I decided to do a check using Scroogle Scraper – the tried and trusted way of determining approximately where you are ranking for various keyword phrases in Google dot com. In fact, Scroogle is providing me better results than does the Google keyword ranking tool – and these results are fairly related to the use of Build My Rank! (Sorry to everyone who did not get in on Build my Rank at the lower price!)..
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One of the bad things about WordPress is that it tends to mess up your post editing – hence this post is all squashed up. Furthermore, in this particular post its putting a score mark through a lot of my links. I’ve seen this happening on other blogs recently too. Anyone know what’s causing this?
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This time last year my rankings for similar keywords were pretty reasonable. And this time last year I was making more money, even though I did not really know what I was doing. But this time this year my rankings (according to Scroogle, which is supposed to be representative of at least some of the Google dot com database/s) are quite a lot better than last year.
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And as I mentioned already, this is because of my investment in Build My Rank and my investment in people to write articles for it, albeit I’m down to one part time writer who writes about 50 to 60 posts a week for me.
I could not be happier with what I am seeing in Scroogle. Often times I’ve got rankings 1, 2 and 3 in Google, which includes “Twilight poster”, which you can see in the above screenshot. But, I’m seeing almost no income from any of this which amazes me.
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Only about 27 shopping days left before Christmas (less than that actually because online shopping finishes a few days before Christmas) and I’m still not seeing Chistmas sales.
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See the screenshot below which is my eBay account showing stats for November. You can see that real big spike that I mentioned the other day, and then visitor numbers and sales have dimished again drastically.
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But what to do other than keep figuring ways to get ahead in the game? This poor eBay income for November has been a good thing for me, believe that or not. Its forcing me to try harder to generate new ideas that I can implement in the months ahead, and not rely on eBay as being the be-all and end-all of my monthly income, which is not at all a sensible way to progress it seems to me. Too many eggs in one basket and all that…
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Already over the past 30 days I’ve let go around 20 domains that I purchased a year ago. Even though most of these have been profitable from the point of view that they are bringing in monthly income, its just not sensible for me to hold on to these domains because I am looking at much higher end stuff right now and trying to reduce my dependancy on eBay.
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In some ways it would make sense to hold a year-old domain because it could have some authority built up on it. And for sure – I am seeing some of my older domains – those that are around 12 to 24 months old – doing well in Google SERP, even though I’ve not done any backlinking for many months.
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These older domains seem to gravitate upwards in Google. I think its partly to do with quality content on the site – in the “old days” I had to write everything myself 
, and partly to do with maturing backlinks that could well have gained in value. And back in those days I was using Unique Article Wizard almost exclusively, so there’s something for you to ponder if you are planning longer term for your sites – UAW worked very well then and still works very well now!* There is a lot to be said for maturing sites and maturing backlinks that hold quality. Google seem to perceive true value here, and that makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
, and partly to do with maturing backlinks that could well have gained in value. And back in those days I was using Unique Article Wizard almost exclusively, so there’s something for you to ponder if you are planning longer term for your sites – UAW worked very well then and still works very well now!* There is a lot to be said for maturing sites and maturing backlinks that hold quality. Google seem to perceive true value here, and that makes a lot of sense if you think about it..
* A friend of mine has been utilizing parts of the 40 Day Challenge Warrior Forum system recently for ranking his sites. He used Unique Article Wizard for most of his backlinks and got his site ranking high for his main keyword phrase of choice. He then flipped his site for a cool $1,000 just the other day. He’s a college kid, so that’s a real nice side-line income! If you want further proof of that you can see his comment on the 40 Day Challenge WF thread near the bottom of page 20.
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Would that make a real nice salesy sort of letter do you think? ;-)
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I received an email the other day from Mike Geary. You may or may not know who Mike is – he’s the guy behind the massively successful Truth About Abs product and website. The email was about some tips regards SEO. Apparently an SEO guy he knows has noticed that Google are de-ranking webpages that have lots of affiliate links on them.
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So, say for example I’ve done a review of 4 products on one webpage and for each product I’ve added in 3 links, then its possible that Google are not going to like this and will demote my webpage/s.
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I’ve heard something along these lines before from a chap whom I trust pretty much implicitly. He said that in some niches and sub-niches that are really heavily populated with affiliates, Google will be very choosy indeed about who they are going to rank in their SERP. This is of course a very sensible way to do things, so it comes as no real surprise.
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So how to combat these issues?
