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

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.

Google recently made a major change to their search engine results pages and while I normally don’t comment on a lot of SEO news I think this recent 12% change to all Google US results is worth talking about. Before we go any further, you might be wondering if my websites were affected by the recent changes by Google?

Short Answer: No.

Fortunately, the websites I build were unaffected by the changes that Google put into place that changed 12% of the Google US Search Engine Results Pages. (You can read the details of the changes here).

Should You Be Afraid Of Google Algorithm Changes?

Yes, of course you should be afraid of what Google may change because you can literally have an income stream cut off overnight. This is precisely why when I build websites I set out with the goal to create a website that is better than the #1 ranking website for my target keyword. This includes creating better content than the #1 site and getting more links from equal or greater sources than the #1 website.

While this sounds simplistic in theory it really can take a lot of work to build a great website; however, as I’ve illustrated before it can certainly be worth the effort especially when you can turn around and sell that website for six figures.

How To Sleep Easier At Night:

If you realize that the goal of Google is to provide users with the best experience then it makes perfect sense that your goal should be provide the best experience too. There is no set formula to build the best user experience for your website because it will change from website to website but one of the ways I sleep easier is when I look at the rest of the search results and fail to find a website that is presenting information better than I am. If you think about it from this perspective it makes it easier to know that there will be a place for you in future years as Google search gets better and better.

(Note: For today’s Google search quality links still play a critical role and I believe they will continue to for several more years. So while quality content is important don’t forget that’s only half of the puzzle)

Were your sites hit by the Google update? Share in the comments below…

Coming Up: I’m going to do another big update discussing my Amazon earnings as well as posting an update in my series on how to make a profitable information product. Stick around…

I searched these terms on another computer that’s on a different network and didn’t see the above results which tells me Google is probably just testing them right now. But either way the signal is clear – Google is effectively cashing in on the lucrative mortgage lead generation business but claiming the top search result and cutting deep into the businesses and websites that are built up around these keywords. Yes they’ve entered the market via sponsored results, but look at how much these don’t look like ads. I guarantee the CTR on these Google mortgage ad search terms are much higher than typical ads.

As far as I can tell the only space they’re doing this in right now is related to mortgages. Look at this url:

http://www.google.com/comparisonads/
It redirects to:
http://www.google.com/comparisonads/mortgages

I don’t own any websites that compete in this space but this certainly makes it a less attractive market to go after. My prediction is that Google is going to continue doing more of this where the information being searched for isn’t overly complex. i.e. it’s pretty clear what someone is looking for when they search “mortgage calculator” so why not just give it to them courtesy of Google?

The lesson I see here is that the more unique and difficult to replicate your content is the lower the chance that Google will horn in on your business.

What do you think about this? Anyone else seeing the same results I am?

Update: Well, serves me right for trying to break SEO news when I’m not an SEO blogger: Turns out this was already announced back in October 09. Thanks Jonathan!

I believe my lesson still stands though: If your content is unique and difficult to easily replicate by Google then there is little chance they’ll horn in on your business

Now I know this sounds really simple, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw someone write about Google Webmaster Tools. Most people usually write about what Google Analytics can do for you, but that doesn’t mean you can just turn a cold shoulder to Google Webmaster Tools. There are a lot of key features you can take advantage of to improve your website like:

Submitting a site map

If you’re running WordPress you can download this simple plugin and it will automatically generate a sitemap for you. Then simply put the link to your sitemap within Google Webmaster Tools. This makes it easier for Google to crawl your content and helps to identify errors with your website that could be affecting your search engine results and linking structure.

Analyzing top search queries

You can search the top search queries in which your site appears (impressions). This helps you to figure out where you are in the SERPs for various search terms. Obviously as you can see from this image these figures are not stellar. But this data is from the previous week, so I expect it to improve after Google crawls my new redesign.

Again, there are a few very powerful tools that you should exploit for all of your websites. The benefits far outweigh the time it takes to set up the sitemap, analyze your site for URL errors, robots.txt errors etc. so I highly recommend you spend some time using the tools if you haven’t already.

In typical Google fashion, Google Webmaster Tools are free to use too.

Do you regularly use these?

TNX.net is a website that allows you to buy or sell text links on any webpage in their marketplace. Upon first going to TNX.net you will see a quick break down of the primary features advantages and benefits of their program for Website Publishers and Advertisers which I will go into later on in the review. But what you’ll see next are the stats showing the sheer size of their network.

At the time of this review, there are over 25,966,645 pages that links can be purchased on. You’ll also notice that there are currently 52,808 users on the site with a daily growth rate of .23% (about 121 new users a day!) So you should already know by these numbers that TNX is an established marketplace for buying and selling text links that not only serves to pad your wallet but also to improve your rank in the SERPS.

Selling Text Links

What I like most about being a website publisher on the site is the fact that you simply copy and paste the TNX code into your website and the links are automatically listed to be sold to thousands of advertisers. You also don’t have to spend any time figuring out the price of the link as this is calculated automatically (based on PageRank, link popularity, inbound links etc.). They also only take a 12.5% cut as opposed to some other services out there. You can also get paid out via PayPal which is always a plus.

The process for adding the code to your website, a new website to their marketplace and selling your TNX points is very simple. This is all done via your control panel which also displays the number of TNX points you have. From the single forum I have added to TNX.net nearly two months ago I’ve gathered 7,847 points.

