I was going to write a post a bit earlier this morning (I was up at 2am and wrote a spun article for the first time in 3 months – I’d forgotten how much I don’t enjoy writing spun articles). But, I got this new piece of software that I want to use for backlinking and it takes quite a bit of setting up.
(the image here is of Damai, which over-looks the South China Sea. Its where we were for the day yesterday – a lovely place to relax and unwind, and the waters are so warm)
Its the sort that you have to fill in captcha thingies and POP3 account details and all that palava. And I get all frustrated with these sort of things and tend to avoid purchasing into such backlinking tools altogether. Well, this is an article submitter thingy and I’ve heard some good things about it, so I thought I would take the plunge regardless. Even though many of these things only get about 60 percent or so success rate at submitting. And I can’t go tweaking the settings for more submission success because I’m too stupid for doing that!
But I’ve given up with it for now – the POP3 stuff that is, and had to send the software owner an email for help with this POP3 nonsense because I can’t work it out to save myself. Thus time for me to write a post for the blog. (If anyone knows anything about setting up POP3 settings for Hostgator email accounts, do please let me know, thank you!).
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Damn, if I could swear right now I would. No, not about the POP3 palava, but about what’s going down with one of my websites, and thus my monthly income, both on eBay and on AdSense.
I’ve invested quite a bit of money in backlinking tools this month and seeing some interesting results from the past 3 weeks of using them. Not all good, I may add!
3 days ago I saw that after getting 3 record AdSense days on the trot, suddenly I get the lowest AdSense day of the month. Also, my eBay visitor count went down drastically – yesterday it was the lowest of the month by some way, and income from eBay is also the lowest of the whole month.
Something is wrong!
So I go check some stats from my best performing site – suspecting something is afoot there, and sure enough, site visitors are way down on normal.
In fact, the site has seen just over 22k uniques in the past month, which is the highest its ever seen – all from long tail rankings in Google (almost all from Google anyhow).
But the stats have been way down from 3 days ago and I know exactly why. I got hit by Google, didn’t I!
Even though I’ve got quite a few backlinks to this site in place from months ago (the site is about 10 months old, and I have done a bit of backlinking to it now and again over that time), with my current backlinking methods, Google has said “we don’t like this and so you are gonna suffer”.
And suffering I am! But what to do about this?
There are a few options, really. I’m not saying the site is sandboxed. Its still ranking for a few terms, and it could be that its just going down with a major dance in rankings. But I cannot help but suspect it has been sandboxed. And if it has, what can I do to get it out sooner, rather than waiting for perhaps 8 or 9 months (2 of the 3 websites that I had sandboxed about 3 months ago are still in the box, with one just having come out, but still not ranking well in SERP).
- Well, I have heard say that I could change the domain name and change the posts and stuff. But na, that ain’t gonna cut it. Its a large site and that’s too much work. No guarantee it would be successful either. So, what else?
- I could just leave it and sacrifice what was an increasingly good income for what could be many months to come. Nope! I did that with those 3 other sites – gave up on them, and have seen very little income from any of them over that time, when before they were doing fine.
- I could go in and do all soft backlinks to it over what could be months – soft meaning that all my backlinks are high quality stuff from the likes of ezinearticles, Squidoo, WordPress dot com and what have you. Hmmm… too much hard work and I’m too lazy for such a grind. So nope!
- Final option – go in even harder than I have been doing with all sorts of links, ranging from good to rubbishy quality and just see what the heck happens. Aha! That’s the one for me!
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So I’m going to bomb this site with tons of backlinks in the next few weeks and hopefully this will pull it out of the sandbox and maybe I can even get it ranking for some of the higher searched keyword phrases too, instead of merely ranking for low hanging fruit (this indeed was my intention – to rank for some more highly searched-for terms).
What sort of links? Well, if I can get this POP3 stuff sorted out I will be using a ton of article directory 
submissions (for now even writing the articles myself – yucky!). I may very well get Article Ranks too (link is affiliated – I’ll be doing a review in time, if I do sign up with AR), and use that for added effect – before the price goes up at the end of this month – thanks Tom and James for the info on that!
