’s somewhat relevant. If you have a static site, great, add a blog and start writing those sort of articles. If you have a blog site, then make a section for those articles.

It might be possible to just write a post like that and links eventually find you, but don’t count on it. There is a saying “The more work you do  the luckier you get.” I prefer to make my own luck. Get your ass on the web and start promoting that post. It’s likely you’ll have to contact blogs with related content (not your direct competition though) and tell them they might be interested in sharing that linkbait post with their readers.

You can also set up an entire site (call it Site B) based around this content to use as a link resource — in each article, include a targeted link with your keyword to your main site (Site A). If you can attract those links to Site B with those linkbait posts, you can use it to push up Site A.

This is just a couple of ideas and there are plenty more ways to attract natural links. This is by no means a definitive guide to linkbait, but rather a primer on how to get started. I’ll let YOU get creative here. Note that if you want to do this yourself you need to be a decent writer (if not, you need to hire someone who is).

I will say this: linkbaiting can take a lot of work and practice, but nothing in life worth having comes without work. For those looking for a set it and forget it method, good luck to you — you won’t be seeing very many natural links.

3. You are in a niche with a huge “passion” factor.

Fantastic, it’s much much easier to get natural links in these type of niches.

But what is a passion niche? There are a couple kind of “niches” as I call them. The first are the commercial niches — these are those standard niches that you can make pretty good money from because there is a lot of commercial intent behind the searches. People are looking for something specific — maybe to buy midget thongs, maybe for cheap condoms. You can make money if you rank and offer the right product. It’s pretty hard to directly extract natural links because for one, the people searching for that term will typically be your joe only concerned with buying the product or your competition scoping you out. Those are not the people who will sending you links.

The other type of niche is the “passion niche”. These are those niches about sports, entertainment, or anything where there is a lot hobby sites. If you have an informative and highly useful site in these type of niches, it’s fairly easy to get natural links. There is usually an avid amount of passionate readers who are just itching to join in on discussions and link to sites they feel are authoritative in that nich. It’s also pretty easy to “network” in these niches if you join the community.

The same tactic of writing linkbait posts applies for these type of niches — in fact, it’s usually easier to get “links” from a passion niche via linkbaiting over a commercial niche. Good content also goes a long way too. If people in that niche perceive your site as useful, they’ll likely link to it.

Of course the the only problem with this type of niche is it might be hard(er) to extract money from it. I personally like to go after the commercial niches but create a couple semi related passion niche sites to support the commercial site. It works well, but it’s not something you can “do” in a couple weeks.

4. Bigger Sites tend to yield more links

The final point I want to make is that the bigger your site is, the more chances you have to get a link. If you’ve got a smaller 5 pager site, well, you only have say 5 pages that might potentially get a link. But if you have a site with 100 pages, that’s 95 more “chances’ to get a link. If you’ve got a site with 20,005 pages, that’s virtually 20,000 chances more than your 5 pager site will have to get natural links. Bigger sites also tend to seem more authoritative too just by appearances — if you had the choice between linking to a 5 page site or a 1000 page site, where would you place your link? Exactly. There is also the issue where the search engines seem to give sites a lot more authority over small sites, by just the number of pages the site has. I can’t prove this, but I have a deep suspicion that it’s true — you stand a much bigger chance of gaining SERP authority with a big site than you do with a small site.

Well that’s it — a few things to think about for the new years. Another big post. And I really thought I’d do this post in under 1000 words. When will I ever learn!

Happy New Years Guys

Best
Ben K

The famous longi rice terraces of Ping'An villiage, Guilin, China

The utterly remote and desolate landscape of the Karakorm Highway -- the road from china to pakistan (highest paved highway in the world (4000 meters)

Magic happens in the Yellow Mountains of the Anhui province, China

More pictures to come when I post again…IF I post again

But back to SEO and Making Money — this is a Make Money Online blog and not a photography blog afterall.

Ok first, no, I’m not dead, injured, or broke. I’ve been busy the past 7 months and writing make money guides hasn’t been my primary focus the past 5 months (since I’ve been back). In fact, I haven’t posted specifically for one reason: I always seem to pay a price for posting real information here. And I earn all my money outside of this niche. These days, I’m only really inclined to do work when it leads to money. Call me a lazy, money grabbing bastard, but oh well.

