Due to the fun of time zones mostly when its the 24th April in the US its the 25th April in New Zealand. In New Zealand and Australia the 25th April is ANZAC day. ANZAC Day is the day Australasians respect our war dead – so I personally think its pretty fucking ironic that’s also the day that Google decided to DISrespect the right of small business to exist on the Internet. By the 26th there were an awful lot casualties including askthebuilder.com – apparently being the poster child for the Adsense team and providing huge amounts of unique and original content is no guarantee that Google might rank you in the search engines. So much for the content is King argument. The winners, fairly universally, appear to be large corporations as domain authority and, quite possibly, large Adwords budgets, trump everything else.
Full disclosure: my niche sites got slaughtered. As in every ranking gone from the top 100. My larger sites are generally OK with some oddities like losing the ranking for “passive income” for this one. However I do not think this is a result of the deindexing of Build My Rank, I saw the drop of a few pages that was the result of that. This was the wholesale disappearance of every ranking for each site.
Most of those affected where niche sites, which, frankly repeat the same keyword variations a little too much both on-page and in the backlinks – I’ll ignore them for a while before I decide what to do with them.
But there is one I’m, frankly, annoyed about, the book site I set up last August. I set this site up to promote my Vacation Packing List book. Before 24 April it was bouncing around page 2 for some related long-tails – but now its gone, entirely, it doesn’t even rank for the site’s domain. Instead we have:
I mean that terms is hardly a very competitive one – in fact, as witnessed by the SERPS – Google has hardly anything that matches! It has good links and about 20 links from Build My Rank – if that’s what sunk it – then the very scary world of negative SEO is alive and well.
My gut feel is that this one is a huge win for Google – but not for its stated reason of “removing spam for the search results” – it clearly hasn’t – just Google some of your favourite queries using a proxy such as pagewash.com – to see the rubbish that is ranking.
No this is a winner for Google – because of the number of small time SEOs I see claiming that they be quitting the game. In fact if I was looking for an investment then I’d be buying shares in any company which provides email services such as mailchimp or AWeber.
Because although I’m not quitting the game – I am focussing more on social traffic and building email lists. And those are easier to do with larger sites. Are niche sites dead? I don’t think so – unless every specialist site – like my one above, and every small business’s website, are doomed to rank nowhere. Which may be what Google wants – but how long before the general public start switching to a better search engine? Because at the moment if you search Google isn’t providing the answers – they are giving you a list of big brands, and sites which are way out of date.
I originally published this post in November 2011 pointing out that people really didn’t understand how to use link networks. I’ve now updated it = UPDATED: March 2012 after Google de-indexed Build My Rank
OK guys apparently the world changed and some of you didn’t notice. Ironic really, I’ve heard plenty of people whinging about not being able to get good backlinks. Or asking for alternatives to Build My Rank because the BMR blogs didn’t look “real” and weren’t niche specific.
There are two really obvious things that are apparently from Google’s swipe at backlink networks. First obviously backlinks from these networks were effective (otherwise Google would have just ignored them) and, in future you are going to have to play smarter.
Build My Rank was not the only network to get deindexed and devalued, it was probably just the highest profile one amongst the make money crowd. SEO Nitro, SEO Linkvine. The sites that have not got hit are generally keeping a VERY low profile.
This is quite specific – Google isn’t targeting spammy backlinks from forums, automated bookmarking or the other stuff you can buy for $5 at fiverr. People who have spammed the hell out of their own sites are reporting no drop in rankings and no nasty messages in Google tools about “unnatural links being noted on their sites”
This is all about networks which insisted on 150 -odd words of unique content. Google has found them and taken them down manually.
So what do you do now to rank – what are the alternatives to BMR?
Alternative 1: Forget Manufactured Backlinks Make Your Site High Quality
Yeah I know I probably just lost 90% of you. And no I’m not saying you don’t need backlinks – what I’m saying if you write really good content, engage with your readers, and be genuinely helpful. You will then, over time get natural backlinks, when people link to and promote your content. Its a sound approach, which will take a while, but at the end, you will be mainly Google-proof. Not entirely – because you’d be an idiot to trust Google after this week – but a lot more than if you just have a mini-site of thrown together content that you don’t actually know much about.
If you want to learn how to develop a long-term, high quality websites – CLICK to check out the Keyword Academy
Alternative 2: Find a Few High Quality links
I started a new site – 3 weeks later it was a PR3 – nine months later its still PR3 and on page 1 for its desired keyword? What did I do? I gave it one single link from a PR3 site which I controlled which was relevant to the niche and didn’t have too many outbound links.
It not rocket science, it hasn’t changed any time recently. Some links are more useful than others. When you have access to strong links you will find it easier to rank your websites.
Getting just one really, really good backlink can do more for your rankings than a 1000 crappy links. It will also look more natural to Google.
