Why The SEO Sky Is not Falling:

No matter what the future holds – Google still has to collect and rely on external information to determine rankings

The way we SEO as it is today may look a lot different years from now, but the simple truth is that Google still has to look at a variety of external factors such as links, social signals etc. to determine how authoritative a website is and whether or not it should rank for a keyword or not and these external signals will always be possible to game for at least the next several years.

So when Google does something like go through and deindexes a blog network like Build My Rank all that tells me is that building links with blog networks is/was an effective strategy (time to build my very own private blog network lol) and serve to remind me that Google really is just an algorithm that can be beat with a little bit of work and effort. So now that they’ve gone and slapped down one strategy (and it’s not really even “dead”) what should you do?

Balanced Link Building Has Always Been The Best Strategy

I was in the process of doing a case study on link building using just blog networks (again just to prove you can build ranks with only blog networks) continuing the case study with just blog networks isn’t the best idea because this most recent attack by Google has shown that relying on one link building strategy isn’t a good idea (something I already knew, but for sake of controlling variables wanted to just use blog networks). The best strategy for building links has always been building links from a variety of sources. If you look at some of the recent niche site blogger updates on how their sites fared you’ll see those who weren’t hurt the most are people that didn’t rely on just one link building method like Spencer from Niche Pursuits.

What I’m Specifically Doing

When it comes to building links I’m specifically going to focus on some guest posting, some article marketing, some blog commenting, some social book marking and some profile link building. Before you ask, I don’t have a magic ratio of link building for various types of links (nor do I think that would be entirely helpful – or maybe it would help to have a general starting point – let me know in the comments below). What Google looks for is links that are built unnaturally so if you rely on any one specific source for link building you’re putting yourself at a higher risk of being hurt (like in the most recent targeted hit on private blog networks). So it only makes sense to build websites and subsequently links using a variety of link building methods (all of the strategies I’ve mentioned are scalable and can be easily outsourced).

I personally hate link building (boring), so even with guest posting I’m not doing that myself. I’ll pay someone to write the article, put my own link in it and then pay someone to find a website to put it on.

An Alternative Strategy – Authority Website Model

If all of these strategies around building links so that you can (in some cases) rank a site above others when it shouldn’t be there in the first place sound too tedious, hard or boring to you there is another strategy to consider – building authority websites.

An authority website would be something that would take a lot more time and effort to build because the goal is to actually be the best in your niche (or at least strives towards being the best). This is another strategy that I’ve used and it can be extremely profitable as well.

The biggest question to ask yourself is what can hold your interest longest?

1. Do you like the idea of building quick websites, playing the SEO game, outsourcing link building, testing new link strategies and constantly building new sites?

2. Do you prefer to build a handful of websites with the effort to be the best within your niche?

I’ve done both strategies and fluctuate between the various strategies I use based on what interests me at the time. I will still do some link building case studies since it’s clear people need help with this, but I need to re-think how I execute them.

Let me know what you would like to see in the comments below

Here’s What I Learned:

1. Most people don’t understand how to do link building right:

There is a severe lack of understanding on how to build links to smaller niche websites as well as tactics used to build links to larger websites. So what I’ll be doing is buying monthly memberships to every major monthly recurring article marketing / link building style services out there (tell me what ones you want to see in the comments) and documenting case studies on my blog showing me (or one of my VA’s) using them.

My goal is to find some software service(s) that I can wholeheartedly recommend for building links more quickly to smaller niche websites. Higher end link building is something I can talk about as well, but so many people are interested in the niche website building aspect and they get stopped because of link building. Even if this costs me a few thousand dollars in subscription fees this should be worth it to be able to show some useable data to you. I’m not going to reveal the niche websites I’ll be doing the link building on (see this post for why), but I will document rankings, total number of links built etc.

2. Most people don’t understand how to find a good niche

This was another trend. Too many people had crappy niches that they’d selected. I think I might do a webinar talking about this in the future and sharing some of the tools I use, but more importantly how to interpret the data these tools provide into actionable tactics. More on this to come.

3. Most people don’t understand how to set up a niche website correctly

I saw a lot of poorly placed advertisements, bad looking websites, complaints about the time it takes to make a unique look for each website etc. I also received at least one hundred emails over 2011 just from people asking for feedback on their websites so I already knew this was a problem area. This is something I’m certain I can clear up for you. I’m going to be hosting a webinar with another niche marketing expert very soon (make sure you’re on the newsletter to get the invite). We’ve been working on the solution to this problem in the form of a WordPress theme that we’re calling the last niche website theme you’ll ever need to buy (presumptuous you say? if you come on the webinar you’ll see what we mean). We’ve been working on this project with a team of programmers since Oct 2011 and it’s finally ready for a limited beta release where we’ll be selling it at a discount to people that make it on the webinar.

