How I Got Rich

Google Panda 2.5 Strikes!

None of the previous Panda updates have affected my sites except for one site which got knocked down a few places or pages depending on the keyword. It didn’t take that long for the site to return to number one though although it was my biggest earner at the time and I lost a few quid.

Now though, after what I presume is the release of Panda 2.5, my sites’ rankings have been decimated! I checked a few sites the other day to see where they are in the SERPs as I do fairly regularly and I saw they had lost their number one spots for some of their main keywords. The morning I noticed the drop in rankings was the morning I was leaving for a weeks holiday in Malaysia. Not a good way to start a trip!

I was taking my laptop with me but wasn’t expecting to do any work as my sites were doing ok. Now that they are all falling out of the SERPs that plan might have to change.

This month was going pretty well and I’d had quite a few days where I made over £50 but since the drop I’ve only made a few pounds.

I haven’t had much time to read up on what has happened. Has anyone else noticed anything?

What are people doing to try and claw back their rankings? It looks like Amazon has come out pretty well of this from looking at the niches where I have sites.

Never a dull moment eh?

Another Google update?

Has Google done another mini update recently? I ask because quite a few of my sites have made jumps in the SERPs. Anyone else noticed anything positive or negative?

Cheers Google!

Google Panda hits the UK

Well it looks like in the last few days the latest Google Panda/Farmer update has been rolled out to the UK.

I think the main point of the update has been to downgrade sites with low quality/non-unique content.

Site with backlinks from sites that have low quality content may also have been hit as those links get discounted.

So how have your sites fared? Mine seem to be ok so far as far as I can tell.

• http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/04/12/googles-panda-update-rolls-out-to-uk/

Another stick for Google to beat us with!

Looks like Google will be ranking pages on how quickly they load (if they aren’t already?).

Use their tool to find out how you can improve your sites before they get the chop in the SERPs:

• http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

Saying that I just ran it on one of my sites and it pointed out that I was resizing images with HTML so I am off to resize their actual size and save some space.

Thanks Google!

Return of the Google Sandbox Update

The other day I wrote about how it appeared my site had been sandboxed by Google. This happened after adding about 30 new pages/posts to the site.

After adding the content the website dropped out of the SERPS but just five days later the site is back on page one with pretty much the same rankings for its targeted keywords. Hopefully the new content will make a difference and the site will move up a few ranks to get to the top half of page one but we shall see.

Meanwhile I have been continuing the work on getting links for my ‘three websites of the month’ in a bit to get them ranked better in the SERPS. I’ve been doing a lot of article writing and submitting as well as social bookmarking and getting some basic link wheels built. Although none of these approaches to link build are new or special I think they are better than what I was doing before which was nothing!

I’ve not seen much movement in the SERPS for those three sites I am working on but hopefully its just not been long enough to see the results rather than there not being any results.

Update: 3 days later and my site is back out of the SERPS. Seems my time on page one was limited. Where will end?

Return of the Google Sandbox

Its been a while since one of my affiliate marketing sites disappeared from the SERPS, or maybe its just been a while since I noticed it happen! I recently added about 30 pages to a new site that had only about five pages on it already. I also submitted the website to a couple of social bookmarking sites and wrote a few articles and submitted them to a directory. Before doing this the site was on the bottom half of page one for three of the main keywords I was targeting it at. This sounds ok but in reality it was only getting about 10 hits per day and had made only one sale.

I guess that this surge in content has brought the site to Google’s attention and as it is a fairly new site it got sandboxed. In the old days this used to fill me with dread but now I am more relaxed about it and hopefully it should return to the SERPS in a better position than before it got sandboxed.

Fingers crossed….

AdWords Ban

The Google AdWords people have been in touch about some of the sites I am promoting with their service and we were in discussion about how I could improve them to make them less like affiliate sites. I gave it a try but short of taking all my affiliate links off the sties I was unable to meet their demands.

I just logged into AdWords after a weekend away and none of my ads have received any impression since half way through October 7. I’ve not had an email or any notification inside AdWords but I am guessing my account has been stopped.

Its a shame but I was relying too much on AdWords and hopefully this will allow me to keep my outgoings down a bit as I was spending about £500 a month with them.

Final Warning: Your Google AdWords account has multiple violations

I got an email from lpq-support@google.com the other day giving me a final warning for violating the AdWords policies. Despite it being my first warning I was quite alarmed. Although most of my traffic comes from SEO a fair amount of my sales for big ticket items come via AdWords ads so if I stopped the ads I’d probably lose out on a fair chunk of my earnings.

Only a few of my sites were listed as offending Google but they looked like most of my others sites which I am promoting through AdWords.

The email told me not to delete or pause the ads to those sites but to change the sites to meet their guidelines and then resubmit them for their approval.

I deleted the ads to the offending sites anyways and sent them an email which they have just replied to letting me know about my sites.

They told me that my sites were bridge pages and I need to make them more useful to the end user.

The sites are technically bridge pages as they link through to the merchants but they all have at least 200 words of original content about the products they are promoting.

If they are considered bridge pages then all affiliate sites are bridge pages in my eyes.

Short of removing the affiliate links on these sites I don’t see what else I can do to please Google.

I’m going to try and cut down on the number of sites I promote with AdWords and aim to reduce my reliance on it in preparation for the day when my account gets cancelled.

The worrying thing is if these sites offend Google AdWords what’s to say they won’t soon offend Google regular, organic search and get the boot from there too?

I never really worried about the dominance of Google but perhaps now it is time to start!

Getting all my sites to number 1 in Google

This might sound like an obvious goal but for now I am going to focus on getting my existing sites to number one in Google.  Most of them are at number one in Google for their main keyword but not all of them.

Normally I start a new site, put up some content and wait for it to get to number one.  If after a while it is not on page one or close then I leave it and move on.  But as I have vowed to not make any new sites for a while I am thinking I might as well get the sites I have to number one so I can see if any of them will get any traffic.

I have sites for keywords that get, according to the Google keyword tool, anything from 3,000 to 50,000 exact searches a month.  As I’ve now realised the Google keyword tool is not to be believed and does not even give a rough idea of searches.  This has made me think that I might be sitting on a site that gets 100′s of 1000′s of exact searches each month and I won’t know until I get the site to number one.

So with that in mind I am going back to my older sites that don’t rank well and seeing what I can do to get them to number one.

I’ve never really done any work on back links so I might have to finally get around to giving it a serious go.  I will also be adding content which I will probably end up outsourcing as I don’t have much spare time any more.  It is quite expensive at £10 for 500 words but probably cost effective in the long run?

Anyone got any tips for getting a site to number one in Google?

Another New Site For Summer

I launced a new site last week (#24) and it made its first sale yesterday.

This is another keyword niche domain site and is for a niche that will probably only get sales in the summer.

When I was researching the keywords I must have had the Google Keyword Tool set to broad because when I checked it just now it was 9,900 rather than the 60,000 I thought it was!  Oh dear.

I also registered the domain with an abbreviation of the keywords as that gets a large amount of searches too.  I was initially going to park this domain but now as it turns out to get more searches than the domain I started working on I think I will develop it.

I’ve not worked on two different sites in the same niche before so I will have to be careful not to duplicate any content.

Right, I’m off to go and recheck the last batch of domains I registered using the Google Keyword Tool but making sure I select ‘exact’ match this time!