And, I’ve got a couple of writers still writing (part time) out of the 6 employees I took on only 2 weeks ago – 2 staff from the original 6 is pretty much where I wanted to be, so that’s fine – and submitting articles to make up blog posts. I’ll discuss more about this particular process and what I’m using here and why I am investing so much money in it in the days to come.
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I don’t have UAW at the moment (but I still like UAW a lot!), and will possibly try out Article Ranks for a bit instead – AR is a bit cheaper and I hear good things about it.
Oh, and I do have another piece of software which I have been using and which is the culprit for the down-fall of my best performing site. Again, I will discuss this software in the days to come, after I see more results from it, and thus either give it the thumbs up, or the thumbs down.
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So yes, I could be jumping up and down right now and shouting abuse at my laptop. After all, this month’s income was looking to be higher than last months, but this incident could see a change to that. Plus, I’ve got many more costs this month than I have had for… almost 2 years, so a drop in income is merely adding pressure, which can end in sleepless nights and lots of gray hair. I got the graying hair, I don’t want any more. And my nights often are somewhat sleepless anyhow, so no extra harm there.
But no, I see this as very good news. Cos I’m insane? No, it proves that what I am doing is working, and I like that a lot! Just as with the Shelby site as I mentioned in a post the other day – its been dancing about for some good keyword phrases (phrases that according to Google were worth something like 170k unique visitors a month – but with the new kwd tool, are only worth about 27k uniques a month (taking around a 40% figure of that 27k, if indeed I can rank top)). And I see in Analytics that the uniques for those 2 keyword phrases is growing nicely, so what I can see in Scroogle Scraper must indeed be reasonably true – improving rankings, which is not always the case – Scroogle rankings are not always indicative of world-wide rankings.
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I said its very good news. Well, that’s not entirely true. Although this site I am talking about is fairly evergreen with sales being all year round (so it seems anyhow – I have no idea about the niche), there is no doubt that sales in November and December would be as good as if not better than at any other time. Thus my timing for getting the thing sandboxed or whatever could be very poor.
Ah well, what to do? What to do is to work hard (and spend hard – ouch!) on ranking other sites in the meantime. Keep keenly focused, don’t let this down-turn in income upset the apple cart. See it as positive. Re-asses my current focus (is it time to dump that travel website I have been backlinking to – the rankings are good, but the income is rotten – is this good income ethics or merely me indulging myself – indulging my ego a bit too much?).
As a matter of fact, quite a few domains that have been coming up for renewal this month (mainly with Go Daddy) and which I had every intention of renewing because they do make some income – well, I’ve not bothered to renew. Why not? Because even though they are profitable, they do take a little bit of time to administer – have to keep them updated etc with regards to plugins and what have you – so there is too much time being spent on that, even though it takes merely 10 minute a month per site for those lower end sites.
That’s 10 minute per site, each month, and with around 50 lower end sites that are ticking over and making small profits, I think that’s too much time spent on the wrong thing.
So I want to really pair back all this dross and make my business much more streamlined. Even more streamlined than it is now, which is much “cleaner” now than it was 4 months ago.
After Christmas sales have ended, I will be dumping a lot more sites – before their domains are set for renewal. I’ve had enough of keeping sites merely to see 2 months of decent income from them.
And what this really comes down to is – for each site I have, I will be making lots of effort at top rankings for high (financial) value keyword phrases (or what I hope to prove to be high value), and that way I am sure that profits for the next year will be far greater than they have been during 2010. Watch this space…
Comments PLEASE, are always welcome!
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm…. the sandbox I am not sure about but I hear that when that happens just keep doing what you’re doing when it comes to adding content/backlinking and ignore it. I realize that it is incredibly hard as the income dropped but that is Google for you. From what I hear and see the dancing is quite hardcore lately as it is time for the annual before the holidays algorithm update. So be on the lookout for that as it seems that it has started already.
