How I Got Rich

Google Panda Update 3.3 – Google’s Changing Backlinks

This latest email from Rappin Matt of Matt’s Marketing Club might be of interest to some of you and it sounds like it’s the death-knell of back linking as we know it:

Well, looks like Google is getting ready to roll out Panda version 3.3. You can take a look for yourself at the 40 updates Google is making to search here:

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

Basically, if you go through the changes, you’ll notice that Google is mostly tweaking things that help the placement of their own content.

“Improvements to travel-related searches.”

(When you search for stuff related to travel in Google, you’ll notice they give top billing to their own service, even above the paid ads! Coincidence?)

“International launch of shopping rich snippets.”

(Translation: Google Shopping will now be featured above organic results on a world wide scale.)

“Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search.”

(The Google Images placements will be a lot more intrusive.)

Anyway, the list goes on and on. But the biggest news that should conscern us SEO people who rely on search engine traffic is this:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

This comment has set the SEO community abuzz over what change Google is making to backlinking, since backlinks are pretty much the lifeblood of SEO.

My own personal theory – Google is going to be removing the “Pagerank” factor from it’s backlink evaluation.

I don’t have any proof to back this up, but that’s my gut feeling.

Why do I feel this way?

Well, dealing with Google’s Quality Score with my own websites, it seems to me like their “Quality” algorithm is far better in finding the kind of sites Google likes than it’s PageRank algorithm.

After all, Panda is all about finding “Quality” websites.

So it just makes sense that Quality Score will replace PageRank when it comes to determining how valuable a backlink is.

In short – a backlink from a website Google deems High Quality will carry much more weight than a website with a high “Page Rank.”

Couple this with the fact that Google has slowly been weeding out it’s Pagerank tracker from its services – like the Google Toolbar – and you can see why I think this is the link evaluation factor that’s on the chopping block.

This is why it is SO IMPORTANT to learn about Google’s Quality score and how it evaluates websites. Backlinking is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

To your success,

Matt

P.S. If you want to repost this article, feel free to. Just be sure to toss a backlink to the group at:

http://groups.google.com/group/matts-marketing-club

Good old Google! Time to start work on the community site you’ve had on your ‘to do’ list for the last few years…

Another Free Pinging Tool

I just got an email from the 24/7 Backlinks people about their new free tool to ping urls to help get backlinks indexed:

• 24/7 Pinger

I’ve not used it yet but it might be worth a shot for getting those dodgy backlinks of your indexed or at least crawled by Google.

Speaking of getting urls indexed can anyone recommend a service that will do it for things like articles from services like Unique Article Wizard? I’d like one that tell you whether a link or url is indexed or not too.

Was there a Google Update last night?

Update: seems like it was my SERP tracking tool giving me problems rather than my sites getting dropped. Whoops!

I’ve just been checking the ranking of some of my sites in Advanced Web Ranking and it seems like quite a few of them have been banished from the SERPS. I guess this Google update would’ve happened between February 22 & 23.

Anyone else noticed anything going?

Build My Rank is Closed

As of today Build My Rank is no longer taking new members, at least for the time being. If you were thinking of signing up you can put your name down on the waiting list but in the meantime you might want to sign up for the similar service that is Link Authority. It looks to be a good alternative to BMR.

I’ve been testing Link Authority for a few weeks now and seen good results already. I was initially testing it on one site but as it seemed to have positive results I’ve now signed up to test two more of my sites on it. I will report back with my findings after a month or so but if you want to give it a try click here now. They have packages starting from about $12 per month.

Anyone using PLR or Pre-Spun Content for Link Building?

Bit of a long shot but wondering if any of my readers uses PLR articles or pre-spun content for link building purposes?

I would never dream of putting this stuff on an actual site but have heard of people using it to put into systems like Unique Article Wizard and other article syndication software.

One service that has caught my eye is Article Builder but it is nearly $300 a year. But if it take the pain out of using services like UAW then it might be worth it.

If anyone has used Article Builder or something similar let me know. Also if you want to share a subscription let me know too!

Update: I’ve been using Article Builder for a while now and it seems to do what it claims. It could do with a few more categories/topics of articles but if your site is in one of the niches it has content for then you will really benefit from having all this extra content at the touch of a few buttons.

I’m using it mainly for submission into UAW and for Web 2.0s but I’ve set it to auto post to a few old domains just to see what happens.

Find out which topics Article Builder has content for by clicking here now.

Link Authority Test Update

A few days ago I started a test to find out if new link building service Link Authority is any good.

Well its only been a few days and so far three of my articles have been submitted into the system. Two are on sites with PR2 and one is on a PR3 site.

On February 7 2012 my starting stats were:

• Main keyword: #3
• Plural of main keyword: #6

Today I am pleased to report my current stats as of February 10 2012 are:

• Main keyword: #1
• Plural of main keyword: #5

It could just be coincidence but its an encouraging start and will help me keep motivated to keep writing those 150 word articles.