What is a good backlink? A link from an authority site? So WTF is an authority site? A site which ranks well in the same niche as you, a site which has an engaged audience who find it useful, a page which has similar or the same keywords as you want to rank for, a site with PR (this is the least important factor).
How do you get those links? Well as I said above the best way is to have such an awesome site that people in the same field WANT to link to you. But you can hurry up the process a bit. Its not rocket science. Its called guest posting. Try to find a blog who will accept a guest post from you. You’ll have to write really good content. You’ll have to make it possibly even more useful than the stuff you would publish on your own site. And in return they will give you a link. And you know what – you might even get visitors from that link – there’s a thought!
Its pretty tough finding guest posting opportunities. You’ll have to contact a lot of webmasters, and expect a lot of rejections – or ignores. I hate doing it. On the other hand after a while you get to know a few people in the same niche and then its a little easier.
It probably all sounds a bit overwhelming – and I can understand if you are pretty discouraged after the news of BMR. But if you give up now – Google wins – and I HATE letting the bullies win!
Check out the Keyword Academy – really – you’ll be pleased you did – its also free for the first month – so no risk to you. Really check out my new Postrunner V2 Review – a great opportunity for quality backlinks.
I'd call Google the elephant in the room - but I like placyderms
Build My Rank has been good to me. They’ve ranked my sites for years. It was easy, it was hands-off (I used an outsourcer), it worked. Until some time last night, my time. I woke to find this:
Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. Read more here
I wasn’t having a good day yesterday – seriously questioning what I was doing online and trying to figure out a new direction. Wizzley wasn’t living up to expectations, I was stuck in a funk of self-doubt and analysis paralysis.
When I read the post above I expected myself to freak out. Oddly I didn’t. I know this means I’ve probably lost two sites which I’ve aggressively used BMR on – the same two sites which I’d just received the dreaded “notice of detected unnatural links” message in Google Webmaster Tools.
Or maybe not.
The more I think about this the more I see the opportunities. I finally know what I’m going to be doing over the next few months.
First I’m not going to be doing anything Google would like me to do – so I will NOT be:
I won’t be removing “unnatural links” to my two sites.
I won’t be asking Google for reinclusion so they can run comparative stats and see which sites I removed.
I won’t be removing content from BMR for the same reason.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist – but I firmly believe that Google is playing a really two-faced game these days. Google does what Google needs to do to make it, not your or me, money. Although I don’t like this guy’s taste in MMO products – he’s spot on in this post about Google’s hypocrisy.
I'd call Google the elephant in the room - but I like placyderms
Google Still Counts Links
The mass de-indexing of BMR PROOVES that links still matter. I mean why deindex something that makes no difference! In fact THANK YOU Google for de-indexing BMR – now I know those links weren’t working (which I was beginning to suspect).
So all Google’s huffing and puffing about social indicators and quality content – yeah may help – but links is still where its at! I can’t believe they actually de-indexed the network though. Crazy – they could have just quietly devalued the links – would have been far more effective!
Build My Rank Does The Right Thing
And thank you the people behind BMR – because you are nice people. You’re not the first network to be hit – but you are the first that I know of who is offering pro rata refunds for the current month, will pay out affiliates before shutting the doors, and, this is the biggie – are offering to return user’s posts! Hell, some networks who have been de-indexed have even kept on trading!
If you are a BMR member this is what you should do:
cancel your subscription with Paypal for BMR (BMR can’t do for you AFAIK);
keep an eye on their blog for when they release the tool to download your articles (unless of course you kept a copy of all your BMR posts on your hard-drive – yeah me to!);
give in a few weeks and then quietly use that content either on other networks, or on your own network. (After all, its de-indexed now – not duplicate content!)
EDIT: JUST TO REPEAT IN BOLD – IF YOU GET A MESSAGE ABOUT UNNATURAL LINKS BUILDING WMT DON’T REPLY TO IT AND REMOVE ANY DOUBT! ITS AN AUTOMATED BOT MESSAGE IGNORE IT!
I am liking Pinterest! SY gave me a heads up about why I should use Pinterest ages ago, and sent me an invite. I ignored it. Then she told me I REALLY needed to have a look, and finally I did. I figured it would be a distraction, it was, but what may well be a useful one. First off the site scared the bejeesus out of me – it is very “pretty” – I am graphically challenged and easily scared by people who can do pretty! Apparently a lot of the users are female – I’m not surprised.
But even for the non-visual amongst us, and, dare I say it, those of us who don’t have any clues as to “our style”, and no desire to plan a wedding, its kinda cool, and useful.
Cool Stuff You Can Do On Printerest
Its good for collecting stuff together – I did a bit of baking around Christmas I was forever googling “how to make marizpan” and similar stuff – I found some good recipes – this would have been a good place to keep them all together (maybe next year).