Instead of simply dropping the sites that are making small income sell them on flippa and make some quick bucks. In case you do not know how to do it go watch a few of the videos of the last module from the 30 day challenge and all will be explained to you under two hours. It’s located somewhere on challenge.co
Good Luck!
Hi Tom, ya – I’ll just keep plugin away at the backlinks. No matter whether this is purely down to a severe dance in Google or is sandboxing, its not going to hurt things if I keep pluggin links.
I’ve witnessed Google’s clamp down already – not witnessed, but succumbed to it, so it would seem. The reason those 3 sites I mentioned in this post got sandboxed was for transgressions that a few months ago would have been rewarded by Google and not punished. I know this for a fact because its the same backlinking methods I’ve used over many months now, with no negative effects up till recently.
I hear ya regards flipping. I just can’t be bothered with it though. If I were to flip sites it would be because I had set up the site with the intention of flipping, or that the site was flying along nicely in a niche that was gonna die a death sooner or later – like iPhone 4 or something. Its more appealing to me to just dump these sites and move along as soon as possible to making more income from other sites – whether that be sites I have already in my possession, or new ones.
It would be nice to flip the Damai site, but its a personal travel site rather than a general one, so I don’t think that would appeal to most buyers.
Thanks for your insights Tom – appreciated!
Joseph
Joseph,
Would you expand on the following statement?
“The reason those 3 sites I mentioned in this post got sandboxed was for transgressions that a few months ago would have been rewarded by Google and not punished. I know this for a fact because its the same backlinking methods I’ve used over many months now, with no negative effects up till recently.”
Are you talking about building Web 2.0 properties and hitting them hard with links?
This is the knowledge that brings people to blogs such as yours.
Thanks
Tom
Hi Tom, yes, knowledge such as this comes with experience and with discussing matters with those who have gone before. No reason for me to say that but I felt a philosophical moment coming on there.
Its not to do with Web 2.0s, Tom. Although I hear that if you bang Web 2.0s up enough they disappear from SERP in Google too. Such as using a ton of profile links in a short space of time.
I was very much an advocate of Blog Blueprint for quite some time and had this “wonderful” idea that why don’t I use it to rank for more long tails. You see, I got in the habit of checking AW stats in my hostgator account (time very well spent, I may add!), and could see that for some of my sites I was getting good unique visitor count via long tails, and nothing at all from short tails (mainly because I was not focusing too much on backlinking for short tails – well, on some sites yes, but on many no, because of lack of resources etc.).
So when I check the rankings using Scroogle I could see that for many of those long tails they were well down the page in Google dot com server (again, not entirely representative of the whole world where Googie is concerned, but fairly close – ish, none the less).
So, I decided to set up an ongoing campaign of targeting those long tails that were getting a few hits per week or so, and trying to see how easy it was to get them up the SERP, maybe even to top spot.
It works by jove, it works! Just with a couple or so BB backlinks, for many of those web pages that were perhaps sitting in 10th, I was getting them top within 2 weeks. Not for all – sometimes it takes more work. But for many its very easy to do, if you give them a little link love.
And there goes a big part of my technique for getting this particular site from 2k uniques about 5 months ago, to 22k uniques over the past month, with a mass of potential for much more! (edit: I used Blog Blueprint to do this technique on this site for about 2 months in all).
Of course, it should go without saying that if you are to use this technique (many folks will have good intentions of doing so, but its a daily slog/ grind for sure), you have to know that your product sells at least fairly well. And further, if you are to focus on only – say – a couple of sites, then you gotta have a whole range of products in those niches so that you can vary the tags enough to get a nice variety in rankings. If you only have – say – 100 products in a particular niche, its gonna be tough to rank for more than 500 keyword phrases. But that may be enough, before moving on to the next domain/ niche.
