It’s been business as usual for me: sitting on beaches and drinking coronas. commenting on a couple major Google changes the past couple days. A few more pictures from my last trip before we get to the nitty gritty.
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
19 Comments
I was intrigued by your subject and hearing your ‘take’ on the matter, becuase I recalled how you went through your own ’slap’ with niche sites sometime back. And it’s been informative, thanks.
But i also remember when you took a sabbatical sometime back to travel to China … was it worth it? If you came back with nothing except the sunset photo you lead off with I would have to say worth it and more. great work Ben, thanks for putting it out there for the rest of us to enjoy.
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Dave Starr Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 2:33 am
Correction, Sunrise (Geez, you mean _that_ is what alt text is for?)
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admin Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 10:38 am
Thanks Dave (Starr). Can’t say I make any money directly from photography — it’s more like one of those expensive, money losing hobbies! I’d say if I could choose just to do something, I’d head out into exotic sunsets with my camera and a sleeping bag and live as a wandering (broke), landscape photographer, lol. The trip was oh so worth it. I always end up pretty refreshed to work harder too after a break.
I’ve been expecting something like the content farm slap for a while. The whole hubpage challenge thing ended up with google tinkering with something, making it harder to rank hubs initially. But this last update is a full blown “slap.” They’ve lost massive rankings (some reports are saying their online presence is down by 90%). That’s killer.
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Hey Ben, good timely reminder for all. The Ezinearticles blog post was an interesting read, boy are they panicking. I have been waiting for all our Hubs to take a nose-dive but it seems that traffic is just down on the ones that have been write and forget, not backlinked.
Great piccies Dude, I loved the one on the last post of the girl in the rice fields, if you sell prints let me know.
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You can see the whole list in sordid detail here
Was there suppose to be a link?
I’d like to read that article.
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Shaun L Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 6:31 am
Agreed.
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Rajaie Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 9:50 am
Here it is: http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
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admin Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 10:39 am
Sorry, I wrote the post in a wordprocessor and the links didn’t import. I’ve added them all back in now
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Glad I didn’t put much effort into Ezine Articles! Methinks a class action lawsuit could be in order if they no-follow the resource links.
Anyway, are you missing a hyperlink? Where do I see the whole list?
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admin Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 10:46 am
Links added back in — they didn’t copy over correctly and didn’t notice lol
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I’m actually more curious on finding out what you have been working on lately
Thanks for the heads up and nice pics BTW
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admin Reply:
February 27th, 2011 at 10:40 am
Quite a few different projects, but my main focus this year is to really focus on adding as much value (and content) for a couple sites over the course of the year.
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Well wonderful pics. Now i am confused.
Last may updates: small niche sites will be kicked out in future.
This update: Big content authority sites kicked out. Atleast they will not rank that high.
Looks like peoples are panicking too much. For me sky is not falling.
Now amazon, yahooanswers, ehow is ranking much higher.
http://www.seomistry.com/2011/02/27/biggest-losers-in-googles-algorithm-update/
My question is What kind of sites will be future? 10 pages, 100 pages. How many sites. 10 sites or 100 sites or 1000 sites.
What will be your strategy?
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admin Reply:
February 28th, 2011 at 3:55 pm
It wasn’t big content authority sites that were kicked out, but rather content farm authority sites — big difference.
The best strategy is to master a niche. Have a really big, in-depth site that offers great information about a specific niche. These sites tend to offer a lot of value to the user. The thing is, these sites can take years to build up, however — much like a real business takes years. the bottom line is that it’s not really possible to make a long term income online (via internet marketing) outside of the large, highly focused authority style site now.
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Love the site dude.
As soon as the slapping started all of infobarrels got hit. I found your site at the start of the year and it made me write alot, but i agree now with the auhtorit site model.
Pick afew areas that ou enjoy writing about and then SEO those articles on thr actual sites. Build a website like a business and not a portfolio of micro sites.
Ive read every single post on here thanks for the motivation. Keep it up.
