Life and Times of a Brit Living in the Philippines

Competitor Dumps Backlinks Genie Website From Top Of Google

September 22, 2012 by Joseph 6 Comments

Time for something different!

Some of you may know that I’ve got this blog ranking top in Google for “Backlinks Genie”, “Backlink Genie”, “Backlinks Genie review”, and a few other related keyword terms (my Backlinks Genie review Youtube video is also ranking well).

How did I do it? I used Backlinks Genie (of course) (that links to my own review of the tool on this blog) and followed the general ethos of the 40 Days Challenge (this links to my 40 Day Challenge website).

Well, those keyword phrases don’t get too much traffic, but nevertheless, the competition even for low search keywords is strong because its an internet marketing related term.

Seems every keyword term which is in some way related to the world of IM is keenly targeted, for whatever reason, and that’s why I’ve generally avoided going after these sort of rankings in Google.

Anyhow, I do see traffic for the terms – perhaps on average around 4 – 10 uniques per day. Nothing to write home about.

However, I’ve been having issues with my affiliation to the product (my affiliate link has not been functioning correctly and I’ve not been receiving credit for sales) and therefore have regularly been in touch with Joe, who is one of the BLG owners, in order to remedy the situation.

He’s been very helpful and we appear to have conquered the problem, although it did take a long time and no doubt some of my commissions have gone astray. To make up for that though, he’s kindly doubled my incentive – from 20% commission per sale to 40% comms. Cool!

One thing he did mention to me was this – at one time, not so long ago, the BacklinksGenie.com website was ranking top for the keyword phrases that I’m now ranking at the top for.

That’s to be expected isn’t it? After all, its the exact match domain name and its also the company who developed and sells the service, so its strongly branded as far as Google is concerned.

He explained that the website lost all the top flight rankings when someone decided to bomb them with hundreds of thousands of backlinks. Google got uppity and bam! The site was history (in terms of ranking top in Google) for a variety of BLG related keyword terms.

So, if you still had any doubts about this. If you still thought that a competitor cannot get your rankings dumped in Google, you should think again.

This is nothing new. But there are still folks sitting proudly on the fence about it, resolutely claiming that they don’t accept that you can get booted from Goog SERP’s if a competitor (or some dweeb) were to bomb your webpages with backlinks in an effort to have your pages removed from the upper echelons.

You can!

As a postscript, should anyone who reads this decide to do the same with my blog (bombing my webpages with links in order to get the pages dumped in Google) then I wouldn’t bother. Income from my affiliation with Backlinks Genie doesn’t amount to much and its really not worth your while.

What’s in an Exact Match Domain Name? Dominating Google Rankings With Exact Match Domain Names

May 26, 2012 by Joseph 21 Comments

Straight up – I’m discussing the very recent findings of Jon Leger, who carried out a fairly extensive and very recent study of how exact match domain names are faring in Google search – post Panda, post Penguin, and post any other Google algorithm updates that few of us are aware of.

Apologies for the lack of images in this post. The post is not overly appropriate to using images, really. Or maybe I’m just gettin’ lazy

Now, if you’ve been working in SEO – with the main focus being Google search – for any length of time, then you will already know that Google provide a bias to exact match domain names. If you don’t know what an exact match domain name is, you can read about it here…

What is an exact match domain name?

Well, as it turns out, post the Penguin algorithm update by Google which was rolled out towards the end of April, exact match domain names (let’s call them EMD’s) are ranking very nicely indeed in Google’s search!

But, Jon took this research further and assessed a number of EMD’s that had high rankings in Google for their exact match keyword phrase and found that not only are they still ranking very well, but many of those that are ranking have an inordinate amount of exact match keyword anchor text linking to the site’s homepage.

In fact, some EMD’s he found that were ranking in Google’s top ten for their related keyword phrase had as much as 100% of their backlinks containing the exact match keyword phrase to the homepage.

Check Your Google Rankings Because Google Have Rolled out Another Update

April 25, 2012 by Joseph 28 Comments

Check Your Google Rankings Because Google Have Rolled out Another Algorithm Update.