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Firstly, instead of adding in plain old affiliate links, change them using something like TinyURL. Who would have thought that this would have been beneficial? But according to Mike Geary’s SEO friend it works pretty well. I can’t actually say yay or nay to that – I very rarely have more than 3 links on any single webpage that go to affiliate products so its not a problem that tends to afflict my sites or webpages. I don’t tend to do product reviews because I’m too lazy to do the write-ups
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Secondly, and as we all know, make sure your content is unique-ish (not 100% unique – that’s not possible), and make sure its a quality read, thus folks do actually read through your stuff because you are offering good info.
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If you are churning out quality work – quality meaning real good info, quality not necessarily meaning that your grammar and spelling is totally perfect – then you are one up on most affiliates because they will not take the time to do that. And given time you will be rewarded by Google and very possibly the other 2 big search engines also.
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Do please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for reading!
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry to hear your eBay sales were short lived – but hopefully starting today things will pick up again (Black Friday is going great for me!). Some interesting stuff here in your post. I’ve noticed that my older domains do a lot better than my newer ones when I’m backlinking them with Sick, which has got me thinking about whether it is better to buy expired domains with a nice age to them already versus keyword rich domains.
Regarding aff links, I’ve got some sites full of them that do very well (generally older sites), so I’m not sure about the supposed penalties, but I’ve started recently cloaking all myaff links (more for commission purposes than SEO purposes) and there are several good ones for Wordpress (some free, some not), which I MUCH prefer over a url shortening service. These can go down! I’ve had it happen in the past – and all my shortened URLs have suddenly become worthless! It isn’t fun going back and redoing all those links, BTW…
Anyway, I hope your apartment move goes well, and that you see sales pick up soon!
[Ah, and I saw JUST IN TIME that you have one of those SUPER ANNOYING spam plugins that cause you to lose your comments if you don't notice it in time! Whew!]
Michelle recently posted..Weekly Update 25- November 17-23
Hey Michelle, I’ve not checked on stats since posting this post – maybe its kicking in, but maybe not… Some you win some you lose. Good to hear things are flying for you, what with this black Friday thing, where everyone and their dog emails you regards a special offer. Enough of that already!
There is something to aged domains but I also feel its a lot to do with the back links the domain possesses. A lot of those aged domains you can pick up at auction don’t necessarily have the sort of links that I’d be looking for. Mind you, a lot of them are decent Goog PR so they can’t be bad all round.
I feel that kwd rich domains are good for the one keyword phrase and that’s about it, which is kinda limiting yourself. I mean, if I bought something like abcdxxyMitsubishiTelevision – then how can I legitimately tackle any other Mitsubishi television on the same domain. I think exact match domains are good for flipping too cos folks go a bit silly over them, particularly dot coms.
Na, I too have my doubts about this thing with TinyURL’s. Why would Goog not see thru that anyways? But I do sense that Goog could start penalizing a very competitive affiliate market, if they are not doing that already – which they probably have been doing for a long time but not many people actually realize it. In fact they do, don’t they – is it not the case that you only will ever see two ezinearticles at or near the top of Google search for the same kwd?
Regards moving apartment. I’ve just been stacking some boxes at my front door as I begin the move tomorrow morning. Man, I’m sweating buckets and knackered too! This IM lark does not help keep you physically fit
Apparently my new place is near a gym so I’m tempted to join up. Its just too hot to walk here on a regular basis, unless you go out at about 6am. That’s a pity cos I like walking, but not only do you risk shrinking due to the amount of sweating, but you also risk being attacked by rabid dogs…
That super annoying spam plugin is saving me from having to dump so much spam hour after hour from my spam filter. I got kinda fed up being sent so much crap from some spam networks that I thought it time to do something about it. Yup, I agree, the little tick box is a bit silly, but it works where cutting out spam is concerned and that’s where Akismet does not.
Enjoy your evening Michelle!
Nope – eBay is performing poorly for me today. Further, I just checked my Amazon stats cos I felt like having a laugh, and I was not disappointed either. Sales to click thru ratio is a whopping 0.7%!
That the hell is going on here!
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for the informative post as always. I hope things turn around for you soon, we’ve been having a bad month as well despite good traffic.
I’ll give the tiny url thing a try, but if anyone can recommend a WP plugin that might do the same thing, I would appreciate it.
I was thinking another solution could be to create 301′s re-direct affiliate landing pages on other blogs I own, but my guess is that Google would figure this out pretty quickly even if my primary links to my blog redirect were “no follow”. I also read somewhere that using java scripts to mask affiliate links can work as well.