Back to the topic of Adsense Myths. I see a lot of pure shit out there in terms of information about adsense. There is fact and there is fiction and from where I stand, most of the stuff you read on forums and pick up from the table of gurus is fiction. Let’s talk a bit about what I’ve learned with Adsense the past two years of making hundreds of thousands with it.

Sense Myth 1: You Can’t Make a Real Income with Adsense

Fact: This is &(&*(##.

I’m not going to bother proving my income anymore. Been there, done that. But you can make absurds amount of money with adsense if you know how. I’ve talked about how, Grizzly talks about how. Court over in his Keyword Academy has an entire program about the topic, and there are countless other sites that detail strategies (most are wrong though).  Now, just because you CAN make easy money with adsense, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. But we’ll save that for another post. Or maybe later this post!

Adsense Myth 2: More ads on your site mean more money

Fact: Not necessarily.

I can’t say for sure, but I’ve noticed some ad sections seem to pay more. It’s usually the bigger 250×300 ads that seem to give out the best paying clicks. And it’s also the MAIN ad that usually get’s the best click values. I suspect that Google tracks the conversions on each of your ad bars and gives the best CPC to the highest converting. In some cases, I’ve noticed that throwing on too many ads can lower the CPC. It’s up to you to specifically test this, but it doesn’t always pay to go gungho with plastering as many ads as you can on your site. There is another reason for keeping the number of ads down that I’ll address later on in the article.

Myth: Mixing adsense and affiliate offers decreases your adense earnings

Fact: More rubbish.

You can do quite well mixing adsense and affiliate offers on the same site. The key is HOW you do it folks. I will admit, for some niches, pure adsense works best. But putting on a few related affiliate offers won’t usually take from your adsense. In fact, you might even increase your income. I’ve had sites literally double in income by combining adsense with affiliate offers.

Adsense Myth 3: CPC is Everything when it comes to keyword research for adsense sites

Fact: Google Keyword Tool CPC lies more than Hilary Clinton

Sites will tell you to go after high CPC, but I’ve found over the past few years that the CPC shown in the adwords tool if far far from true. That’s 80.00 CPC can bring in .10 cent clicks and that .25 cent CPC can bring in 10 dollar clicks. Don’t believe it at all.

You have to remember that just looking at a single keyword’s CPC is no way to really judge your total potential earnings either. I’ve seen some so called formula’s floating around that guestmate your potential earnings based on the expected traffic and your CPC. Rubbish and half!

For one, not all of your ads will display the keyword you are targeting. You might be targeting the keyword: Midget Thongs with a CPC of $10 according to the keyword tool.

Now, depending on the content on your site, the ads might display ads that target the Midget Thong keyword or it might not. If it displays the right ads, then the CPC is generally accurate. But there are a lot of factors.

1. Is the ad actually targeting the keyword or displaying another keyword ad
2. Is the traffic geo (i.e. adsense often displays different ads to people from different locations)
3. The awords bid fluctuates from day to day
4. There are no bidders for that keyword
5. The page the ad is displayed on is not focused on the keyword you are targeting and thus the ad is not the keyword CPC you are targeting

These are only some of the factors. So basically what I’m trying to say is that CPC is only a rough guestimate. I talk a bit more about this on my forum.

Adsense Myth 4: Google is just waiting to BAN your ASS if you slap adsense onto your site

Fact: Only if you produce shit

No, despite the fear people seem to have, Google is not waiting with a big stick to bash people who monetize with adsense. The thing is, there are really two teams out there: the Search Team and the Adsense Team. Both seem to have contradictory views. Adsense wants to increase revenues for google while the Search Team wants to ensure the search results are as high quality as possible. Sometimes, what’s good for one is NOT good for the other.

That means while you 500 one page xfactor mini sites might make Google 100 bucks a day, it also fills the index with 500 pages of pure crap that pisses off the searcher and lowers the brand value of Google. Not good.

So what’s to be done? If you want to make stable money with adsense, you need to really build up your sites. It’s not necessarily HOW much content you have on your site, but it’s more about the presentation of your content (though you need to have a certain amount of content on your site, of course). If you are tricking users into clicking on ads or offering the user nowhere to click but ads, that’s bad. If your site is so fucking ugly that your reader’s eyes scream in agony, that’s bad. And if your site is bare bones, that’s fucking bad.

Just build sites that offer easy navigation to the user. Sites that answer the user’s questions. Sites that link to relevant authority sites about the topic, sites that don’t have a crazy amount of ads.