Oh no, I hear you mutter (or cry in anguish perhaps!).

Here we go again – another mess up of the rankings perhaps?

Another round of dumping of our webpages?

Have you checked your site’s visitor stats today??

Here’s the facts from the horses mouth about this search engine update which was rolled out yesterday – 24th April 2012:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

I popped on over to Jon Leger’s forum to check out what he’s seeing.

For the query: make money online (110,000 global monthly Google searches), there’s this site ranking top 10…

http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/

Huh? There’s no content on it!!

Actually, here’s my own search results for when I did the “make money online” search in Google…

From Apparent Failure to SUCCESS!

January 28, 2012 by Joseph 32 Comments

Today, I thought I would write a post which is particularly relevant to all those folks who regularly read my blog but rarely if ever comment. That’s fine – I know we are not all the commenting “type”. Apparently, the average amount of comments received by a blog is only 1% of total traffic. Fortunately, this blog is quite a bit above that.

Anyhow, I received a brief email today from a gentleman who sometimes writes me to check that he’s on the right tracks. As you know, I do try to answer almost every single email I get – other than those great long book-like emails which I’m sorry to say I simply don’t manage to get around to making a reply to.

Here is the email I received this morning. The gents name I will leave out for reasons of privacy…

Email title: Awesome “THANK YOU”. (I actually thought it was spam, LOL!).

Recently Suffered a Ranking Penalty in Google? Read This – Return From the Dead!

December 27, 2011 by Joseph 138 Comments

If you are currently annoyed, angry, frustrated, feeling utterly miserable and helpless – about having a website recently dumped down the Google rankings, then perhaps you can now take at least some heart from what I’m about to tell you. Listen up…

I set up a website around 9 months ago now. It was an MFA (made for AdSense) site – quickly set up the site, quickly added some content, quickly started the backlinking process, and voila – job done – a few top ten rankings within weeks, literally! And this was an EMD also (EMD = exact match domain name to a half decent keyword phrase in this particular case), although the kwd that the exact match is to only gets around 600 or 700 searches a month in Google according to Google stats, so the ranking of the EMD would hardly make me a millionaire over night.

Well, as it happens, the rankings did appreciate rather quickly – in fact, this niche has become popular over the past couple of years or so, so I was in fact surprised at just how quickly the rankings did materialize. I think in its hay-day, the website had about 6 of the 8 kwds I was targeting in top 10 and that came about within around 10 weeks of me buying the domain name. Yup – that was surprising!

Mind you, there was only one higher end kwd phrase with around 10k global search a month in Goog (according to Goog stats), where in the main, the rest of the kwds attracted anything between 500 and 3000 searches a month. So even though AdSense pays fairly well on this niche, the competition is still not particularly high end due to a fairly low geared search volume on the whole.

Okay, so there I was, happily moving up through the rankings for all my kwd phrases after only about 10 weeks, and the income was appreciating in tandem. Nothing huge by any means, but for example – one week may have seen 8 bucks, the next week saw 11 bucks, then then next 15 bucks and so on – you get the idea – the rise in income was gentle, but it was a definite rise all the same and ROI (return on investment) was good and looking better all the time.

But guess what – around about week 12 – 14, Goog did what they do and dumped all my rankings. The only ranking to stay in the top 30 was the EMD keyword phrase. All the rest plummeted out of the top 100. Thus the penalty was fairly harsh – site wide, as opposed to page or kwd “wide”. The site was of course still indexed in Google, so things could have been worse, but they were bad enough.

And yeah, I probably deserved it – I’ll come clean. I got greedy, and I wanted more, more, MORE!!! And I got a bit slap happy with my backlinking processes I guess. Silly boy – never learn!

Competitor Dumps Backlinks Genie Website From Top Of Google

What’s in an Exact Match Domain Name? Dominating Google Rankings With Exact Match Domain Names

From Apparent Failure to SUCCESS!

Recently Suffered a Ranking Penalty in Google? Read This – Return From the Dead!

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