Ok, I just watched this latest video in which WebProNews interviews Matt Cutts about the Mayday update and more about Caffeine.
In the video, Matt discusses the Mayday update and some quick tips on the types of content Google is ranking as better quality content.
Matt says “if someone is affected by it (Mayday update) there are some questions to ask yourself. How do I make sure I am returning the highest quality of content. Stuff that’s really useful for users, whether its editorial discretion, unique content, user-generated content. You know, stuff that’s not available anywhere else. Versus something that is just scraped or duplicate content. Or really kinda low quality. That sort of thing”.
Matt also touches more on how in the very near future, Google will start giving a higher ranking boost to sites that use video sitemaps.
So the only thing I can think of is that google must feel my micro niche sites are “lower quality”. It still baffles me because I see tons of scraped content, ie., amazon scraped reviews ranking in the SERPs for my keywords. I do think that higher quality, plus the use of LSI words are important for recovering rankings. I know as I examined a competitor of mine that has the .org and has been solidly ranking at #5 only after this update, his article has better quality than mine for the same keyword. My article was more of a how to care for the product and his touches on an overview of the product that outlines who uses the product, popular brands, how the product is used and where to buy it. So naturally google feels that content is more helpful since the content is more diverse. he also has about 300 more words than I do. My content is only 475 words and his is about 800 words.
RSS Feeds
on 
on 
on 
on 
So naturally google feels that content is more helpful since the content is more diverse.
But how would the Google algorithm determine that?
Carrie recently posted..Building Article Backlinks – Posting Complete
Its gotta be the LSI relation. Each of his paragraphs flows from one keyword to another related keyword.
paragraph 1 – history of main keyword (includes another LSI word)
paragraph 2 – brands of keyword (LSI heavy)
paragraph 3 – who should use keyword
paragraph 4 – how to use the keyword (another LSI word in here too)
paragraph 5 – how to pick the right keyword (more LSI words)
I throw a video tip/explanation/how to on all of my Adsen7e sites, which are a staggering 4 right now! I also incorporated LSI into my main page, but I did not do any research on these other kw’s I just grabbed them from the Big G adwords page that were related to my main keyword.
I do not remember if I put them into my inner pages I will need to look at that!-I am sure I did not, which I need to fix because one of my sites just starting ranking #1 on Google and the main kw plus the inner ones have a CPC of $20 +.
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
I actually added several youtube videos on my authority site challenge but that didn’t seem to help much.
Nice, Kelly! So, what was this Keyword again? =)
Good work!
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
yeah right
My inners are not ranking yet, and my main page has only a 1,300 exact search a month-so I definitely need to do something w/ this site. I have not received one click yet.
I think I am gonna add another post w/ LSI and do this for the inner pages, then I guess do another UAW run on the inner pages.
The run I am doing now moved it up to #1.
I am not sure if the videos help either, but it does not hurt to try!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
How can Google determine if the website is helping? Relatively easy – Bounce rate. If a visitor is searching Google, clicks on your page and uses the back button back to Google, that’s the bounce rate. If this happens over and over, especially quickly and often, Google can get a sense that your content is not what people are looking for, especially over sites that don’t have visitors coming back to Google all the time. Your goal is to keep them on your site, through your site or clicking off your site without going back to Google.
Is it a known fact that Google keeps track of the bounce rates of millions of users?
I have no idea, but that sounds like an awful lot of data to process for millions of users across millions of sites. Although I think Google Analytics does this for sites, right? But then dumping all that data into rankings – I guess my brain has a hard time understanding all that but I’m sure it is possible.
Carrie recently posted..Building Article Backlinks – Posting Complete
Well, my authority site I was working on doesn’t have such a high bounce rate as my average micro niche site does. In fact, the average user stays on my site for 2.11 minutes. Yet, my authority site still was penalized.
It was just mentioned on the xfactor forum that a guy that has not had any drops in rankings or earnings said he did have a site drop on June 2nd from #2 and was lost into the thousands. He reported that he added a few amazon contextual links to his content that basically uses the product names from amazon and he noticed within 10 hours his site returned to position #2. So I figure why not?! I am going to try this on my site that was #1 just before June 2nd and see if it helps recover it. It’s lost past page 10. Here’s to hope!