BTW: you should send in your pictures into compititions. Sorry for typos, using ikeyboard:(
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I’m really not happy about ehow keeping it’s rankings. Whenever I’m trying to find information on something they always come up and it is by far the most useless “content farm” I see often.
However, everyone says squidoo wasn’t hit, bu tall of my squidoo lenses have taken a dive.
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Hey Ben,
Great post here and I remember that you predicted this would happen when you had a massive deindex on your adsense network. So while the way to go is building up bigger and branded websites, what do you think about article spinning and submitting backlinks via forum profiles, article directories, bookmarks, etc.?
Is it possible to still rank from backlinks from these “content farms” or is it just more work now?
Thanks,
Hann
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admin Reply:
March 3rd, 2011 at 12:24 pm
Sure you can still rank using them — it’s just that the web 2.0’s don’t rank as well themselves. I’m not sure if the link juice has been devalued (I suspect, not or not too much — but this is just my own guess) yet — perhaps it will be in the future/soon.
The people who were really hit the hardest are people who owned the content farms/and made money from them, either indirectly (by building say hubpages and making money from them via adsense) or via bum marketing (using say ezine articles to get referral traffic/market products).
In my own case, I noticed web 2.0’s that were the hardest hit by the update (hubpages say), still rank fine as long as they had a decent amount of backlinks. Hubs with NO backlinks suffered mightily.
So to answer your question: yes you can still rank from the backlinks. But as you say, more secondary backlinking work may be required now.
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Your articles are always interesting but your pictures are freaking brilliant. Just saying…
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eHow’s been getting a ton of bad press? I had no idea. I can say though that the reason they were probably not touched is that the review process for their freelance site, Demand Studios, is insane. You HAVE To have a reference (usually two) and relevant picture, and since majority of the articles on eHow now are probably written by those like me who get the $15 upfront for doing a crap ton of research and actually making an informative article (if you don’t, it’ll get rejected, of course) there’s less rehash and sloppy content.
In general though I think this is all something of a scare tactic. No matter how small the change to the algorithm, it’s going to stir up search results. And if certain sites like the ones on the list are ranking high for hundreds of thousands of terms obviously it’ll seem like a bigger deal than it really is. There’s also only so much you can do to change things up without starting over from scratch (or very nearly doing so).
People were going on about Caffeine and Mayday for the better half of last year and now we’re six months past Mayday and I’m still seeing flat out micro niche sites every other day, and some other sites that look like they’re getting away from the model while still being low on actual content (IE, 5-10 pages, but with an actual theme and not Xfactor’s piece of crap).
I’m not saying these big updates don’t matter, but there’s a kind of law of diminishing returns when it comes down to it, and the better Google search results get, the less room they have for (automated) improvement. When was the last time Google did something truly, undeniable, fundamentally important to the algorithm? Implementation of PageRank?
But ultimately if you have unique, rich, informational content and promote it using other unique, rich, and informational content or valid social interaction, it doesn’t matter if your site is 1 page or 1000 pages, you stand a much better shot at succeeding.
My $0.02. Actually, you know what, I think I’ve earned a couple of dollars by now, so my $2. Suck it, lol!
But great post Ben, and amazing pics. I wish I could afford to travel to my hearts content. Ah well, I’ll get there soon… I hope.
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admin Reply:
March 15th, 2011 at 9:06 am
Yup, there are still plenty of micro sites around. The smart(er) owners have gone underground and cloaked their sites, but you still do see an occasional xfactor style of site popping up. Probably one of the biggest reasons you end up getting slammed by either the adsense team or the search team (it’s more likely to be the search team) is the template/theme you have on your site. The xcraptor themes are pure shit with nothing to click on but the overly aggressive ad and no sort of navigation. Themes like this scream MFA. If you have nice looking theme though with a clear navigation menu with less aggressive ads and some decent amount of content, you won’t likely run into any sort of trouble. I’m personally moving away from the blog and into static sites. Most real sites don’t use blogs but static sites anyways — there are just way more customization options available to you and a static site doesn’t look so bloggy.