I know there has been a few automated messages from google telling people to put more ads on your sites, but don’t take this as gospel to make your site an adspam site. If you can use the maximum 4 ads in a friendly, non spammy way, go for it. If your 4 ads are all above the fold and invasive to the user experience, don’t.

Adsense Myth 5: It’s easy to get your adsense account banned

Fact:Yes and No

no, it’s actually not. If adsense went around banning everyone who used it, they’d be filing Chapter 13 very soon. But there are a few easy ways to get your adsense banned:

1. Clicking on your ads regularly
2. Having someone click on your ads regularly
3. Breaking the TOS in some way (having gambling, porn, or other “naughty” content on with adsense
4. Delivering non-converting traffic

It’s #4 that I want to address here, since it may be news to a lot of you. Let’s talk a bit about it. Adsense is a CPC model. That means it’s a cost per click for the advertizer. You click, the advertizer pays for that click. Now, the advertizer is expected a certain return for a certain number of people who click. Just like you expect a certain number of people to click on an ad per set of people. Despite the seemingly random nature of the whole process, there actually is a very defined “ratio” of conversions. Now you can mess with this ratio with your site layout, the number of ads you have, how focused your content is to the topic, the desperation of the people searching, etc.

Now when a certain number of people click on an advertizer’s ad, they expect results. The could be a sale for every 10 people deliver via adwords, a lead generation, etc. When they pay for traffic but get no conversions from that traffic, they naturally get pissed. And they bid on less adwords or stop altogether. And google loses customers. This is bad folks.

If any of you work with lead generation, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You might be able to induce targeted traffic to fill out leads for an advertizer, but if those leads don’t end up converting for the company paying for the leads, they will cut your ass from the program.

The same goes for google. If your sites (or some of your sites) REGULARLY deliver ad click traffic that does not convert for the advertizer, you risk having your account banned.

Now the question is, HOW DO YOU DELIVER NON CONVERTING AD TRAFFIC

Adsense is generally pretty good at delivering converting traffic. It’s highly targeted for the most part. BUT this is where the layout of your site is VERY important. If you throw ads that masquerade as a navigation bar (vertical or horizontal), you are playing a dangerous game. Folks, you don’t want people to click on an ad thinking they are navigating to a page on your site. They won’t convert for the advertizer. Get enough of this non-converting traffic and you put your account at risk of a ban.

Simple, right? That’s why it’s much preferable to have a clean website layout where only the people who actually WANT to click on the ad will click on it. Integrate that ads rather than have them shout out from above the fold. Those kinds of layouts have higher CTR, but the traffic is often less converting for the advertizer.

Xfactor style themes and other so called “adsense” themes are created by idiots who don’t really understand the simple concept: don’t fucking bit off the fingers from the hand that feeds you.

Nough said.

Adsense Myth 6: Good Content = Higher Adsense CPC

Fact: The opposite actually

The sad reality is that crap content almost always has a better adsense CTR than does good content. I’m sure a lot of you folks who work with adsense have already realized this. But for those who don’t know, here’s why.

When you write an article that really engages the reader and does a pretty damn good job of answering all the questions, the reader won’t be as inclined to click on an ad and will spend more time reading your article.

I’ve found that a higher bounce rate almost always means a higher adsense CTR. This is why it can be so hard for those used to earning adsense money with crap content and spammy themes. If you switch to reader-friendly themes and fill out your sites with good content, your CTR may tank by 50 to 75 percent.

Now, this does not mean I’m advocating producing shitty sites to make money with adsense. I’m just saying it’s a lot easier to make money with adsense by producing shit. But it’s not a stable way to earn money. I’ll take the loss in CTR in trade for a site that stays indexed.

Adsense Myth 7: Adsense is the Best Way to Make Money Online

Fact: Adsense is in fact only good for certain niches

If at all possible, it’s better to try to convert your traffic with affiliate sales or lead generation over adsense. Almost always, you can make more money per same amount of traffic. The fact is that adsense is the lazy man’s way to make money. But it’s not necessary the most profitable way to make money.

Adsense is the middle man. Cutting it out gives more of the revenue chunk to YOU.

When internet marketing, keep one thing in mind: the monetization method that requires the LEAST commitment from the user will convert the best. But not all conversions are equal.