In any case, we won’t just be pitching our theme on the webinar but just discussing general site construction as a whole and showing how the theme solves the problems.

Jan 30th Update: Do you want to be a beta tester? The theme is just about done, but we want a few beta testers to help out. Please contact me here if you want to work on the theme, provide feedback, submit bug reports and get the final theme for free.

Overall Impressions:

I know this feedback came from a small sample size of people when compared to the thousands of people on my newsletter, thousands that read my blog and listen to my podcast etc. but I’m sure there must be more of you struggling with these concepts and tactics. So I’m going to be spending some time talking about the topics above in upcoming blog posts.

1st: What link building services do you want me to pay for?

2nd: What else do you want to learn from me in 2012?

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I do receive a commission if you sign up for hosting through my link and that’s partly why I wanted to do this bonus webinar for you. It’s a way to say thanks for the support and to also help you learn from some of my real life successes and failures with websites over the years.

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You need to be a new HostGator customer to get the 50% off so keep that in mind as well.

What’s Upcoming On The Blog?

I’ve been using the strategies I shared earlier on how to make money on the holidays and so far have set income records for almost every website I own. Google Adsense isn’t even my focus and I earned $200+ with it yesterday lol. I love this business.

I’m going to be sharing more tips on how I killed it this year with my websites and email marketing so be sure to stick around I also have an awesome podcast episode coming up with someone who got started in domains back in the mid 90′s – visionary style.

Why I Started This Blog With My Extra Free Time After Getting Fired

I built an income that surpassed my $60k a year high stress sales job in the extra hours I put into my business every day when I got home from my regular day job. So I knew that when I got fired I could use some of my new found free time to start a blog sharing my experiences in the hope that people won’t repeat my mistakes trying methods for making money that just don’t work. Some people will try to sell you on the idea that you can make money easily and instantly on the internet – this is not the case. I tried for several years to make money online and it took a lot of failure before things really started to work because I didn’t really know anyone that I could get good advice from.

What I’ve Learned After Getting Fired

I’ve learned that self employment can suck at times, but the freedom and uncapped earning potential is worth the downside. Since last year’s fireversary update I’ve also met dozens more like minded people who build, manage and run websites full time that generally don’t talk about their business success online (I interviewed some of them for an upcoming project). Last year when I wrote this update I hardly knew anyone doing the same thing that I did, but this year I’ve found people that I can relate to and bounce ideas off each other (most of my friends give blank stares when I explain what I do for a living).

What The Future Holds For This Blog And My Business

I will continue to share advice based on my real life online business experiences rather than speaking in general terms about topics I know nothing about (I’m referring to 95% of the other blogs that discuss blogging, making money online etc). I’ve also been working on some much bigger projects behind the scenes that I’m eager to share with you as well. Some of them are related to this blog but another project is very focused on mainstream use. When I open it up I’d love for you to try it out and be among the first users of this new website. I know that I haven’t described what it will do yet but it’s completely unrelated to earning money online.

Thanks for continuing to read my blog. I’ve got a little less than 19 years to reach my (admittedly silly) goal of buying the Guthrie Castle.

Note: Yes I do realize how stupid some people think I look when I continue to publicly say that I want to buy a castle that costs millions of dollars when I haven’t even made my first million. I still have plenty of time…

Edit 1: I should mention that I wouldn’t actually live in the castle, I’m too cheap and practical to do that. I’d run it as an investment property like the current owners do now. I just want to buy it so that I can say I own a castle named after my ancestors hah hah!

I’ve been meaning to finish the free course since last year’s blog world (wow I’m slow) but because I planned to release the course for free other income producing projects kept getting in the way. I finally had some time in late July and early August to finish the course and I’m very pleased with what I was able to put together.

Check Out My Free 10 Day Course Here

Why Did I Make This Change?

The free course I put together teaches essential information that I wish I knew when I first got started trying to make money online so this free course was designed to give a step by step overview of how to make money with websites with 10 separate daily lessons. Rather than relying on my readers to come to my blog and not know where to go, I wanted them to start with the fundamentals first.

How Did I Make The Change?

In WordPress you can create pages and set one as the “front page” and another as the “posts page” if you set a WordPress page as the front page you’ll get a WordPress page instead of a list of recent blog posts. Then if you set the posts page as a newly created blank page called “Blog” your new blog page will then look like mine: MakeMoneyontheInternet.com/blog but it won’t affect the permalink structure of your existing URL’s.