Oh man, I have just about had it with this mayday junk. My one and only authority site in the insurance sector which recently started earning loads of money and gave me hope that maybe I can expand my 5-page sites into 70+ sites like my authority site, well today, Google decided that it does not deserve its #4 ranking for its main keyword. I found my poor site lonely and confused at #154 (hmmm, wonder if some numbnut at google said, I don’t like you, that’s +150 for your serp), surrounded by nefarious ugly as heck sites, autoblogs and the like. I checked a bunch of my pages against copyscape to see if someone has been pilfering my pages via rss, but nothing interesting came up.
If Matt Dodo Cutts wants quality, well all I can tell him is that I have been writing all my content for that site. Pages on average have 800+ words and licensed pictures bought with my subscription to shutterstock. My readers love it. Bounce rate is 41%. On average, readers look at 3+ pages, and they hang around for more than three minutes each visit. High numbers of new readers, etc, etc.
It is my super 100% white hat as heck site. It runs on thesis, and is monetized only with adsense. My goodness, my readers are mostly senior citizens. Give us all a break here. What do my readers want? The truth as I write about it, or the fallacy of the insurance industry marketing, which dominates the first page now?
For this site, these are true: no bulk backlinks bought, and backlinks actually come from hubpages, squidoo and my own personal network of pr3+ sites which have NO OTHER outgoing links except maybe to gov sites and wikipedia. In other words, not a link farm. Hosted on different hosting companies, different registrars, and not all of them use wordpress.
Perhaps I should run an experiment. Create pages and just stuff it with all the LSI relevant keywords that GAKT spits out. I mean spam the page to death, and disregard readability. Adding related keywords seem to help some, so why not go over the top? Goog can’t hurt me much more than they already have.
I’d not spam or stuff it, but definitely would go with adding some in – context LSI, high PR outbound links maybe? — but don’t kill it.
I had a high-ranking PR2 in the nosebleed section, ranked around 2-3 for months, then it dropped to 4-5, hovered there, then someone sneezed at the Big G and let the pit bull loose…
Then it was seemingly knocked to Pluto, I think, in the SERPs, which as we know isn’t even a planet.
:/
Anyhow, I didn’t panic, just didn’t have time to mess w/it. This site appraises at $1k from a number of resources, I wanted to flip it for a while…then I just forgot about it since it was doing pretty well. In any event, it came back up today, out of nowhere — back up to #5.
What gives? Dunno. But don’t panic.
In any case, here’s an interesting read you all might wanna check out:
[http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/06/11/was-the-google-mayday-update-a-complete-failure-then/]
It came off Aaron Wall’s Tweet deck. Pretty interesting — just when you thought you had some sense of it all.
Personally I’m going to quit worrying about it for now. I can’t figure it out, but I know the basics. Just going with that (that isn’t directed at you, Sara, btw: you are in a much bigger mess, my network is much smaller and my main monetization at this point is one site pulling about $600 this month, and Elance which is considerably more…plus the full-time job).
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
My ranking on some have gone down in the SERPs but my income seems to stay around the same. Not growing though like I wanted.
This is getting confusing – I think we need to set up some kind of chat room lol…. its hard to keep track of all the posts that have been happening here lately.
Well, i just re-read google sniper, and you know what? That george guy is a smart dude…..
I think the problem with all of these systems, is that in general, they are very prone to changes at google, for example the reliance on certain on page seo factors and the exact match domain. Imagine you have built up an empire of snipers, and are making a killing. Your living on the beach somewhere, then one day the exact match domain means nothing. Boom – all of your snipers drop 10 pages, and your income is 0. Im not saying they are a bad idea – make hay whilst the sun shines sure, but develop a longer term strategy as well.
I read somewhere (terry kyle?) that backlinks act as “anchors” that keep you fixed in place, against the varying tides of google. I like that description. This has strengthened my belief that a larger and more heavily backlinked site is a better option in the long term. As other factors change, the sheer weight of backlinks will prevent your site from dancing too much.