If you want to sign up for Link Authority click here.

What Does a £400 a Month Site Look Like?

On my last post a comment from Jason from Lazy Bastard Life got me thinking about how many sites I’d like to have and what I’d like them to earn.

I think the ideal situation would be 10 sites that make around £400 / $630 per month each, bringing in a total of £4000 / $6300 per month.

But what would a site earning £400 / $630 per month look like?

So far none of my many sites make that much and although I’ve spread myself pretty thinly I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a while. Some of my sites do occasionally make this amount per month when they are in season but never for more than a couple of months.

So is it possible to get site earning this sort of money?

If a site was making £5 commission per sale it would need 80 sales a month which is about 3 sales a day. You could probably get 3 sales from 100 visits (3% conversion rate) if your traffic was targeted and relevant to the product you were promoting.

Let’s say you get to number one in Google and get 100 hits a day. Let’s assume being number one in Google gets you 33% of the people searching for your keyword. That means you would need 300 searches a day which is 9000 searches a month.

So you would need a keyword that gets 9000 exact match searches a month and be promoting a product that gets you £5 in commission. Let’s assume a commission rate of 5% (amazon.co.uk) which would mean we need a product selling for £100.

If you were targeting the US market I think it would be easier to find a keywords getting that many searches due to the larger population.

So when you look at it like that it doesn’t sound too hard? So how come I’ve not come close so far?

What have I overlooked and what am I doing wrong?

Do you have a £400 / $630 a month site?

How Should One Invest Their Profits?

At the moment nearly all my earnings go towards paying off previous financial commitments and living costs but there will be time in the, hopefully, not too distant future when the slate will finally be wiped clean and everything I earn will be mine to spend as I choose. If we ignore last month which was an utter turkey when it comes to earnings and look back at 2011 you can see my average monthly income was £1500 or $2400. If I estimate my living costs at being £700 per month which includes putting money aside for holidays then it leaves me with £800 to play with.

How Would You Reinvest £800 Per Month?

So the question is: what should one do with £800 per month? Is it best to put it into a savings account or try and get a decent return by investing it in building websites? If I was to invest it in making money online I think it would go something like this each month:

• Hire a part-time virtual assistant to do link building
• Sign up for Build My Rank, Unique Article Wizard & SocialAdr
• Setup five new sites in low competition niches
• Add content to my best earning five sites
• Start an authority site and add regular content to it

Or am I just continuing to do what I’ve already been doing and not looking at the bigger picture?

What would you do if you had money to re-invest each month or if you already are, how do you reinvest?

Updating My Blogroll

I just had a quick look at the blogs on my blogroll and most them are no longer being updated.

If you’ve got any suggestions as to which sites related to money making on the internet should go on there leave a comment, shameless promotion welcome!

Anything to do with making money will be considered although I’d like to have sites from the small players rather than the big boys who have already made it.

Link Authority Test

In my last post I asked if anyone has used Link Authority. In that post I mentioned how I was going to add one of my old blogs with PR to the site so that I could get credits in return but it turns out the blog I was thinking of has been downgraded and is only PR1.

Cost of Link Authority

After looking at the pricing I saw that for a one month subscription the cheapest options is $11.64 which is about the cost of two to three pints of beer or $0.32 per link. This only gives you one credit or submission a day but it should be enough for me to test this new link building service out.

I’ve Signed Up

I’ve signed up and am going to test this service on one of my sites that was previously at number 1 in Google for its main keyword and the plural derivative of it but since the Google updates of October 2011 it has now dropped to #3 and #6 respectively.

My plan is to submit one 150 word article a day into Link Authority targetting these two keywords as well as a few variations on those keywords to mix things up a bit.

You can submit more than one article a day but only one article will be posted to their network (unless you subscribe with a daily quota). I just did my first one and it took me 10 minutes to write so I am confident I should be able to do at least one submission a day.

3 Links Per Submission

You can also submit articles which are over 300 words long and you can put three links in them. If you do this you could link to three different sites which might make this service even more cheaper as you are boosting more than one site per credit. Do multiple links from one article have much SEO value?

If the site moves up the rankings I will easily make back my money and will then try the tool out on some more sites. If not its less than a tenner wasted and five hours of my time.

Starting Stats

The site is an exact match domain and the keyword in the domain is the main keyword. As of Tuesday 7 February 2012 my site ranks as follows:

• Main keyword: #3
• Plural of main keyword: #6

I’ll report back in a month with any changes and possibly in-between with my thoughts on this tool as I go along.

Quick update: my first post has been submited and accepted and is on a PR3 site according to the Link Authority report. Pretty good for $0.32!

If you want to sign up with Link Authority you can do so by clicking here now.

If you want to find all the posts in this series I have used this tag: Link Authority Test.

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