Here’s What Else I Changed:

One Other Home Page Change:

On the home page I also provide three small graphical links to my blog, my podcast and my story because I didn’t want the home page of my blog to just be a squeeze page / email opt in alone:

That’s why I also left the sidebar on the home page as well with links to my popular posts etc. I don’t want new readers to think that I’m just trying to get them into my free course. I’m confident if they come through to the blog, listen to my podcast or do anything else they’d be interested in joining my free course then so that’s why I set up the design of the home page the way I did.

Podcast Page Change:

I changed my podcast page using PHP if conditional statements so that when someone goes to MakeMoneyontheInternet.com/podcast it’s not just an archive category listing of all my recent podcasts and instead it provides a few options to subscribe to the podcast and explains why I’m doing the podcast etc.

Check out the new podcast page

What Do You Think Of The New Design?

I made several changes and partly why I haven’t published any new blog posts in over two weeks is because I was busy using my normal blog time to focus on writing free content for the course. Check out the new home page, the podcast page and then let me know what you think of the new design in the comments below.

Its not uncommon to come across stories on the internet of new websites quickly reaching levels of success. Over the past three years, I believed that one of the websites I put my personal time and effort into was one of those success stories. I was wrong.

I started Maciverse.com in 2008 with no money and just a little time to invest into building the site. I worked hard at creating interesting and helpful content and gradually I saw a steady increase in traffic. During the first year, traffic on Maciverse.com grew from just a handful of visitors to 12,000 each month. Growth continued over the next couple years, reaching more than 200,000 visits in one month. On April 4, 2011 site traffic reached a daily high of 7,052 visitors.

The site had grown on average 20% each month from the very first month that I started publishing content. I started earning money from advertising and affiliate programs on the site and realized that the only way to continue to grow was to hire a group of Mac experts and professional bloggers. These experts helped me continually create quality content for the site on a daily basis. Everything seemed to be going smoothly with these authors as traffic continued to increase, but that all changed on April 14th. That morning, I logged onto Google Analytics to check on site traffic and saw the graph below.

Almost overnight, I had lost more than 50% of my site traffic. I frantically started doing research and discovered that Maciverse had gotten snagged in Google’s international Panda update, a Google algorithm adjustment aimed at minimizing the appearance of content farm sites in the search rankings. I did not understand how or why my site could be mixed in with content farms as we produced high quality content and editorial reviews. I reached out to others on the Google Webmaster forum to get their input, and the overwhelming consensus was that Maciverse had been caught by mistake – an innocent casualty of Google’s war on content farms. Again, I (and everyone else) was wrong. It was not until I did significant research that I realized that something else was happening.

Maciverse.com’s content was stolen. After researching for several weeks, I discovered that one of our authors was selling the same content he wrote for Maciverse to other websites. Over 100 articles that he published on Maciverse were also found on other Mac websites. This, I believe, is the reason why Maciverse triggered Google’s Panda flag and was hit with a painful ranking penalty.

I learned a hard lesson on April 11th. I needed to do more to protect my sites content.

How to Protect Your Content From Being Stolen

I learned by losing 50% of my sites traffic overnight that I should have been smarter about the content I was publishing on my website. I would periodically do checks on the content the authors submitted, but once it was published I rarely looked back to see what else the authors were doing with the content. I now realize that I should have been continually checking the content that was published to see if it was also showing up elsewhere.

With the Panda Update, Google has made it clear that they expect web-masters to police their own sites. It is now your responsibility to make sure that your site contains unique content and that its not being published elsewhere. Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s Web Spam team, has explained that you should file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) report if your content is being scrapped or republished.

To file a DMCA report you need to be able to identify when other sites are publishing your content. Below are three tools I now use to help protect Maciverse and other sites from stealing my content.

• Google Blog Search – The advanced search feature on Google Blogs search allows one to find other sites that are publishing my work. In addition to searching for keywords, the advanced search options allows searching of exact phrases, post titles, and even author names. Entering a few sentence from articles on your site may help uncover other blogs that are publishing your content.
• CopyScape – This is a plagiarism tool that lets you enter your web address to find other sites that may be publishing your content. Premium versions of the software let you check specific content and their CopySentry tool will monitor the web regularly for the content you’ve published.
• Grammarly – An excellent Grammar Check tool that will scan your content for grammatical mistakes and will also warn you if any piece of your content may be plagiarized. I find myself working more with Grammarly to check my content, and the content of authors on my sites. It improves the quality of their articles while identifying pieces of content that I should not publish because the content is already found elsewhere.