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I’ve had a fair amount of success making a few bucks with a personal blog in the past. I’m working on building it back up now. What’s your take on using personal blogs or non-traditional niche topic blogs (i.e. politics, etc. ) for making money?
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admin Reply:
March 15th, 2011 at 9:10 am
In one word, don’t bother. Unless you have a huge passion for topics like politics, I wouldn’t make a huge effort into those type of niches if you want to actually make money. The CTR is for anything (adsense, affiliates, leads) is likely to be dreadful. There have been some spectacularly succesfful political blogs like the huffingtonpost, but those guys gamed the shit out of digg way back in the obama election days to get a worldwide presence and readership. And now they’ve got a zillion links, are owned by one of the major media corporations, and get millions of views a month — it’s highly unlikely your personal efforts will yield something like this.
If you’ve already got a decent personal blog in a non traditional topic, it’s still got value — as a link resource. Link it to your money making sites (in a relevant way of course). Links like that can count for a lot.
So my .02 is stick to topics that will actually make you money. The trick is to find those niches that over internet marketers have skipped over. You can make money without too much effort with these or you can duke it out with all the rest of us for the competitive terms.
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Apart from that adsense network you had indexed a year ago… how many websites that you built up with spamtools such as build my spam and spambox have been deindexed or deranked?
People like me are still struggling to make a decent income online and if we don’t resort to web sewer magic a la Splork, we will never make it.
You gotta have resources to start authority sites, you see.
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Blackthorne Reply:
March 24th, 2011 at 4:58 am
Tell us Ben. How many? I’d really like to learn.
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admin Reply:
March 25th, 2011 at 9:58 am
Blackthorne, when I first started, I used spam tools for a lot of my first sites. These days, I don’t do that. I focus on legit links. I’ll use various spam methods to promote support sites and secondary websites (anything and everything I can do to build links), but to the money sites, I’ll spend the time getting real links.
New websites I start I have no intention of making money with for at least a year (if they make money after 6 months I’d be surprised even). I’ll spend that year building them up with lots of great content, offering a lot of value to the readers, and building as many good links and support sites as I can. I’m as impatient as the next guy to see new (and old) websites become profitable, but I (now) realize that’s there is a certain element of time involved. Most of the sites that earn me good money (aka thousands every month each) are at least 2 years old, some even 4-5 years old.
The problem a lot of you guys have is that you want to rush things — you want your cake and you want to eat it too. That doesn’t leave a lot of options other than building links with spam. You could get incredibly lucky and find the perfect non-competitive niche, or have an amazing website Idea that the public picks up on and you find yourself getting links from all over the place, but the chances of that happening are pretty low. Most decent websites take years to build up, both links, readers, and public awareness. This is NO DIFFERENT THAN A REAL WORLD BUSINESS. My suggestion is to treat you good websites like a legit real world business. Many businesses will operate at a loss for a couple years before they even make a profit. And it usually takes 5 years to really make a real world business successful. Websites are faster than that (usually), but the same principals apply. I’m telling you, if you try to rush things, you are just going to fuck yourself over in many cases.
If you can’t afford to spend the time or you are desperate for money (maybe you are unemployed or your job pays shit) or you are simply too lazy to put in the effort over a couple years to develop some quality websites (because that’s how long it takes!), then I suggest you do something other than internet marketing for a living — or at least don’t go into this full time until you have enough savings to survive 1-2 years of doing this FULL TIME. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way: there are no fucking shortcuts other than having a lot of money to throw down (marketing, hiring sales teams to promote your websites, paying for links of all sorts, etc) which increase productivity.
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Blackthorne Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 9:24 am
No worries, I got steady income and am saving up.
I’d like to set up some quick extra income using squidoos or something. That’s what I’m trying right now. Other people can get lenses to rank and do sales in a few weeks. Mine aren’t performing like that. Not when I backlink them with 200 links. That’s why I’ll try to spread my links thinner. Maybe being less greedy won’t get me sandboxed so often.