• CPC (Cost Per Click, aka adsense ) requires the least commitment by the reader. They click and that’s all.
• CPA (Cost Per Action, aka lead generation) requires a bit of commitment by the reader. They click and commit some sort of action, one that usually does not involve spending money.
• CPS (Cost Per Sale, aka clickbank, commision juncion, amazon, etc)  requires the most commitment: the reader must spend money.

But just because the CPC can generate the highest CTR, doesn’t mean that you will earn the most money.

Think of it this way: if 1000 visitors have a 5% CTR with adsense with an average CPC of .30, that’s going to be $15 dollars earned from that 1000 visitors.

Now say you replace adsense with a link that sends users to a form they can fill out (a lead). You have a 2% conversion and 4 dollars per lead. That’s 20 people who fill out the form and a total of $80 dollars earned.

For CPC, you might have a 1% CTR on a product that’s earns you 30 dollars a sale. 1000 visitors might net you $300 dollars! Hell even if it’s something like 5 dollars earned per sale, that’s still $50 dollars!

So as you see, adsense is often the montetization method that earns you the LEAST amount of money per given number of visitors.

So Ben, tell me exactly what to do here! Sorry, won’t do that. You are going to have to figure this out yourself. Now here’s a few rules of thumbs you can follow that I’ll toss out there for you. Even better, I won’t send you to a spammy sales page and charge you $37 dollars in WSO fees for it.

• Rule of Thumb 1: For traffic with a need that does not convert with sales, lead generation (less commitment) usually does well.
• Rule of Thumb 2: For target commercial traffic (product searches, health problems, etc) , CPS almost always earns you more money as the traffic will open up their wallets.
• Rule of Thumb 3: For everything else, Adsense works best

In case you didn’t understand what the fuck I was talking about, here it is in plain man’s English: Monetizing ONLY with adsense is often the way to make the least amount of money. So make sure you experiment with OTHER revenue streams for your niches. You might find you can double your earnings (or more) just by switching to some other revenue method.

So there we go, 7 Adsense Myths that I’ve seen floating around the web that, in my opinion, are (mostly) wrong.

Another Rant About Mini Sites

Now there were a few BIG changes to the Google algorithm a few months ago (MAYDAY as some people call it). There were, in fact, two updates – one that happened around the end up May and one that happened June 3^rd. There were a few major changes last month too that rocked the boat. Google is really starting to crack down on exact domain names — so if using exacts is your sole strategy for ranking, you better change that.

Mayday was designed to cut the crap from the index; it specifically targeted micro niche sites that have been developed a certain way. Oh, I know that’s not exactly what Google official said, but in reality, a lot of people saw their entire mini site empire crumble. From what I’ve seen, a lot of micro sites lost anywhere between 40-50 percent of all long tail traffic, due to sharp drops in rankings. I have one friend who lost 80 percent of all traffic.

I’m not positive exactly what sort of criteria G man used to knock sites back, but here’s a couple things I’ve noticed that may have been “looked for” by Google when targeting sites:

1. Sites with less than 10 pages of content
2. Sites that had the same theme (especially that Xcrapter theme that pretty much ruined the mini site model for everyone)
3. Titles scrapped just from keyword tool
4. Very few backlinks (less than 100)
5. Individual pages lacking backlinks
6. Backlinks from the same sources
7. Exact keyword domains
8. No outgoing links (to authority sites)

Yep, that describes about 95% of the mini sites out there. There are some crapo mini sites that did escape the update/s and are still kicking around. Probably not for long and certainly not if they leave a big wide footprint of sorts.

Where does this leave you? As I’ve been saying the past few posts, focus on quality not quantity. It’s still important to cast your net wide in terms of the number of web properties, but you should really focus your efforts on a core of sites you can really build up. The days of the 10 page set-it-and-forget it mini site are coming to an end, folks. You might get away with ultra thin mini sites for a while, but you are always going to risk waking up in the morning to find your sites gone from the index.

Now you’ve seen me rant quite a bit about the whole mini site thing. And I still get people asking me the following: “Can You still make money with mini sites.” So for the last time, here is my answer: Yes, but it’s not worth it. Mini sites are coming under heavy fire from google these days (just do a search, read a post on my forum about it,  or other forums — stories of mass site deindexes are cropping up everywhere).  I have a friend of a friend who actually lost 1.5k a day in adsense with a mass deindex about a month ago. Bad times indeed for some.

The proof is in the pudding as some people would say: Google has taken a clear stance against these type of sites and by pursuing this path seriously means you are going to lose. In a Me Vs. Google battle, I’d put my money on the guy with 50 billion in play cash and thousands of PH.D’s to order around.