You can upload your photos. Its as close to a good place to share images that I’ve seen. You don’t have huge options as to how to arrange them – that seems to happen automagically – but its cool. I’d suggest that you watermark them though.
Pinterest for Image Sharing
And For the Internet Marketers Among You..
Well I’m counting at least two do-follow links here one at the top above the pic and the pic itself. Those links stay when the pic is shared too – OK multiple links from the site doesn’t have as much value sure, but it gets you in front of more eyeballs…
If you sell anything pretty – photos or crafts you should be on this pronto. This is not my area of expertise – but people sharing and being to link through to your pretty cup cake holder – or whatever it is you sell can’t be bad, can it? It also works for non-fiction indie authors. Oh and you can even advertise the price on it too. (I can’t get any html to work in the description though).
Hey, even if you don’t make stuff – or your product is not particularly visual, those links could be your affiliate link you know!
Now, at the moment, there seems to be more real people on Pinterest than internet marketers, it won’t stay that way for long, as several of the big boys are calling Pinterest as the next big thing in social media.
Frankly its refreshing – the interface is simple and intutive – after G+ and Facebook its a bloody joy I can assure you! Within minutes of tossing up some pretty pictures I had complete strangers share some of my stuff. That kinda gave me pause, these people did it because they wanted to not because they knew that sharing my book site might make me money.
Amazing! I want to go to Myanmar this year because I don’t think it will be long before its completely over-run with tour groups, and has a McDonalds on every corner, and nice modern buses and trains. It will loose its current run-down, worn-out bucolic charm. You might want to check out Pinterest while its still dominated by people sharing their interests, it has a certain bucolic charm too.
Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville
Who needs new keywords then? Well any of us who want to make money online in my experience. As I mentioned recently, I’m using Wizzley to make some fast cash – though this approach will make you money regardless of the platform – so long as the website is in Google’s good graces.
So does it work? Let’s see – I was aiming for 7 articles/day on Wizzley – hmm not quite – I’m up to 17 articles on my main account on wizzley – so what have I have I earned?
As as of 13 Jan – I’ve made $46 from Amazon and as of 15 Jan $30 from Adsense, that’s not bad given the age of most of my articles and how few of them I have.
I’m also getting a 10% order rate ie from around 450 clicks – I had 45 orders – I don’t have a huge amount of Amazon data to judge this by – but to this looks like a pretty darn good conversion rate.
Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville
What I am doing with Wizzley is a slightly new approach to me. As some of you will know most of us have been continuously frustrated with Google’s Adwords Tool inability to provide long-tail keywords. I’ve pretty much given up on it myself for long-tails.
Instead what I’m using is a tool which scrapes queries from Google’s autosuggest feature – Keyword Researcher. Basically it takes a few minutes to basically give me 500-1000 suggestions on everything I’ve tried it on.
Now KR won’t give you either competition or numbers searched. But obviously if a term is even in KR it must be searched for more than once (which is by some stats I saw ages ago is about 40% of all Google searches).
Basically for the length of time it takes me to write a Wizzley page – I’m not too worried about how many searchers there are either.
I basically throw a seed keyword into Keyword Researcher – and let it do its thing (incredibly fast I might add)!
I add all the keywords I have into Keyword Strategy tool and sort by search volume – you will see a lot of zeros ie no search traffic, but the term is from Google’s own “auto suggest” – Google lies – proof positive!
I basically start at the top – focus on the terms with the most searches and create about five pages – all targeting different, but related keywords. I create exact match urls with Wizzley and I interlink these pages.
Anything that raises its head in the top 100 – I start sending links to from SEO Cobra (using a link wheel at the moment – which seems to work great!) . Eventually they will all probably get backlinks – but the ones that show most promise get prioritized.
Rinse and repeat as they say.
Wizzley is not my site. They could go away tomorrow – I’m using them as a supplement to my income – they are not my main focus long term. If I find some nice new keyword groups that I think I can rank – I’ll build my own site and use the Wizzley pages for backlinks and traffic funnels.
Its nothing new – in fact its almost exactly the approach advocated back in the day when Court from the Keyword Academy – got excited about Hubs. (well except he was using Postrunner for backlinks and Hubpages not Wizzley) – it works.
Doing exactly the same thing will work on your own site – it will work faster if it has authority. How do you know if a site has authority? Easy, does an easy keyword rank with little or no backlinking? In fact its a perfect tool to use to build out a niche site to be a larger one – you really will have too many keywords to deal with!
Would I go out and buy Keyword Strategy just to get the search volumes easily?
Probably not – you can get them (about 75 at a time) – using Google’s Adwords Tool – or you can just figure out that if you are going after a competitive term like weight loss – is going to take a while and a lot of links, while going after “travel to Burma” – not so much!