I’d also like to set up useful sites with useful content. But what is useful content? How do *you* provide real value? How would you provide interesting content on a site about, say, leather jackets? How are you going to write hundreds of interesting posts on leather jackets?
admin Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 9:47 am
If you are going to write about leather jackets, you become an expert on that topic (or pay for high quality, researched articles, not 500 word fluff crap). I can’t tell you specifically how to write your own useful content. If the reader comes and finds real value — then that’s useful content. If the reader comes to your site and finds a bunch of shitty articles written from places like ezine articles stuffed with affiliate links, that’s not useful.
Blackthorne, I try and provide real value with every word I write. I’ll stuff as much real information into posts as I possible can.
I’ll add more than just a bunch of posts on a site too — perhaps create an interactive buyer’s guide with pictures and a slide show, write a bunch of funny (viral) articles on the topic (i.e. Top 10 Sexiest Jackets Naked Women Can Wear), create a forum and community devoted to the topic.
Really man, you shouldn’t have to be asking how to provide useful content to a reader. I think you are over thinking the entire thing. The fact that you are asking how to provide value from your websites that tells you are not really sitting there working on a single site for an extended period of time.
If you spend a lot of time working on a site and brainstorming on how to make the site more and more useful for the readers/buyer’s, you can come up with a lot of things to do so. So my answer is, stop with the analyzing and sit there and put some real time into a site (months). THEN your site will have some value to the readers.
Best
Ben
Blackthorne Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
I wanted to reply below your most recent comment Ben, but there’s no reply link there.
Anyway… I’m sick and tired of 500 word fluff crap as you call it and I’ve also thought about slideshows and interactive widgets and stuff.
The reason why I’m asking about real value is because I have the feeling that these big ass 500 word articles are not necessary anymore. But at one point in IM, that’s what the gospel was… just write your stuff and eventually people will come.
Since you can only stuff real info into so many words, I’m guessing you don’t do a lot of fluff writing anymore.
Actually, I do have a site that provides value to people. It’s an entertainment/celeb related blog. I added lots of content to it and I got more traffic.
I *did* spend some serious time backlinking it, but that (unfortunately) did not increase traffic or my income.
Oh well, back with my nose to the grindstone.
admin Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Here’s a hint: when I think useful content, I think in terms of “thousands of words”. It’s rare for me to write an article that’s less than 2000 words on any topic these days. Articles don’t just ramble on either, there are plenty of links outs to related topics and other helpful resources on the topic. Just doing the research + writing for one such articles might take me a solid 2-3 hours (or I’ll pay one of my quality writers to do it). Compare a 2000 word article that takes 2 hours to research and write to a 450 word fluff article you rewrite from an ezine in 20 minutes. Which do you think offers real value?
Really, with 500 words, you can’t say anything substantial about any topic or provide real value to the reader with something that short. Google has taken a clear stance against “thin” content as they call it. Thin content doesn’t just mean short (i.e. 350-500 word articles) articles, but also means there is really very little substance of value. And from my point of view, I can’t see how you can give any REAL information about any topic in just 500 words.
And for backlinks, I’m not surprised you don’t see immediate results. Unless you are landing solid links from established sites (or you own a bunch of PR’ed sites you can juice for your own links), you probably won’t see increases in traffic from linkbuilding for a while. Really, with brand new sites, Google loves to just put them in a box for months (or even a year) so even if you build links to them, the traffic is minimal still. That’s why I say I think in terms of a 1 year plan — sometimes it takes that long just to bring your site up from 5 people a day to 1000 people a day.
As for celeb/entertainment blogs — I’m not a big fan of that type of site for making money with. They are good for using as link fodder, but entertainment/celeb type blogs are hard to make money with. It’s possible, sure, but you usually need a lot of traffic (thousands a day) to really see something.
Blackthorne Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
I got 1000 a day. That’s why I make fifteen bucks a day off it. I’m also not a fan of it. Matter of fact… I dont’ give a rat’s ass about it.
As for 2000 word articles… I don’t see how I could ever fill a leather jacket site with a hundred of those.
Not that I’m actually in the leather jacket niche, so go ahead and steal that niche if you like.
Be sure to let me know where on earth you find enough information to write 2000 word articles on that.
