I’m going to have to give you a little background here to explain exactly what I mean by such a title. I was on the Warrior forum a few days ago and I read a post from a guy. Basically he said he was in top spot for a great keyword and getting a ton of hits everyday. He was buying backlinks to get him up to that point and than one day he got slapped. Basically he lost everything. At that point he said that he cleaned up his link building and after a year to the very day that he was slapped, he moved back up in the listenings.
There was something specific that I took away from this and no, it’s not about paid links. I had a site that I purchased around the end of May 2008. I really beefed this site up and within a month of having it up I was getting nearly a 100 unique searches a day in the very competitive forex niche. Than on July 4th, I received a slap for my new site and completely disappeared. I just assumed that my site was new. I was getting a lot of traffic, so Google just put me in the sandbox. At the time I was told that I could be in the sandbox for a few months to up to 10 months. Well, it has been 14 months since I was slapped and the site is still down and out.
Back to the guy at the forum. He said he ‘cleaned up’ his link building. Usually when I hear that phrase, I assumed that he started to build good links and do things ethically the way big G likes it. This time when I read it, the word clean hit me. When you clean, you don’t do things better. You clean up the mess you made. It suddenly hit me. Maybe I should remove all those links coming to my site that probably got me in this situation.
Let me explain my link building on this site because it was quite aggressive. As usual I’d make my unique sales pages in the internal directories of the site for products. I’d target keywords, product names and whatever I could rank for. I’d sign up at squidoo, wordpress, blogger, tumblr, etc etc etc. I’d write one post of them, link back to my sales page. I’d stumble each one of these sites (including the sales page) and that’s basically all I was doing. The site was getting around a 100 a day in SE traffic in the forex niche. Obviously if I was to attempt this in the future I wouldn’t be linking all the pages to my money site. That was just stupid.
At this point I’ve been logging into my old squidoo and wordpress acounts. Basically I deleted all the blogs/lenses that link to this site and we’re going to see what happens. But this really isn’t what the title of this blog post is about. The site that I’ve slapped isn’t important to me. Trust me, 14 months of being in the dark makes you completely indifferent.
I haven’t been in my squidoo or wordpress account in a long time, but I started these accounts when I first got into this. In fact, I started with the 2007 30 Day Challenge by Ed Dale. It was basically the way that I was going to make cash online. I started to log through these pages that I made for the challenge. I was blown away. The keywords I had selected are pretty weak, the keywords are supposed to get nice amount of searches a month (3000+), all the sites were ranking on page 3 or 4 on Google for the keyword and all of them were getting some sort of traffic. One of them was getting 20 unique visitors everyday.
When I gave up on these sites nearly two years ago, they were failures in my eyes. I believe I had one make it to the front page. Maybe even another one. But I just have this desire to see how far I can push them up if I take a little action with them. I was digging through backlinks for some of the sites and all the backlinking is crap. I never even took the time to write and article to submit to a directory. That’s how crazy this is. Also these sites have been around for nearly 2 years, fully indexed and receiving traffic from Google. Maybe the big G will like them more and that will help me make cash online, but I don’t know.
I’m not sure what exactly it is that makes me want to try and see. One of the main sites that I want to try out was in a niche that my mentor told me to always go into. The reason he suggested this was due to the fact that it isn’t anything hard. And what I mean by that is like hard facts and hard information. You can basically write bullshit and your readers will eat it up. Endless amounts of shit you can write and everyone will love it. I guess seeing the comments waiting in the queue proved that fact to me because I thought the posts are a little inane.
Obviously at the time of making these sites I was what you would call a poor webmaster at this and didn’t know what the hell I’m doing. Definitely not a person that would be running an Advanced Affiliate Marketing blog. Essentially all I was doing was doing a few social bookmarkings and than doing a few blog comments.
I just have to give it to my mentor for suggesting such a niche. The fact that I was writing complete text vomit blog posts, but people like it. They liked it so much that people with decent sites thought they’d link to my crap and they ate it up. If only Christine Taylor would link to my blog than I’d be set, but I digress.
It’s just an interesting and reflecting experience to see where you were when you started out. I got to see my first attempts at affiliate marketing online. It is funny to see, but I definitely want to see if I can turn these old failures into successes. I think I shouldn’t have a problem with it.