Recovering From the Google Panda Update

If you identify your site contains content that has been published elsewhere you have two options. You can either file a DMCA report with the site and fight for them to take down the content, or you can remove the content from your own site. For Maciverse, I removed every article that the author sold to other sites.

With the content removed, I anxiously awaited the next Panda Update as Google had stated that it is not a daily occurrence. I assumed that Panda updates would be pushed out towards the beginning of each month and now believe that to be the case. After removing the damaging content from my site I waited a little over a month and on June 5th I started to see a dramatic change once again. Maciverse’s rankings were being restored to the top positions they held before the Panda update. Search traffic was returning to the site and over a couple days the daily traffic improved by 70%. The traffic pattern has continued over the past few days and much of the traffic lost from the Panda Update has returned.

Of course I have still lost the traffic from the 100+ articles that were removed from my site because the author had published them elsewhere but I’m happy to be able to compete once again on level ground for search ranking positions in my niche.

If you’ve been hit by Google’s Panda Update I suggest you follow the steps described above on how to protect your content and ensure that its of high quality. The process appears to have worked for Maciverse.com and I hope it works well for you also.

Be sure to check your site with the tools mentioned above so that you’re not penalized in the future for having your site content stolen.

AOL Owned Download Squad Shut Down

Well, here we are. More than four years after launching, Switched and DownloadSquad are unfortunately being closed… Src

Why Did Download Squad Get Shut Down?

Download Squad was a tech blog that covered tech news relating primarily to free software apps and tools. Web visitors that are looking for free solutions to their problems aren’t worth as much as web visitors that are looking to pay for something. In other words, a software blog about various paid software solutions might be less popular than a blog on free software solutions but the traffic would be more valuable on a per visitor basis because you have a direct path to monetize that traffic through affiliate software sales.

It’s very difficult to make a profitable blog on quantity of traffic alone and the closure of Download Squad is just another example to look at. It sucks for the employees that lost their jobs when the blog closed but the decision presumably came down to Arianna Huffington made changes to focus on more profitable web properties. She is the editor in chief of 56 sites owned by AOL (including Download Squad).

What You Can Learn

Don’t let the focus on making money from your website crush your dreams to make a successful web property in a low value niche, just realize that it is much more difficult to make money from traffic that doesn’t have a clear path to monetization. I bet Download Squad was profitable based on it’s traffic figures, but it was obviously one of the lower earning properties or it wouldn’t have been shut down.

My six figure website sale was a product review blog and it was easy to monetize that website because I could sell the products I reviewed as an affiliate. If my blog was about reviewing something free I wouldn’t have been able to sell it for the price that I did because it would have never been making as much money as it was.

Ever read something like this? “10 Reasons Why Facebook Will Be Worth A Trabillion Dollars” or “6 Things THEY Didn’t Tell You About Blogging” I’m unimpressed. Yes my friends, the list post sucks (most of the time) and in true ironic fashion here are 101 reasons to tell you why they suck:

101 Reasons Why Most List Posts Suck:

1. List posts as link bait are so 2006

Get more creative and do infographics instead. Oh wait – those are so 2010. My suggestion? Vinfolistographics: That’s video information list graphic posts (you heard it here first folks).

2. Your list post is simply a bow slapped on top of the turd of information you’ve collected about a subject that’s already been discussed elsewhere on the web

Seriously why should I read your list post about the “6 Things They Didn’t Tell You About Blogging” when all I “learn” is that blogging is hard work?

3. The topics in your list contain vague information and never any real world examples

Put some effort into your list post and try using some real world examples or data. For example, one of the most popular posts on this blog remains the Top 7 Tips I Used To Make $41,438.42 With Amazon Associates In 2009 because I provide actionable advice based on data I actually collected.

4 – 101. Over half of the topics discussed on your list post are thrown in simply so that you can use a larger number like 101 instead of 4

Yes, I only have 4 reasons why list posts suck and although it would have been funny for you to try and see me come up with 101 reasons why list posts suck, I think I can just end my Friday joke/rant here.

List posts can be a great way to generate traffic, but only when used correctly. I urge you to trim the fat off your list posts and really put some thought into the content you create for them otherwise you won’t get as much of an impact that you were seeking.

/List Post Rant Over

Don’t you think that some of the list posts people publish on their blogs are a little ridiculous?

Next Week: I have some cool stuff planned for next week including the next installment on my series of how to make a profitable info product (see part 1 and part 2 here) as well as an update to my Amazon earnings along with some new tips – stick around.