I see plenty of sites ranking with minimal sales pages that aren’t even 100 words. Probably because these sites are unable to come up with 100 2000 word articles for their product.
If you’re making loads of money, then I’m guessing most of it comes from spam sites.
Authority sites take a year, like you say. And you’ve been at the MMO game for slightly more than a year. Most of your time went into spammy MFA sites. It wasn’t until a year ago that you made the switch. Using pure logic I’d say you can’t be making money off any authority site yet.
You mentioned interactive sites. An interactive site such as http://toppppp.com/ might be more my thing. I have a background in comp sci after all. Maybe I just don’t have the fucking brain for internet marketing.
It’s odd. I type much faster than anybody else I know. So if I’ve got the type skills to blow anybody else out of the water in IM, why haven’t I done it yet? It must be my fucking brain working against me. Like they say, you are your own worst enemy.
I used to be a real fucking computer nerd but not anymore. I dread every second I spend behind my fucking computer. I want to be a cage fighter like you used to be. I don’t know anybody else with a masters in comp sci that wants to get down and dirty in the ring like me. I’m totally fucking alone in this world you know. I still have to find a way to make it in this biz somehow.
I have much respect for people like you who shamelessly clog up the web with spam for your own gain. You managed to get quick results with that at one point in time. You went from 0 to fifteen bucks a day in 2 weeks one time, no? Still don’t know how ya did it.
You say you’re not surprised I don’t get quick results. That’s funny because I’m currently putting in the work that many other rich IM people have done in the past. So apparently it’s not possible to get quick results anymore. I’ll have to just wait a few weeks or months to see if my new shitload of squidoos will ever start producing anything.
I’m getting my drunk ass to bed now. Thanks for your time.
admin Reply:
March 26th, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Man, you are all over the place Blackthorn — either super positive or downright suicidal. Seriously, stop bitching about how bad life is and how you can’t make money. You are always asking details about this strategy and that strategy and you are given good information and yet in the end the story is always the same: life sucks, you are not making money, blah blah blah.
Fix your attitude, settle the fuck down, stop wasting your valuable time asking for strategies on forums, etc. Build some quality sites (however you personally define quality), spend your time backlinking by getting whatever links you can, and quite being a roller coaster. If you can’t do that, then do something else besides IM — there are a million other ways to make money besides spending all day on a computer doing something you hate. Moaning about this or that won’t do shit all for you.
Best of luck with things
Ben
Blackthorne Reply:
March 27th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Yeah I know Ben… I’m all over the place. I’ve seen shit and it does shit to your brain.
I used to be fucking fantastic and really put in the work to achieve impressive goals.
I need to get back in touch with who I used to be and put in some serious work again.
I think I’ll do that starting right now. I’ll let ya know how I’m doing half a year from now.
Cya.
admin Reply:
March 27th, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Good stuff man. Just keep your head low and focus on what you need to do. If results don’t come right away, fine — just take a long term approach and keep getting as many backlinks to a few of your choice sites as you can. Build them up with more and more content. Results will come in time!
Good luck!
Ben
Hi Ben, this is the first post of yours that i’ve read for about 2 years, back then you were talking about huge link farms and how content is worth nothing. I’m glad you’ve managed to evolve with the web and seemingly become more ethical along the way.
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Hi, Ben. As a writer on hubpages, I was, of course, sorry to be slapped. There are a lot of informative articles over there and it’s a shame that the good will suffer due to the crap. HP is going to have to clean up if they want to move up in the ranks because there is a lot of garbage there as well.
Be that as it may, as a person who uses Google, I thought maybe the changes would be good to help reader locate valuable content. But searching for info relating to various home projects, general info, etc. I have found a lot of junk on Google’s first page, including articles that were 3 sentences long.
I hope the trend is not going to be toward commercial sites. They only want to sell you a product and may not offer the real information that you want or need. Just as in real life, some of the best tips I’ve ever been given have come from ‘regular’ people - neighbors and such, and not necessarily actual authorities.
(Awesome photographs!)