Plan of Attack
I’m absolutely obsessed right now with writing monster long posts. I’ve never done it before on any mass scale and I’m desperate to see what is going to happen. I know it helps with long tail keywords by the obvious fact that you have more combinations of words that could end up being combined in a search engine. But I’m really curious about what will happen for keywords that you actually target.
Think of it like this, EzineArticles allows you to put your keyword once every 100 words, or 1% keyword density. A lot of people think that is pretty tight and they like to do 3-5%. Let’s say you write a 300 word article for EZA, that means you can put the keyword in three times. Let’s say you wrote a 6000 word article on your blog. At 1% you could put your keyword in 60 times. Obviously that could come out spammy, but if you follow the 1% density rule you can put it in 60 times and there must be some relevancy for that. I’m not going to try for 1% though. I’ll try to go for maybe 1/2 percent.
I refuse to write a 6000 word article for EZA to test this out, but if you’re someone that wants to give that a try, please post your results. If you steam roll over the competition, I’ll have to applaud you.
Obviously I’m going to have to work on building some backlinks to these sites that I haven’t built for them in a while. It’s odd because I never actually followed Ed Dale’s rules. Back in 2007 it was all about the social media/web 2.0 game. Basically you would go to squidoo, write an article, social bookmark it and you’re on the front page. Well it wasn’t that simple for all keywords, but that was the case. The idea is that if you didn’t get on the front page, you just kept building links through article marketing and stuff like that. At the end you’d be able to see if the keyword you selected was a profitable one.
Being the lazy person that I was at the time I did absolutely no article marketing for the site. At that point I wasn’t very interested in the idea of writing articles for other sites. I wasn’t good at it and it just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. At this point I’m going to start writing articles that point to these sites. I’m not going to go over board or anything like that. In fact I just wrote two articles today to submit for two of these sites.
This is a test though that I just want to check out. You never know what could happen with this. I have no problem building websites and leaving them for a year to come back and work on them. If it proves to be something that Google views as an authority and I can make cash online doing it, than I’m going to do it.
Update on the August Project
The August SEO project that I started ended at the start of September, so that I could start my sniper work. This project was a little different because it wasn’t successful like the June Project. Less than one month into the June project I was already ranking for keywords and it was great. The August project wasn’t quite as successful. One month into it, I had basically nothing to show for it. All my sites were buried somewhere past the 500+ mark and never even came close to getting a trickle of traffic from Google. I do get a little traffic from Yahoo and Bing, but nothing that is going to produce sales.
I was actually going through my stats today and I couldn’t help, but notice that one of my sites finally hit the front page for two specific keywords that I was targeting. I couldn’t remember exactly how many searches per month these keywords were supposed to get and when I looked it up I was a little disappointed to see only 1300 a piece. Together that is 2600, which isn’t that bad. The annoying part here is that I know I didn’t go after keywords that get that many searches. This has been an annoying trend that has been happening to me (not through the snipers though), that I go after a keyword that gets 3000+ a month and work at it for months, get it and than Google revizes the numbers to something shitty.
There was another keyword that I was going after. It was supposed to get roughly 4500 searches a month. Today, Google says it gets 590 searches per month. Talk about a slap in the face.
But I guess that is life…
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m happy this site has finally started to rank in the top 10 for both keywords. 2600 a month is at least enough to be profitable and make it worth my wild. I’m hoping I can pick up at least 5 sales a month for this particular page.
Surprisingly my best site for SEO results is a site from the June Project. I know that they say that you should take what works and do it over and over again. The problem with this site is that I haven’t been able to figure out why it is so successful. I went into a niche and went after a more modest keyword (around 2000/month). Within a few weeks I got into the top 10. As you can guess a keyword like that would only result in a few hits a day, but I noticed in my stats that I was getting a lot more searches for another keyword. I ended up on the second page for a keyword that gets around 10,000/mth.
No where on this page is the three word keyword phrase found on the page. In fact, I didn’t even have the third word mentioned once on the page. I ended up jamming the keyword in the title, built some backlinks with anchored keyword phrase and by the end of the month I was in the top 10. Since than I’ve slightly moved up the ranks from hanging around the 10th position, up to the 6, 7 and 8 positions.
I have no fucking clue why it ranks so well. I don’t have any special backlinks or anything like that. The only thing that was really different about it is that it was a long sales page with completely unique content. It was only around 2600 words though, so it wasn’t as long as my previous post on this site (6000).