This should really be a blog post, so I’ll make it into one when I get the “feel” for doing so. I kinda like Star Wars so I’m a believer in “The Force be with you” kinda thing
Oh, and although some folks poo poo Blog Blueprint (and for good reason do some folks poo poo it), its a wonderful sort of tool for this kind of work. Half an hour per day can see some real nice increases in weekly financial profits once you start seeing those increase in rankings!
Joseph,
I see, so you are saying that by targeting the long tails too hard it placed you in the sandbox… am I geting that right?
If that is in fact the case it will make it real hard for anyone to get traffic quickly. Really hope that Google has not killed that strategy… from what I know about 50% of your back links should be going to your home page and 50% deep within the site. Have you followed that, or have all of your links simply focused on the deeper pages?
Thanks,
Tom
That seems to be it Tom, yes. I was targeting both home page and interior pages at the rate of about 20 links a week using BB. And remember too, BB is reputed for not being great at getting these posts indexed so quite a few of those 20 links per week probably even now are not indexed.
The 50 50 stat is a rough guide that you can take or leave – after all, let’s face the facts – some websites will naturally get links mainly to homepage, where others will get very few to homepage and tons to inner pages.
Agreed – Google are making it tougher now to get visitors quickly to a new site, or to a site that has received few backlinks. The only exception I can think of right now would be along the lines of an exact match domain that could rank top 10 as soon as the site is indexed in Google, and that would tend to happen if the competition is not so stiff, otherwise you’d most probably not get a top 10 as soon as that. And even if you do get this sort of top ten, it would tend to last no longer than 2 weeks or so and then it would slump downwards until you could get some links back to it.
Cheers!
Jo
If the POP problem is with Article Marketing Robot, make sure you have everything unchecked. That was the problem I had (contrary to other advice I found).
Carrie recently posted..Site 1 Focus – Week 2 Update
Hi Carrie – its been a while! Yes, that was it. I had a chat with Hostgator support and they put me right within minutes. No word from the software support team, which is poor on their behalf.
But even if you had told me to untick all the boxes, the other bits you have to fill in would (did) have me totally in a spin – I have no head for this stuff whatsoever and I tend to find that any instructions that come with this type of software are generally severly lacking – seems that the software producers presume we are all tech-capable when I bet that the vast majority of us are quite the opposite. Thus they end up getting tons of questions via email when they could have avoided that by spending a bit more time and being a bit more thorough with their instruction manuals.
Hope you are well Carrie!
Jo
I’ve been working on SEO for my website http://wwwFreebieJeebiesFJcouk and this site has helped me out abit!
Hi Jordan, I’ve got a friend who has a site with almost exactly the same domain name as yours, unusual as it is. Small world!
Some great advice here Jo. I’m always a bit in awe when I see stats like 22k uniques in the past month. I don’t know how you stay on top of this. It’s a little unnerving that targeting the long tails too hard it placed you in the sandbox. I’ll keep reading and learning. Thanks for sharing!
Sherryl Perry recently posted..Copyright Infringement – What Should You Do if Your Blog Post is Stolen
Hi Sherryl, its my mistake that its now gone awry actually, but at the same time this SEO stuff is all about trial and error so although the short term is a bit painful to bare, in the mid and longer term all will be good. Its most certainly affected my eBay performance this month – more about that coming up shortly in my income stats for October.
But I’ve got another couple of sites that are growing in stats very nicely so I’ve no doubt given a little time I’ll be doing okay again with eBay income. Not sure about AdSense however as that’s gone off the boil as it often does with me.
Oh, that 22k is purely from search engines – by far the most from Google as opposed to Google dot com. Hardly anything comes from Bing or Yahoo and nothing from Social Media. Its all about SEO and long tail rankings.
Cheers Sherryl!
Hi Joseph,
A lot of your post is over my head, but like Sherryl, I am also quite impressed with 22k unique hits per month. You sound like you are what you preach – and that would be an SEO expert so thanks for sharing your experiences with those of us with much less SEO knowledge and best of luck to you.