If you are doing a competitive niche focus on 3 or long word phrases. Google will tell you there is no searches of course, but my stats beg to differ, and so does its own auto-suggest tool!
Do You Need Backlinks?
I rank #1 for “wizzley review” and “wizzley scam” . I haven’t built a single backlink for those terms – but this site has lots of authority for “review” and “scam” because of previous backlinks. For “empower network scam” – I started at #8 but dropped to #14 – so now I’m building links and I’m back to #11 – this is a competitive term – some people are making a lot of money with this scam.
So if you are using a tool like Keyword Researcher to find long tail keywords – you may or may not need backlinks depending on a) how competitive the niche is and b) how much authority the site you are putting content on has.
Are Lissie and her scams right? Well its hardly my fault that scam is a the word Google likes to give this blog authority on. Well OK maybe it is my fault! And so yes I can use it to my own benefit as in HubPages Scam, SEO Scribe Scam, Keyword Academy Scam, and of course the one that started it all SiteSell Scam.
What is Wizzley?
Wizzley is a place to write articles and get paid via affiliate programs plus get backlinks to your sites. It has a nice set of tools which are drag drop to build your “wizzes” (yeah really that’s what an article is called, where I come from is what a little boy does when he stands up to go to the loo – but whatever!). You have to have at least 400 words, the usual topics (porn, guns, drugs) are banned as are some other rather commonly over-used topics including acne, credit card debt, forex and weight loss.
What does Wizzley offer?
revenue share starts at 50% – goes to 55% after 50 articles and 60% after 100 articles;
revenue is from Adsense, Amazon, Zazzle and AllPosters – and you are paid direct by those advertisers – you know like hubpages used to be. You get paid for referrals too 10% of impressions from referral’s articles – paid from Wizzley’s share.
instant indexing – I created a new user on Wizzley – added an article I’d been forced to remove from HubPages – and it was indexed within the hour!
Stuff you should know:
they have human editors, don’t submit crap – they will reject it.
don’t submit duplicate content – they will reject it.
minimum article length: 400 words.
its a new site – it opened to the public about June 2011, therefore its not huge, and it doesn’t have the internal traffic hubpages has.
you can control the urls (the default is the same as the page’s title), as the site is new, you can probably get your URL of choice.
Wizzley Compared to HubPages
if you want to use the site for backlinks you have to have some advertising enabled, if you don’t want Adsense on the article, turn advertising off and then add an Amazon (or Zazzle, Allposters) module somewhere. They won’t accept articles solely for the purpose of backlinks
unlike HubPages you don’t have to run Adsense – turn off “advertising” on the right side of the edit page if you just want to use the other modules
unlike HubPages Wizzley has a nice little contents module
unlike HubPages there are quite a number of different ways to use the Amazon module – examples here
a brand new identity of mine on Wizzley had my first article indexed in Google inside an hour. With my 4-year old ID on hubpages recent hubs have taken days to be indexed
others are reporting getting keyword targeted articles on the 1st or 2nd page with little backlinking. I’ll comment when I have tried myself.
Wizzley has partner sites which accept German and French articles!
If You Make Money With HubPages You Might Want to Move to Wizzley ASAP
As of 2012 – HubPages’s Amazon modules will be paid via the HPAds programs, NOT via your own Amazon affiliate ID. If you are making good money with Amazon I shouldn’t have to explain to you why this is a terribly bad idea, and why, I have spend hours today un-publishing hubs on one of my accounts so I can move them over to Wizzley.
Ideally of course if your articles are making money, they should be on your own sites. But I haven’t time to create a bunch of sites, so in the meantime I am moving them to Wizzley.
On the face of it I like the layout of Wizzley and think I can use it to create a good CTR to Amazon. If the site stays in Google’s good books and pages rank easily – then as they say YAH CHING!
Google is Part of the Competitive Environment - Not a Moral Authority - or Your Friend
For fucks sake – I am over this whole -“Google hates me”, “I must please Google”, “is this OK with Google” shite going down in certain circles.
Google is a company.
Google is a search engine that using a superbly complex algorithm.
Google doesn’t give a shite about you – because you are not Google’s customer.
I think a lot of people need to get over this unhealthy relationship with Google. Because as it is now Google appears to be winning the war – which war? The propaganda war.
You know spreading mis-information and fear – the oldest propaganda trick in the book. And its working. Take for example the bullshite about buying and selling links. Google hates it. Of course Google hates it – links are what their search engine algorithms are still (mainly) based on. The reality is though, its pretty darn difficult for Google to know when a link is – well just a link – and when a link is a paid endorsement.
So often times you can get away with lots of paid links. But even more importantly:
If you are not ranking in the search rankings anyway why the hell wouldn’t you sell links – it could be a nice little earner!