Since the backlinks I was building were no different than what I do with any other site, I can only assume two things. It was either the keyword was weak. I’m not sure how it could be weak on the type of subject that it was on. You’d think a bunch of Clickbank webmasters would of gotten it by now. Or the other reason is that it had some sort of on page optimization that Google loved. We have to remember that I was getting traffic for the 10k keyword before I even had all the words for the keyword on the site, let alone all the words right beside each other.
Despite the successes with the SEO side of things, I’ve been having a little trouble figuring out the proper way to monetize it. But I’m sure I’ll come up with something soon enough.
Okay, back on topic with the old failures that I have…
Squidoo is a beast that I really didn’t like and frankly I still don’t like. I think the format of it sucks. I think it is piss poor to really grow a page internally and stuff. When I first started out, Squidoo lenses were the big thing. You’d put them up and you’d get in the top 10. Here is the thing that you got to pick up on and understand. You have to understand the philosophy of search engines. All that means is that you have to look away from what is working right now and focus on the core of what makes a search engine great.
From this you can derive a very simple rule. If an average honest person can easily rank high in Google, than spammers can too. Spammers will always destroy what is good. That’s the precise reason why I’m not a fan of Squidoo.
Things have changed a lot because it isn’t necessarily true that all Squidoo lenses are crap. And all the same can be true with wordpress.com blogs and blogger blogs. They used to rank easy, but they don’t anymore. I don’t think the big G has slapped these sites anymore, but imposed a new set of rules on them. There is a penalized or sandboxed period where a site has to wait quietly. You also have to show that you have content on it and that you are building backlinks.
Basically, I want to make some authority blogs from free hosts. I’m not necessarily a fan of this way of doing things, but I really just want to sit down and put good honest work in to see if I can do it and how fast it produces results. I have sites that rank in the top 10 for a keyword, so I might as well get a wordpress site ranking right next to it too.
I might dick around with Squidoo, but I don’t know. I’m not really a fan of it. Wordpress is something that I can build on ideas with new ideas and keep things very organized for a reader. Squidoo is just something that is just way too distracting. I think that’s the main reason that I have such a problem with it. My best lense was created on March 2008 and it gets about 180 hits a month, so it’s nothing special or anything. I doubt the lense helps me make cash or anything like that.
If I was to use Squidoo I would probably use it to supplement this site here. I probably wouldn’t even dare to link from a squidoo lens to this site cause I don’t think the links are that cool and are spammish. After the lense has been up for a year, I wouldn’t have a problem.
Google Caffeine
I’m not sure if you’ve guys checked out Google’s Caffeine Search Engine. It looks like the regular Google search, but it is obviously functioning on another algorithm. Supposedly the reason for this new engine is to compete with Bing’s new search. From what I’m gathering on forums, there are two different opinions emerging. The first opinion is that some of your sites will do better, while others will do worse, but in the end everything will balance (basically a neutral position). The other opinion is that this engine is much more dependent on the content on your page.
It’s hard to say when you look at the philosophy of search engines. Obviously on page content is a huge thing. Google has to know what is on the page, not just for figuring out the keywords and stuff, but to determine whether it is a page of value. I’m sure you’ve seen those spam blogs that contain gibberish posts. To a search algorithm, it can’t tell the difference between gold and crap. This is where a huge focus of search engines is goign to come. It is going to have to start looking at pages and figuring out the value of the content in some manner.
Obviously banklinks are still going to have a major role and always will, but content value is something that is far more important. And the way you can tell that is based completely on the people Google services. If I go to the big G to learn how to fly a kite, I don’t give one flying fuck whether the sites come up have 10 million or 10 backlinks. All that matters to me is whether the content is good.
I’ve been focusing lately on creating more valuable content for my sites. I’m hoping something comes out true, but I have yet to confirm. What I’m hoping to see is that Google will actually try and calculate an overall word count for a site. Or a word count per page. The thesis is that if I keep dumping huge pages of content on a site that the big G is going to start seeing value coming from the site.
I guess to sum up everything, I’m going to try and get my old sites that I created a long time ago and see if I can make them rank good. With massive content posts being added and some back link building I’m hoping this will get the sites to rank and maybe help me make cash online. But we’ll see what happens and I’ll definitely keep you guys updated both on this little side project and my current sniper project.