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admin Reply:
April 16th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
I agree, Dolores. But these type of sites naturally attract the spammers and those who cut corners. The trend, unfortunately, is toward commercial sites. It seems that Google is embracing the whole ‘branding = trust’ idea. It’s showing in their search with all the big players dominating huge swaths of the keywords online.
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What slap? Seriously, what slap?
I’m so robotic, all I do everyday is check my sites, approve any comments from 9-10am.
Move on to write a 1.5k word post for 2 money sites from 1-4pm. Then build links to the older posts from 4-8pm.
Rest of the day I’m coaxing my girlfriend for some lovin.
10pm I get denied lovin and go online to play some games.
Totally out of the loop and lack any sort of IM news, maybe because I have no subscriptions to anyone. My stats haven’t dropped, my earnings are all up (soon to break $3k finally after 3 years).
Completely different world when you don’t follow any IM blogs. Did they do a roll back or something? Maybe I missed something. Should have never checked grizzly’s blog, it always sucks me in, and now I’m over other MMO blogs posting comments.
-Clueless Tim.
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admin Reply:
April 16th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Yea, I’ve gotten out of the “blog scene” too myself. It’s a huge time waster for the most part. Everyone has different advice. Bah. It all comes down to this: build quality sites, get backlinks. Repeat. That’s all you need to know. I’m willing to bet if most people who spend huge amounts of time networking on blogs, posting on forums, and being all social put that same energy into actual work, they’d see huge increases. But I know I’m preaching to the wind here.
Best
Ben
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Hey Ben how do you link properly?? I finally got a few good websites set up (the majority of my work online was with content sites before - not the greatest idea long term but i made some quick cash before the slap, now i’m going in for my own stuff) and i was wondering how you go about backlinking properly? I know if you just backlink from anywhere your site will probably get labelled as spam so you should focus on getting quality backlinks, but how do you do that properly? I’ve taken a look at link wheels and link pyramids and getting links from your own self hosted sites, blog farms etc, but how do you put it all together? Should you make 20 more random sites just to link to your main sites and support those backup sites with spammy links? how many tiers do you need and how do you go about doing it? is thee some sort of system i should be following or just get as many links from wherever i can?
Thanks for everything,
Staz
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admin Reply:
April 29th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Take at my “how to create and use a blog farm article” for more information pertaining to your question. And at the end of the day, fill your sites with the highest quality articles that you can, articles that offer some real value to the searchers. Don’t be too aggressive with affiliate/adsense on your sites, and get as many backlinks as possible.
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Ben,
Quick question for ya.
You wrote:
“just take a long term approach and keep getting as many backlinks to a few of your choice sites as you can.”
Does that include 35 BMR links per week to a handful of posts?
Just wondering how literally I should take “as many as you can”.
Just had a new site tank with that amount of backlinking. It had aff links on all pages.
Another new site with no aff links is getting the same amount and it’s flying (so far).
Do you have similar results?
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admin Reply:
May 19th, 2011 at 9:56 pm
I’ve found that sometimes no matter what, new sites get tanked in the sandbox. Just part of the normal process of things. Really, no matter what you do, you might find your site barely gets any traffic (or suddenly loses traffic) for 6 months to a year. I still maintain you should keep building links though — eventually, they will count when you get out of a sandbox.
Note though, google has been making algorithm changes the past couple months targeting micro sites (again). If some of your sites have been caught by those, then it could be a long time before the penalty is removed.
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Hey Ben, I have another question for you
I’m working on expanding one of my websites (it’s only 6 months old right now but it’s got pretty good and long content and a decent amount of backlinks - working on not building them too fast though lol). Anyway, I slapped some adsense on it a little while ago and I’m getting clicks every day but zero earnings, has this ever happened to you? I’ve never clicked on own ads and I wouldn’t really care if it was just a click here or there, but it’s happening on a daily basis. I got freaked out that Google might ban my account or whatever so I took the ads off for now…
Any idea whats going on? Has this ever happened to you? I’m in a lucrative niche too with higher paying clicks so it wouldn’t be because the clicks are just worth less than $0.01. Thanks for any input
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