I don’t think there has been any indication to a penalty of exact match domains, at least not per Aaron Wall (sorry, just interviewed the guy) of SEOBook.
It has to be the other factors. The reason being, if you were searching for “blue corn tortilla chips” and I own “bluecorntortillachips.com” – the SE doesn’t have a choice but to include me somewhere in the SERP (may not be on page one or even page two, but I’ll be there).
Unless the whole entire *point* of searching is now re-invented, and Google doesn’t CARE that a search term carries weight to the actual SERPs…
It has nothing to do w/a penalizing of exact match domains. If the rest of the site doesn’t match whatever criteria Google is looking for (i.e. the content is actually about Hoover vacuum belts and NOT blue corn tortilla chips), then that’s another story.
I’m not sure why you’ve mentioned exact match domains a few times, but it doesn’t fit with what the SE is developed to do (deliver in-context results relative to the search terms).
I do think that building weak sites with weak content and a weak linking structure/on-page SEO/1-way links, etc., will definitely turn up bad results, but that’s just Old School SEO.
Case in point: Mahalo sites are 100% scraped content, yet they are STILL ranking, Mayday or Caffeine notwithstanding.
They don’t have unique content. They aren’t quality sites. They don’t even need many backlinks in many cases from what I’ve read. Why do they rank?
Actually it’s still old-school SEO…just can’t figure out the whole dupe content thing….
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
Mahalo sites? Not familiar with them. Do enlighten.
The definition of Mahalo (most of which I have learned from reading the blogroll that comes from SEOBook’s toolbar, their RSS feed is priceless):
[http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-meet-the-new-spam-worse-than-the-old-spam/]
The current algo change and it’s non-effect on spam sites like the goliath mahalo:
[http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/06/11/was-the-google-mayday-update-a-complete-failure-then/]
the point is that there is no discernable point…my sites are doing as well as they were, so far as ranking goes. I haven’t seen significant drops in anything else…including traffic, now that i’ve analyzed my data.
BUT my network is dinky. the sample is too small really to judge, so take that w/a grain of salt…doesn’t change the whole Mahalo scrape jobs, though.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
James, Just read your interview with Aaron. I am glad you asked him about the EMD issue because that has been my concern and now its nice to know there is no reason to think that EMD are pointless.
Thanks, Sara – I’m glad you found it helpful, and I had been concerned myself just because of the reports here and at Iser’s site.
I don’t think anyone on here thinks there is a *penalty* on exact domains. Just that the advantage that exact domains used to have has been removed or reduced.
That may have been what you meant, but I just wanted to clarify.
Carrie recently posted..Building Article Backlinks – Posting Complete
That’s what this so-called penalty is Carrie. The EMD advantage is still in effect as far as getting a ranking boost. Check out Mike Roosa’s latest blog entry. He is still building new micro niche sites that are ranking on page 1 right away and it seems only a small handful of us on xfactor’s forum have had sites effected. The majority of the members there have not been effected.
I’m just trying to be precise with the language used as it can confuse people. I’ve seen the word “penalty” thrown around with duplicate content and backlinks and people start talking past each other.
There is a difference b/w a penalty and the loss of an advantage. If Google used to give a boost to EMDs and now no longer gives the boost, that is a loss of an advantage. If Google now gives a lower ranking for simply for having an EMD, that would be a penalty. Either way you may lose rankings, but if you were buying new domains you would certainly want to know if there is a penalty (which I can’t imagine ever happening).
I have a couple of EMDs and I would say the advantage is still there, just for the record. Maybe reduced? Who knows. Likely the advantage is now balanced out my the need for other factors.
Anyway, I don’t want to argue about all this, just trying to help the discussion.
Carrie recently posted..Building Article Backlinks – Posting Complete
@ Everyone – I am one of the ones who started part of this controversy about EMD, and i’ll explain the reason why I brought it up in the first place. I don’t care what Aaron Wall, or Matt C.utt.s or anyone else says at this point because Cut.t.s wouldn’t tell us the truth if we paid him, and he is the only one that really knows.
It’s been believed forever that EMD’s give a ranking boost. This really isn’t where any argument is. But looking at that boost from a quality standpoint, and from Google’s standpoint. How does having an exact match domain mean your site is any better for that search?