-Matt
Hi Matt, nice to hear from you, and nice to know that I’m not the only one who is “suffering” from slow Christmas sales. Its easy to get a little paranoid that suddenly no one likes me
Can’t help you out on the WP plugin I’m afraid. I tend to leave links as they are, although on occasion I’ll use a plugin to cloak them. I think on the whole that folks will not know how to over-ride the affili link – even the Clickbank one. The only folks that know how to over-ride it are us IM types.
By all means try the java route. But there are quite a lot of plugins out there that will do that job – some decent freebie ones too, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s interesting what you mentioned about Google de-ranking sites with several affiliate links. That’s exactly what I experienced over the last 6-8 months. I have various niche sites and on all of these sites I also a review page with 3-4 affiliate links. Most of my older sites were ranking in the top 3 (some of them for several years) and lately I realized that some of them were slipping down in their rankings.
Bob recently posted..Numerology Calculation For Everyone – Simple and Easy
Hi Bob, thanks for stopping by and leaving some feedback here!
You said that you’ve been seeing negative changes in Google ranks for the past 6 to 8 months. When was Mayday? 6 or 7 months ago now… Goog did a major algo change then, thus I sense that this is what’s going down with your sites.
I don’t think that merely changing your affil links to TinyURL’s will do the trick though Bob – I think it will take more drastic changes than that, but there is no harm in trying.
You may have to rethink some of your previous methods. I’ve seen a lot of real negativity over the past 7 months in particular regards to some high end guys and girls who used to hold top rankings for a plethora of kwd phrases, only to see those rankings diminish fairly rapidly. And along with the rankings diminishing, so does the income!
Let’s face the facts here, this is a tough business to be in! So what I am now doing is spreading my eggs to many different baskets. I cannot possibly trust Google’s intentions enough to work in tandem with them. They are in this for the money, and they are monopolizing the web. And that means they will stoop very low in achieving their goals, even though they try hard to cover it over with all this “best practice” stuff.
I think there are ways and means to get around this issue, but it can and is incredibly demoralizing when at one time you were doing very well with online income and then suddenly much of that is gone!
Best wishes Bob!
Regards
Joseph
Just wanted to add to the affiliate link thing.
Rather than use third party, or another resource hogging word press plugin you can cloak your self with a php file. I don’t have full info on me now (I’m in the bath on my iPad reading!) but it’s very simple and you can even put a keyword in the link.
Google will like it, your site will like it and most of all visitors will trust a link showing your own URL.
Second to that I used to use bit.ly on Twitter for shortening and it was great but then i noticed my friend had a custom short URL. Turns out you can host your own tiny URL/bit.ly style service with YOURLS (I think that’s correct spelling!) the tracking is immense, gives a pro edge and you can even get a little ad in with the URL. You can even become bit.ly provider for other people!
I registered three .im domains with 3 or 4 letter words for the job and it works very well, plus you have much shorter urls than bit.ly because it’s only you, eg instead of http://bit.ly/387653 for example you can be http://seo.im/1
Hope that’s useful.
Hi Danny, thanks for coming on by and taking the time to leave your comment (from your bath tub, lol!)
Hmmm… I can only use basic services to cloak my url’s. I don’t have the ability or the patience to play around with these sort of things. I simply want to get my link in the post and job is done and dusted.
However, I’m sure that a number of other folks who read this will benefit from it.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge here! Need a job?
Heres the php info that might be helpful, sorry I couldn’t copy and paste last night as I was on the iPad.
Its deadly simple. Just open notepad (or textedit on Mac) and with a blank document paste in.
save it as a .php – and save it with the keyword you want. Thats it, upload it to your server and when you load in your browser it will redirect to the link.
So for instance here you could have.
http://affordableseotipsandtricks.com/great-seo-software.php
which would forward to a Clickbank product or whatever.
No need to risk 3rd party url cloaking (which is meant for shortening anyway) and no need to waste resources on a plugin. Ive been trying to keep Wordpress Plugins to the absolute must use ones as if any have a memory leak, crash, are programmed badly etc it can cause problems on the server. Ive read about someone who had 200+ sites and their host shut down all his site temporarily as one of them had a crashed plugin which was using up 85% of the shared server CPU, I dont think its worth using them for simple tasks.
Great point you make Danny about not using WP plugins for simple tasks!
I’ll probably never get around to following up with what you’ve written in your reply, I have to be honest about that. I’ve got so many things that I’m forever thinking about – developing business etc. that all the techie stuff gets put well and truly on the back burner. Which is exactly when one requires someone with techie expertise to work on these type of things in the background – as and when… But nevertheless, thanks a lot for sharing Danny! No doubt some folks who read the post here and the comments will have learned something that’s gonna be very beneficial for them!
Cheers!
Joseph
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