Selling links is gaming the system, well that’s true. Selling links will get you thrown out of Google’s index, it will get you sent to the pergatory of the 999th page, your site will be deindexed and your sins will never leave you! Selling links is immoral!
Google doesn’t want you to sell links, or buy links. However that’s just a preference they have, because it helps their business model if you don’t. Selling links is bad for Google’s business model: selling your kid sister is immoral – see the difference?
I call bullshit on the rest of it. Lets start with the immoral bit first. This would frankly perplexes me. Google’s algorithm depends in part of counting the links to the page the more likely Google is to rank that page near page 1 (gross simplification there). So people who want their site on page 1, will acquire links to get them to page 1.
None of those links are paid for though – so they are OK. But if I take money for a link on my site – then its immoral and wicked and polluting the electrons of the Internet ??? Pleeeese. It sounds like a business proposition to me.
Google is Part of the Competitive Environment - Not a Moral Authority - or Your Friend
Selling Links in 2011
The link selling industry is alive and well. Most of us who have active blogs, particularly a site which is anywhere on the first couple of the pages of the search engine results will be familar with the email:
“Dear webmaster I love your site – I would love to provide some free content to it – the content is very well written and highly relevant to your readers. In return we will want just one tiny, little link.”
That’s the first offer – they want their link for free. You could try saying yes – and then no-following the link 🙂 Always amusing that one! Better yet – negotiate a decent rate – and then make sure the post doesn’t annoy your readers.
Decide on a Business Model
You either want to sell links or you want to rank in the search engines – I suggest you don’t want to do both on the same blog. You also want to pick your niche. For example, there is no point selling links in the Internet Marketing niche. Anyway there are plenty of affiliate programs which readers are interested in, and which pay me commission.
Other niches are different. Take, for example travel. The affiliate programs in travel don’t seem to convert well – who goes to a blog to book a flight or a hotel – most travellers know how to spell expedia or hotelclub – and they go there direct. Travel on the other hand is an enormous global industry. An industry which is going more and more on-line. Having your travel site on page 1 of a search listing is very, very worthwhile.
Paid Links and Sponsorship and Advertising – Same, Same – Not Different
Apparently advertising is OK but paid links aren’t – well that’s what some in the travel community seem to think. I call bullshite on this one -plus a pile of mis-information in the post and the comments which caused me to write this.
Not one of the sites I reviewed for this post no-followed any of their paid links: sidebar, footer, links under “Advertising” headers, widgets, or in-content links – either declared or not. As far as Google is concerned – if they want to come the heavy – they are all paid links unless you no-follow them.
In practice – if they are actually links to affiliate programs – then Google will probably not care. If they are links to landing or home pages of the advertiser – for which you are not getting a commission for – Google’s reviewers are going to assume you are being paid.
After all why the heck would anyone want to go to any of these advertisers – when they are on a travel blog? Yeah I outed the guys buying the links – not the bloggers being paid – rather see the pimps in jail not the pros if you see what I mean?
So if you are going to do paid links –
Do Paid Links Smart
Here’s how. You need to put all the paid links posts in new category – I suggest that you don’t call it “Paid Links” – maybe “Guest Posts” or “Miscellaneous” might be less obvious.
Make sure that category doesn’t appear on your front page, and remove it from your RSS feed. So now you have money in the bank and you haven’t annoyed your readers – that’s a start.
I would seriously consider re-writing any “Advertising/Press” page you might have to include that you always “no follow” paid links, whether you do or not. Yeah take the moral high-ground if you want – but really Google is in the habit of shooting first and asking questions later. You can always negotiate the deal with the advertiser in private.
If you are caught up in a manual review – then you need to appear to be doing the right thing.
Also putting links in older posts – is far less likely to be annoying to readers, particularly if they aren’t posts which show up in your “greatest hits” list.
Don’t even think about doing paid links on a blog which also uses Adsense – “Don’t make Google Look Stupid” is the appropriate mantra here.
Google Hates Paid Links But Seems To Be Ignoring All But the Most Blatent Sellers Currently
I’ve been watching the most blatant sellers of links in the travel niche for a few months, including a page rank update last month. The worst I’ve seen is a drop from 4 to 2 for someone who has a paid link at the bottom of almost every post. I’ve seen no reports of deindexing.
Google really doesn’t seem to care about the travel blogger’s selling links – at the moment. Whether the little furore I linked to above, will make a difference, its hard to know, but bets would be on not, but this is game not without risks, make your judgement.
The reality is – why you can get away with selling links, you are getting cash in hand, real cash, real return. If it all goes to custard and you get penalised – the worst thing that will probably happen is that you will lose your Page Rank. Page rank and search engine rankings are not related. PR is certainly not related to social media – your community won’t notice. Yes it may affect your future earnings – but at least you still have the cash.