Google isn’t stupid. They probably frequent SEOBook, SEOMoz, they have probably read John’s book, among others. They WANT to know how people are gaming the system. From their standpoint, if I know that anyone and their brother can go out and buy a stupid domain like “9InchRedWidgets.com” and post some junk site, but then get a boost from our search engines, to the point where they can make page 1, that is just bad business.
Now I am not saying this is fact, but i’m thinking logically as though I were Google. Maybe the exact match still gives a bump, but maybe they increase the bonuses for proper SEO and proper content relevance to outweight it.
Either way, whatever they did, when I try to figure out what they may have changed, I approach it from the perspective of, if I wanted a robot to get rid of spam sites, what would I do?
The answer for me is, value LSI, value on page SEO, value links with keyword anchor text of BOTH the main keyword and LSI keywords, and not necessarily what the site is called.
Just wanted to talk a little bit on this, since I think I might have inadvertently started some of this argument.
Matthew DC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
This is kind of the point i was trying to make – i firmly believe the EMD works wonders. But my point was that this probably wont be the case forever, as google get better, im sure less and less weight will be given to EMD’s… Which is why i dont want to build my business around their strength – i would much rather rank based on my content and my backlinks, as these are both likely to provide longer term and more stable rankings
Okay I gotta ask, what is a ’9 inch red widget’?
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
I highly doubt this has to do with posting 300 more words and having “higher quality” article than you. Google is blind and does not know what quality is.
I have some old sites with some very bad content. I couldn’t write very well back then and didn’t understand anything about on page SEO.
These pages (many with less than 200 words of content) have been getting about 50% more visits since May 1st. I have a hard time thinking that somehow there is a content quality filter that kicked it when I know my WORST content is getting the most increase in traffic.
No one can say 100% why certain people are gaining traffic while others are losing it. I think it’s cause of the quality of backlinks being changed on Google’s part. Most of my sites don’t have low quality links as I have never done blog commenting or profile links. I’m sure these still work, but it seems that those who had rankings with these have lost some ranking power.
BTW, I just wanted to pose a question or, I guess maybe make a statement and get some feedback. I have been watching several videos, including one where Cut.t.s goes through websites and comments on their SEO (it’s kind of amusing):
[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-site-review-session-from-google-io-2010/]
I have heard him say on several occasions, direct from his mouth that having the KW in your domain is important, so I am not saying we need to stop doing it. But having it BE the domain, is what I am getting at. For instance….
If I am making a site about Monkeys, and the keywords I want to rank for are Spider Monkey Cottages, Gorilla Cages, and Premium Monkey Food, (yeah, I totally made those up, but wouldn’t that be a fun site?), structuring your website as follows will still count as having the keyword in the domain string:
monkeymania.com/gorillas/gorilla-cages.html
monkeymania.com/spider-monkeys/spider-monkey-cottages.html
monkeymania.com/monkey-food/premium-monkey-foods.html
Matt even references a domain such as the ones above in the video i linked, and says this is good thing because he has the keyword in the domain.
So having a keyword domain doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to have 3 separate websites:
GorillaCagesStore.com
SpiderMonkeyCottages.com
PremiumMonkeyFoodsStore.com
I am posting this because the first example, monkeymania.com, is the route I want to take. Just build a site all about monkeys from the ground up. Cover every possible keyword you can find, interlink properly, do a little deep linking, post some EZA to your inner pages, and build a brandable business.
I would much rather tell my family, oh I run this sweet monkey site, MonkeyMania .com than tell them I run this 5 page site called SpiderMonkeyCottages .com.
Both can make money, we have proven that the xfactor method makes money, all of us have had at least 1 site that made quality money on adsense. I have had 2 or 3 sites that made $15 a day each over the last 3-4 years consistently.
Ok, I forgot where I was going with this, but I was just trying to flesh out my stance, show you guys what I am thinking about, and see what your thoughts were. So, what are your thoughts? haha…
Matthew DC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
be careful about sharing your business ideas on the net – I have just regged monkeymania.com… spider monkey cottages have some awesome affiliate offers.