Now this leads to another question that’s on a lot of people’s minds: Should You Pursue Adsense as a valid Revenue Model

Answer: Yes, but it’s a bad idea to solely pursue Adsense as a revenue source. Adsense is the easiest way to make money because you can simply do:

1. Basic Keyword Research
2. Write Targeted Posts
3. SEO your site to the front page
4. Get clicks

Pretty easy when it comes down to it. You don’t have to mess around with learning how to write a good cover letter, learning the ins and outs of marketing to people, hunting and testing various affiliate programs, etc.

However, Adsense is not necessarily the “best way” to make money as I detailed in a previous section of this post. Folks there are a number of other revenue models out there to look at:

• CPA (lead generation)
• CPS (affiliate selling)
• Direct Stores (drop shipping, etc)

I see people so caught up in the Adsense thing they miss the trees from the forest. Guys, to survive in this game you need to diversify. If most of your money comes from one source (especially Adsense), I weep for you. Something bad is going to happen, eventually. Apply the same principal you apply to investing: DIVERSIFY. If you had all your money in a single stock, that wouldn’t be smart, would it? The same thing goes for putting all your passive income eggs in the basket called Adsense. Way too much risk, especially with what’s been going on. To most new comers, I would say it’s actually better to ignore adsense as a model until you make a full time income with affiliate selling first. Way safer.

I may, if I feel generous, talk about how to break into the CPA or CPS market as I’ve been doing a lot of experiments with these models the past 7 months. But I’ll have to be in a particularly good mood to do so.

Internet Marketing Software That’s Not Bullshit

Now here’s the recommendation part of the post where I try to convince you to sign up with my affiliate link for various services. Hey, for this much keyboard pushing, I deserve a few bucks. Despite the fact that I am attempting to make money by pushing IM products on you, I actually do use and abuse these programs myself.

The Best Spinner

Any internet marketer who’s serious about backlinking is going to need to get acquainted with spinning. I’ve recommended Magic Article Rewriter before, but the new kid on the block, The Best Spinner, is hands down, the-size-of-Texas better. It’s 70+ bucks a year, but worth every penny. My highest recommendation for it.

Sick Submitter

Forget about any of those other article directory submitters, rss bots, or profile link builders. Sick submitter is your all in one SOURCE for automated backlinks. It’s a bit complicated to use, but if you master it, you can be the Darth Vader of backlinks. Well, well worth the 21 bucks a month you pay. Get it and you have no need for bookmarking demon, article demon, magic article submitter, rssbot, dedicated profile builders, and any other stuff like that

Ubot

UBOT is hands down my FAVORITE solution on the web to automating your workflow. If you are not a programmer type, don’t bother spending the 249 or so bucks to buy it. But if you are willing to spend a month or two learning HOW to create your own bots, you won’t have to buy another piece of internet marketing software again. Anything you can do in your browser can be automated. The kicker is YOU have to create the bots yourself to do it and that can take some time. But in the right hands, Ubot is deadly. If your interested, use my coupon code to knock of 50 bucks from the price: BUBU

If there is enough interest, I may create a recommendation thread for some of the better internet marketing programs. Such programs have their place and are useful, but they are not the end all, be all of backlinking. Not by far. It seems that most people don’t want to go the old fashioned way of building manual, quality backlinks. A pretty big mistake, in my opinion since these are the best backlinks you can get, better than hundreds of spam links by far. Still software can help a great deal, especially if you have many sites.

And  On to Other Things..

Ok, that’s it for now folks. I was only going to do a 500 word post and it’s already topped in at almost 3500 words. I think I’ve opened my big mouth enough for the time being and my fingers hurt. So I’m going to go do something that makes me money now.

Make sure you check out the new forum, which I completely overhauled with updated software. I’m also going to soon change the layout of this site. No need to have an ugly theme on it now.

Oh yes, I’m heading off abroad in 3-5 months again, this time for a year of travel across south east asia, Europe, and Africa. I’m going to be creating a new website detailing my travels and internet marketing while abroad. Should be interesting to read, I hope. I’ll let you know when it goes live. A few other projects I might share about later too.

Next post, when I feel like writing it, is titled “Dirty SEO”. Have a Merry Christmas in case I don’t get around to posting before then. Should be interesting.

Go Make Money Online,

Ben