Currently you can sell 1,000 points for $.78, but this number will continue to go up as the TNX network grows too. There is a way to sell your 1,000 points for $.82 but I don’t want to adhere to the guidelines to get the higher payout. The first line on the guidelines is the only one that doesn’t make it worth it for me:

1. Links are not all in one block (up to 4 links), but spreaded throughout entire page (4 blocks). Only one link is allowed in footer.

I would prefer to just have all of my links in the footer as opposed to setting up the code in additional spots to ensure I meet the requirements. But if you’re generating thousands of points and have several spots on your website that you can add different blocks to then I would recommend doing so to get the extra five cents each time you sell 1,000 points.

Going back to the number of points I’ve accumulated you’ll see that I’ve made about $6.00 worth of points which may not seem like a lot for having the code installed for nearly two months, but as I recently discovered I could have made four times that much!

From your site list there is a link that you can click to “show site options” this pops down (picture to your right) and you’ll notice that there is a way to increase the number of links sold on your website. I had it left at 1, but after writing this review have since increased that to 4. I left this number at the default of one because I never really noticed that you can increase the number of links sold on a website because this is not mentioned anywhere else in the TNX control panel. I really think that the site options should just all be displayed by default because it also shows you a lot of other important information.

Another great feature is that you’re able to go in and see the links that are put on your website and delete or block them from showing on those pages again. Because I’m using a forum I’ve sold 401 links, but most of these links are on pages without a page rank so if you have a site with multiple websites with at least a page rank of one you’re going to earn a lot more points. As an example, on my forum I am getting 750 points a month for a PR2 link.

Buying Text Links

As an alternative to selling your points you can also easily use the points to buy links of your own. I love the ability to just take what you’ve already earned from selling links and apply it towards buying links. The concept sounds so simple, yet there are so many other publisher programs that don’t allow you to take the money you’ve earned and spend it through their advertising program so I’m happy to see TNX offering this. Now almost everyone knows that inbound links and the anchor text used for those links play a key role in determining where you sit in the SERPS for various keywords and phrases, so one strategy to improve your ranking is to purchase links.

Like the control panel for users looking to add new websites, sell points and check out their list of websites there’s also an equally easy to use control panel for advertisers.

It’s very easy to set up a campaign in three simple steps. First you set up the the initial steps of the campaign by choosing the category of websites you want the links to be displayed in (obviously choose categories related to what you’ll be promoting). Each category also has a little “$” indicator to show which links are more expensive “$$$” and which sites are less expensive “$”. You’re also able to select which websites you want to advertise on based on the number of Yahoo Backlinks and Google Page Rank and even which language the website is in. After you select all of these options you then set the number of points you want to spend each month.

After inputting all of these options you’ll be able to see an estimation on how many links you will be purchasing. So if you look at the final number and realize you want to get more links than that simply increase the point spending limit, or lower the page rank of pages you’re targeting and it automatically updates the estimated number of links you can get.

Second you will be setting up the actual text of the campaign. Pictured below is the “simple” way to set up the text for your campaign:

But you can also choose an advanced option to put in several different variations of keywords that will be randomly used before your link, for your link and after the link. So the end result is several different phrases and links that point towards the same webpage. It’s always recommended that you don’t use the same link and instead provide some variation so that your links look “real” to search engines.

Lastly you can set the number of links you want to appear in the variations of page rank and yahoo backlinks. It’s recommended that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and instead seperate the links you plan to purchase accross all of the categories. You can also limit the number of links that will display on the same website as well which helps to add a further level of control as to where your links show up.

Wrap Up

Overall, I am very pleased with TNX.net and am happy to say it’s made the distinction of being offered on the Chris Recommends list which contains quality products, services and or companies that I have personal experience using and recommend to my readers. It made my job much easier to do this review for TNX when I had already been using the service for nearly two months. It also makes me feel more confident in recommending that you sign up for an account and test out the service on some of your websites. I plan to add the TNX code to more of my websites and purchase multiple campaigns in the coming months.

Click here to sign up at TNX

The main reason why I decided to get the subscription is because something that I’ve decided to focus on improving is the amount of traffic I drive to my websites through search engines. As it stands right now, for most of my websites search usually only accounts for about 20% of my total traffic. This is obviously not a high number which leaves plenty of opportunities for growth. I’ve been using vBSEO on my forums for several months now which has done a great job to improve my search engine traffic and while I still recommend it, there is still room for improvement. This is precisely why I decided to take the plunge and spring for a subscription to this service and spend some time improving my SEO knowledge.

I’ve been a premium subscriber for about a week now and in my time on the site I’ve learned a ton from the training modules, seo tools, community forums, as well as the SEOBook. However of those items what I’ve found that has really helped me is the forum. Where else can you receive advice from an established authority on SEO for only $50 a month? I asked for ideas on how to improve a few of my websites and Aaron Wall was the first person to respond with a bulleted list of ways to improve. How cool is that? I’m not sure what he charges for an hourly rate as an SEO consultant or if he even does, but I gaurntee I have already received way more than $50 of advice.

I highly recommend paying for at least a one month subscription if you’re new to SEO or looking to expand your knowledge. Also, it’s important to remember that I will never promote a product or service I haven’t personally used before. If I haven’t convinced you it’s worth while go ahead and check out the SEO Book website for yourself there is plenty of free content that you can sample to get a feel for the service.

Is anyone here an SEO Book subscriber already?