My cynical take is that the people buying the links are also big Adwords advertisers – they are Google’s customers and Google doesn’t want to piss them off.
If you do get done for selling links – here’s what to do:
delete the offending posts or add the “no follow” attribute to the links; and
16/5 Adsense hub is back to #1 on scroogle.org 42 articles live on BMR
31/5 after sitting at #1 consistently for a week, today is back to #2 – 60 articles live on BMR
16/5 niche site dot info – #8 on scroogle.org – 32 articles live on BMR
31/5 after sitting consistently at #2 and #3 for the last week – has now dropped to #6/#7 – 60 articles live on BMR
Conclusion – a hub will rank again if you build links to it – whether you have to keep building links to it remains to be seen. For the amount of work you have to do – you might as well just build your own site. Hubpages.com will continue to drop traffic because most of the writers there believe passionately in the old chestnut “build it and they will come”.
Case Study 2: Product Hubs
Starting positions
New hub published 9/5.
16/5 new product hub not int top 100 – 1 link.
31/5 sitting at #28 on scroogle.org – 15 links.
16/5 niche site #15 12 links.
31/5 now at #5 with 15 articles on link.
My niche site is a only a bit over a year old – but is a fairly closely related excact domain match. Its less effort to get the new page on it ranked then to rank a new hub – no prizes for figuring what is the best decision going forward.
What To do About HubPages?
If you haven’t started – don’t bother.
If you have hubs that have dropped – then it might be worth a backlinking effort to get the top-paying ones back in position #1. For the ones that never ranked well – I’m seriously considering un-publishing them, waiting for them to de-index and placing them elsewhere ie on my own websites.
The Quantcast figures for HubPages -continue to tell the same story as last month:
Traffic still dropping on HubPages.com - from Quantcast.com
It should all be slightly sad really. In some ways it is – but much more so this entire little exercise has made me really excited. While I was looking at the data for this experiment I had a real “duh” moment. The moons aligned – the scales fell from my eyes – and figured out the Next Big Thing on making money online.
But that’s a whole other keyword – so another post ! Sorry!
Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast
I started on Hubpages.com – because of Hubpages I made my first $100 online and got paid out by Google’s Adsense program. In fact the precursor of this blog was built to support my hubpages – not the other way around!
Until recently I highlighted my pages explaining how I made money on Hubpages – the posts were genuine – but I also made money from those writers who signed up using my affiliate ID – personally I’d moved on from Hubpages, Hubpages is no scam, but I prefer to put time into my own sites – but my hubpages were still making me hundreds a month – until recently.
Panda Update and Hubpages
I’ve already written about how the Panda updated failed to deliver quality to the searcher – and still my niche sites are ranking pretty much where they were before the so-called update.
But Panda was originally nicknamed “Farmer Update” by SEO’s – because the update seemed to particularly focus on large content sites – sites like HubPages.
The official figures – as provided by Quantcast – seems to support this:
Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast
Looking at my own analytics for the same period – its the same but different :
Analytics on my main Hubpages Account - same period as Qantcast
My point is that – over all comments about the site – you need to look at your own stats and apply the data. The peak on 1 March was because my Wellington Earthquake hub ranked well in NZ before the local news papers woke up to the fact that locals were panicking about about a barely felt shake in the wake of the wall-to-wall coverage of the previous week’s major Christchurch quake.
Ignoring this outlier – my traffic seems to have only slightly dropped – unfortunately that drop is much more dramatic when I look at my Adsense stats for the last couple of months compared to the same period last year (my traffic is seasonal so the only fair comparison is the same time of year).
Its against Adsense TOS to give you details but I can tell you that my eCPM is down over 50%.
My best ranked hubs have dropped – but are still on page 1 or 2 in most cases. However the drop in traffic from position 1 to position 7 or 8 is huge – as anyone who has been there will attest to.
Experiment to See If I Can Get My Rankings Back
I’m lucky because I have two cases study where I have hubs and sites which target the same keywords.
Case 1: Adsense Niche
In this case my hub has been in #1 position for a couple of years – after Panda 1 in early Februrary it dropped to position #2, in April’s Panda 2 (Panda roll-out worldwide) the site dropped to position 4 for its main keyword. This is a seasonal niche that peaks in the US summer so I want it back!
I also have a niche site sitting in position 7 for the same main keyword – frankly I haven’t built a link for either the hub or the site for at least 2 years – its not the world’s most profitable niche – but its perfect for the purpose of answering the question.
Will backlinks still work for Hubpages?
Now lets be clear in the past – hubpages didn’t need backlinks – or not very many – if you had a trusted profile and wrote a good long hub – the hub in question above is nearly 2000 words you could get the hub to rank for a non-competitive keyword using a combination of site authority and internal links.