I totally agree with what you are saying though.
The xfactor method would be to build SpiderMonkeyCottages.com and then add pages about all the other monkey stuff to SpiderMonkeyCottages.com once you know its a profitable niche, but to me, that just doesnt sit right.
I think everyone needs to decide what sort of business they want to run. I disagree with the point that you and Dan are making, that there is somehow a lower level of quality with an EMD. It’s a label. Think of it like a book.
Do you know that the “For Idiots” and “For Dummies” books are essentially EMD’s?
“Spider Monkey Training For Idiots….” Instant best-seller. Well…for Spider Monkey Trainers. lol
You see my point, though? The EMD does not equate to lower quality, not in the eyes of the real world nor in the eyes of an end-user, and it’s been shown sufficiently from both Cutts and Wall and my own rankings (small sample though it may be) that an EMD does not mean penalty.
Having said all that…consider:
Google
Amazon
eBay
etc…
These are top-notch domains, low Alexa ratings, incredible traffic. What makes them so special is the quality and the marketplace they target. Do they deliver the goods?
Are they user-friendly?
Are they trusted?
Do others talk about them?
These sites will never suffer from a penalty or algo change only because Google would be remiss to penalize their customers, who happen to be using Google to get to them…So backtracking a bit, going to the quality issue:
I agree with you and Dan and Yolanda in the sense that there is a quality issue that needs to be in place, something that goes beyond a mere algo change. Thinking of the website as a conveyance of goods or services to an actual human being, and running your business in a way that takes that human into account…
I dunno however you structure it, but LSI makes sense because your page ought to be contextually “about” what the searcher is looking for. SEO on-page factors make sense because again, it’s a user-friendly issue, and this is what the Google spiders are technically designed for: to be sure that Google’s customers get what they’re after.
I don’t think that XFactor’s model is for everyone, but I also don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with it…we just need to be wiser about structuring our sites and backlinking.
I do find it a little concerning, though, that you said that you “don’t care what Cutts or Aaron Wall say,” considering that the former needs us to be better at SEO or Google is going to be delivering sites that are not actually giving the user the content and goods they want (intuitively: if you’re SEO is an indication of what your site is about, and it has relevance to the kw’s used to search….).
And Aaron’s just a guy like you and me. Only wildly more successful. His entire business is your success, so I don’t really understand where you’re coming from. He buys websites that make $5k a month out the gate – I believe he speaks with a certain level of authority, and judging from the emails he and I have exchanged (beyond the interview), he’s an upstanding SEO.
In any event, your idea about monkeymania is already proven to work (viz. eBay, Amazon, et al.). If that’s more your style, then have at it, but it’s a false dichotomy to say that the EMDs and XFactor sites are thus being taken down en masse. All of my sites are faring just fine, even the one that was knocked off the front page (it’s now at #7).
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
Ok, well two things.
1. Who said anything about an EMD equating to lower quality? My point is, that EMD isn’t a good indicator of whether a sites quality will be bad OR good. It’s just a title, like you said. Now it says to Google, oh this site “might” be about this topic, but it still says nothing about whether or not the site is useful.
Plus, you once again used the word “penalty”. Penalty was never the point of this argument or what I was saying. The point was, I think with the same optimization, you could rank a non EMD in the same position as an EMD. I think good SEO should be the focus and is the point of everything anyone is saying and I think this new algorithm is based on giving significant weight to quality indicators.
Your network of sites, if it is limited as you claim, may be continuing to rank because of simple SEO factors. Yours may be better than the other guys for your terms. That is still the most important factor in ranking as it always has been and always will be. That is the whole point of the game.
I think we just keep hammering points that aren’t an issue, and I want to try to take this in a different direction. I will get to that at the end.
2. The implied context (which I didn’t imply well) of my comment about Aaron and Cut’ts was that in regards to mayday, at this point, I would rather trust the data and hard facts we have at the moment. Mainly because right now, Google is the ONLY ONE who knows what they did. Everyone else, even the professionals, are speculating at this point. Did I read the interview? Of course I did. Do I read all of their blogs? Yup. Does it mean they are right? Nope. However, I do weigh their opinion higher than many others, but it’s still just an opinion, and i’m a data kind of guy.