Julie Weishaar recently posted..The Printing Industry Transformed
Hi Julie, thanks for coming by here!
To be honest, its actually not too difficult to get that amount of unique visitors per month. I know it sounds like its incredibly hard work and all that, but its not. The main thing is to be able to pop up posts fairly quickly and to do a bit of on-page SEO. My on-page SEO is far from perfect but it obviously works, and its pretty simple stuff.
You also have to find a niche that is very popular of course, and if its a product you are trying to sell, that the product has lots of variety. Let’s take golf for example – there are hundreds – maybe even thousands of different makes of clubs plus something like 13 different clubs in the bag, plus all the different golf ball makes, plus all the rest of it – this then would be a prime candidate for attracting many thousands of visitors to a site purely by using long tail keyword phrases.
You don’t even have to backlink, but a little bit of backlinking can help for those slighly more popular long tail keyword phrases.
Now the added beauty of attracting searchers via long tail keywords is that they tend to be looking to spend money, unlike someone who simply puts in a search for something like “sand wedge”. Mind you, you got to keep seasonality in mind. Seasonality is a very big factor when it comes to continual sales.
Thanks again Julie and I hope that’s not too complicated!
Regards
Joseph
Hi Joseph,
Oh is that all? LOL Thanks so much for the detailed explanation. I know about the necessity to pop out posts quickly – it is amazing how quickly we can drop in search if we take a breath. Seems like it is getting more and more difficult to stay in the game these days – but alas – we all continue to try and do our best. I need to pay more attention to my long tail keywords ….. another thing for my to-do list
Julie Weishaar recently posted..The Printing Industry Transformed
Hi Julie, its much easier to rank for a ton of long tailed keyword phrases than it is to obtain high rankings for some very competitive term. And as I mentioned, for that particular site which was receiving 22k uniques – over the last month – it was not ranking for any high end keyword phrases at all.
To be clear here – if I had known how easy it is to rank for long tails and just how powerful this can be, then I would have been doing that when I first started online and not wasting a ton of money on a ton of not-to-decent glossy products that are supposed to tell you how to SEO for high end keyword phrases.
And I know folks go on and on about adding content to a blog or site to keep it fresh and to keep it ranking high – or to get it ranking high, for various terms. I have a number of sites that I don’t ever add content to. Those sites have a few backlinks is all, and they are ranking high for some keyword phrases. So all this stuff about having to add content and more content and more content is not necessarily relevant to ranking high in Google. If you want to rank high for loads of long tails, then yes, you gotta keep on adding content.
If its a blog though and you enjoy posting on your blog, then no problem in adding content. To be honest, I’ve got to the stage of almost detesting writing articles, unless they are real short ones – then I can maybe do about 5 in a day, and on occasion. But I really do like writing for my blog. Fortunately I make enough from my work online now to be able to outsource the writing to folks who enjoy doing it far more than I.
I agree, it is more difficult now to gain rankings, not least cos Google are placing even more emphasis on gaining more clicks on their AdWords stuff and thus its tougher for us SEO folks. And also because there are more and more folks coming online to try and make money – most of whom give up in sheer desperation, it has to be said. But there are still ways and means to make a whole heap of monthly cash flow (not that I am anywhere near to that myself – maybe next year though
). I think you gotta be smart though. Tap into some of the knowledge that some folks are willing to share for example and it all adds up in the end.
Best wishes Julie!
Joseph
Spun articles and tricks to influence page rank and Google rank are always deemed to backfire some ways (whether rightfully or not) and a site that isn’t supposed to will end up in the Google sandbox. The best way to get a site to perform is just to maintain quality consistently to influence organic backlinks
Hi California Cases, I think the word “deemed” is probably correct – there is no proof that I know of that spun articles are treated any worse for backlinking workings than that of non-spun. This is a little like the old and well-known saying that you can’t rank content that is not unique (or you can’t rank it well). I beg to differ on that too.
Thanks for your comment California!
Regards
Joseph
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