In May I will be building 60 links to each of the hub and the niche site. The links will be based on a mixture of the main keyword and related cousins – using Keyword Academy methods.
Case 2: Product Hubs
I have a product orientated site which I have also used hubpages for back links from. I’m going to try adding a new hub on the product – backlinking it from related hubs and then backlink the hub to see if it will rank – this is on a different user from my main one – so will be interested to see what happens.
Issues with HubPages reactions to Panda/Farmer Update
Some would say that changes to Hubpages TOS has caused more damage to their earnings on HP than the actual Google changes.
1. Hubpages has launched their own Ads program.
I’ve signed up for the HP Ads program to see if it will give me a better return than Adsense. I signed up all my accounts about 10 days ago but my two more niche focused identities are reverting to Adsense – I’m not going to hit the $50 payout without decent traffic. In contract my main profile has made that $50 minimum in 10 days – I’ll leave it on for another month to see how the eCPM compares to Adsense. I have a lot of popular hubs on that account that get traffic but few clicks so the HP ads may work for this account.
2. Hubpages may be struggling to stay in business.
There has been pandemonium in the Hubpages forums but I doubt that its even 1/2 of what is happening in Hubpages HQ – the company has got to be hurting a lot and probably wondering how to make payroll. Whether they survive the next few months – will be of interest – there is always lots of knee-jerk changes being made. In the meanwhile I advise anyone who has content on hubpages to back it up.
3. Hubpages is losing a lot of “marketers” because of their changes to TOS
Recent changes in hubpages have varied from the incomprehensible (banning pixelated images), to the odd (reducing the number of Amazon and eBay capsules allowed), and from the sane (banning duplicate content) to the not sane (banned affiliate links).
This is losing some hubbers a lot of money – some at least are unpublishing and removing their content. Its very hard to know how significant this is – but it could be that hubpages is losing a lot of high ranking content and suffering from a lot broken links both internally and externally – this would certainly hurt my websites – so I imagine its hurting hubpages too.
Unfortunately the hubbers they are loosing were the ones who knew how to promote their content – those that are left are the “write it and they will come” camp – which worked so long as someone was promoting the site – if no one is…
4. Hubpages has reduced the number of Adsense ads on hubs
At the moment I ma pretty sure that Hubpages isn’t a good way to make money anymore – what I’m trying to establish though is if it still has enough authority to be useful backlinks – watch this space.
Build My Rank really has been a business changer for me. Well not by itself obviously – in fact if you don’t have a plan to start of with then – you don’t need this post you need the Keyword Academy instead!
Back about a month ago I signed up to BuildMyRank: review and rankings were on my mind, then I was pretty excited about it. Well now I am ecstatic about it! Why? I’m seeing rankings jump and jump significantly and with them income. Will the rankings hold? Who knows – but meanwhile I’ll take the money thanks.
Have I a got detailed results to prove this? Nope – these were sites that I was previously supporting using Postrunner – so maybe I could have waited a month and seen the results jumping on the Postrunner submissions- I don’t know – frankly it takes a lot of time to document that type of detail and I don’t have duplicate sites: same niche, same age similar content etc to do proper split testing. Instead I swapped my writer over from writing for Postrunner to BMR and sat back to see what happened.
What I do know is that BMR plus my writer is hands-off outsourcing for me – and Postunner plus writer wasn’t. That’s worth not just about an hour a day of my time, its more than that because it means that suddenly there are about 17 sites I don’t have to think about more than once a month – I can focus on other stuff. Important stuff like this:
Rottnest Island, Western Australia
Oh OK and growing my business as well …
A few days ago several people posted about a minor PR update and a Google dance in their rankings. I knew that nothing dramatic had happened to mine as my Adsense was tracking nicely to an all time record – but on the 1st I ran all my sites for rankings again in Market Samurai – I was up, almost across the board, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes just a little. Now these are all sites which have fairly similar characteristics:
they are mainly niche sites – less than 30 pages indexed generally;
the youngest are 7 months old, most are over a year;
most are WordPress, some aren’t (I see no difference between html sites and blogs in the rankings);
But I also took an old site – hadn’t been updated for nearly 2 years. I wrote a new page focused on a new keyword – used Impact Page Builder to optimize the on-page SEO – posted 10 back links to the new page from BMR over a week – its now ranking in the 20s for a moderately competitive term.Pretty darn impressed with that.
Do I Need Backlinks At All?
Some will say not – some successful webmasters say they never build backlinks. They argue that you might as well spend your time building your own site rather than adding it to other people’s site. Most of those webmasters don’t make any money – so I tend to discount them – after all this ain’t a hobby! Some of them do a lot of real-world promotion – or have even got at book to their name. I discount them – that is not a business model for me.
But some of them make money , good money, better than I do. What do they have that I don’t? Without exception they have websites which are 10 or more years old – that age thing you can’t fake! And the site has been up that whole time, even if it started off long before WordPress and is now a blog – it doesn’t matter – Google doesn’t care about your technology – but it REALLY cares that the site has been about the same general topic for 10 years.
Which tends to mean that the sites involved – are passion sites – the person started them in 1999 because they LOVED the topic – not because they could make money from it. The clever ones make money now. And they have backlinks, lots of backlinks, natural, organic backlinks because they are market leaders in their niche and other people link to them – and yes every one of the sites I know about in this category are SOCIAL sites too.
If you have one of those sites – you don’t need me and congratulations. Do I really, really, really wish I’d started my passion site about independent travel in 1999 – oh yes I do! But I didn’t and you – gentle reader – probably didn’t either. So for the rest of us – well we need to game the system basically … you need to manipulate your backlinks. You need to build them, you need to pay someone else to do it for you.
Lis’s Views on Backlink Profiles
If the site is new – its more important to get authority links than it is to get bulk links. You need to get some “real” links from sites which are recognized as authority in the niche (not just PR). Some Postrunner sites will work for this – as will blogs which accept guest posts in your niche – if its a social niche that is.
Different niches work differently for backlinks – travel bloggers, and frugal living bloggers comment on each other’s sites ALL the time. Niches about embarrassing personal problems and serious debt – not so much. I suspect that Google has a “normal backlink profile” for some niches – deviate too far from it – and you will be sand boxed for a while. You will come back after a while (or any competitor could take out any site at anytime).
I have ranked and kept a site in position #1 with only crappy backlinks and no new content – for 2 years – its hard to stuff this up but some approaches will see results faster than others. I’ve NEVER seen a site deindexed because of bad backlinks – certainly have seen sites sent to position 500 purgatory though!
If your sites are in a niche which is “social” then its probably worth having some twitter and Facebook love going on around it – after all it looks normal …
Getting the SEO right and siloing your site so that it doesn’t have unrelated links on the page – really does seem to be significant
Lis’s Views on Backlink Services
All backlinking services are gaming the system: Postrunner and EzineArticles included.
Gaming the system works – to a greater or lesser extent.
Backlink services work better with a more established site – that old thing of site age is still something you can’t fake – if you want a genuine short-cut in this game – buy an aged site in the niche you want.
Backlinks to backlinks also works – I think this is the major weakness of Postrunner – but you can help yourself with this with things like backlinking services to keep your links indexed.
Until you are making about $500/month from your sites I don’t really think you can justify paying for additional backlink services – and if your sites are less than one year old you are also probably risking your money as well.
There is a risk involved with using any service – sometimes they do die a slow death – which may be terminal if the owners don’t do something about it (basically Google discounts the sites being used over time) – don’t ever signup for a service for longer than a month. On the flip side you really need to commit to 2 or 3 months to really evaluate a service so that is the amount of money you are risking.
Doing ANY backlinking is never a waste – at the moment BuildMyRank seems to work exceptionally well – that may drop back to just averagely well – the point is if I am using it to build at least 10 links a day to my sites I will outrank you if you are still worrying about whether you should backlink at all.
Sorry I went on a bit – the bottom line is – this game isn’t that hard -and it doesn’t change that much over the years – and the best info you will ever get is building your own sites and EXPERIMENTING – then you will really find out what does and does not work.
I’ve just enrolled in a new backlink scheme too – but I probably won’t have any results before the end of the year on this one – so I’m not prepared to name it here – but it does have absolutely EVIL affiliate program so contact me if you want the link LOL – we can do a deal!
So are you building baclinks? Using what if any services? Using your own backlink sites only? Or do you only publish on your own site?
Google can be more than annoying sometime – I mean, as Leo asks, what would you do if you woke up one day and all your rankings had disappeared?
But that’s not what happened to me today. Instead I was talking to Dave – who runs the awesome travel blog GoBackpacking which allows old backpackers to guest post about Google Alerts – and I noticed something had changed…
Waterfront, Wellington, New Zealand
But first rewind: you do use Google alerts don’t you? Its the fastest way to keep an eye on what the great web is saying about you. I have alerts on my name e.g. “lis sowerbutts” my blog’s names e.g. lissowerbutts.com. But I also have some more subtle alerts:
site:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google indexes a url on my site;
link:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google counts a link to my site. NOT Yahoo – Google
Now most of you know probably all know that and have had the alerts for years. But today I noticed there is a new column in the Manage my Alerts screen. As well as “type” and “how often” there is a new column “Volume” – the default of which is “only the best results” – I turned it back to “all results” .
I thought about it and realised I hadn’t been seeing many alerts for the last few weeks – suddenly they are all back. So what does this new feature tell me about Google:
there are sites and there are sites – Google trusts some more than others – and PR has very little to do with that.