And as for not caring what Googles spokesman says? Well theres 2 reasons for that. I read what he says, but at the same time, Google makes these changes because people start to game the system. They are not, under any circumstance, going to tell those exact people what they did to counteract their activities, because then they know exactly what to do to game the new system. So he is going to speak in generalities, much like he has been doing. All he has said up to this point is, do good SEO and you will rank. Well no offense to Google, but that’s been the tagline from day 1. The reason they don’t release the code and say “this is what we changed” is because they don’t want us to know what they really changed.
So at this point, it’s all smokescreens and generalities.
Ok, so moving forward. We all have opinions on what may have changed in mayday and whatever else Google has been cooking up. But what we all agree on, is that good ole SEO principles are what will win the race. So I was thinking, we could all start a discussion on exactly what good SEO is, what factors we think are important, what are some methods we use to get our rankings, how we do on page, off page, internal linking, etc. Or, maybe take one of your sites that hasn’t lost rankings, and run through what you did on that specific site.
I am not saying give away every little secret in your arsenal. But, we are a small little community, and I think we know everyone who comes here by name at this point, so coming together and sharing knowledge is probably the best thing we can do. Plus, for those newer folks here who have been hit hard, there might be a few gold nuggets in there that make the difference.
Just a thought, what does everyone else think?
Matthew DC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
If I hammered a point that you aren’t hammering, the misunderstanding is likely in my own use or misuse, or misapprehension of what you’re saying. My apologies on that, Matt.
I agree w/you on the idea that you can rank a non-EMD site (which is why I brought up Amazon, etc — Amazon has NOTHING to do with that river…lol), I guess I just don’t understand what the hubbub is about w/the EMD thing.
It seems you’ve been making the point that you want to distinguish yourself from the XFactor style of sites with EMDs and the like, and I think on the one hand you have a business model in mind. On the other, it comes off on my end as saying, “The XFactor style is low-ball, low-quality, and is just gaming the system.”
To which I’d reply that I don’t think you can make that statement in a blanket fashion, but again: I may be totally mis-understanding the thrust of your argument (but I don’t think I am).
Having said all of that, I want to re-iterate that I agree with you in the sense that old-school SEO is the way to go. That coupled with “quality” sites, whatever you may deem that abstract and subjective adjective to mean, should mean a profitable business.
Re: my limited network: I only have 9 sites up, not counting the very profitable The Average Genius (I’ve raked in $3). It’s as limited as I’ve indicated. Most of my money comes from a CJ product/sales (truly passive), and elance gigs (hence the name).
Re: your idea on SEO, etc., I know PitDennis dot com is getting some good results with SENuke…I’m going to be hitting article marketing something awful for backlinks and pre-selling, along w/all the usual suspects (a la [http:inlineseo.com] — just plain ol’ SEO, nothing earth-shattering).
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
Certain aspects of the XFactor system are a bit “low-ball” and the sites are definitely MFA. However, John is up front about that and never tries to hide the fact.
I personally am not looking for 50 $1 or $2 sites, which is the point I am trying to get across. This all started with us talking about our methods moving forward and somehow turned into a hurricane that I don’t even remember the point of.
I still think having some smaller sites in smaller niches is a great idea to diversify, but I want to focus on larger, brandable domains, that I can develop into something stellar.
I have said countless times that XFactor works, I have plenty of sites in that style that make money. Anyone who chooses to stick with that method, I think you are going to be doing just fine, and may end up making more than me.
But it all started with us talking about our plans, and I really want to start trying to develop something larger, which I think is the direction a lot of people are considering.
matthewdc recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
I wouldn’t call a discussion a hurricane, Matt. At least, not from my POV. If you’d lived on the Philippine Islands or the Florida panhandle (I did the former) then you’d know a true hurricane.
I think your plans – and mine, interestingly – are pretty parallel, though. I’ll be the EMD, you’ll be the branded domain – fair enough. But I think I’m concentrating on fewer/bigger sites with a mix of smaller sites mixed in, from here on out.
I’ll take the EMD boost as long as it lasts, but I think you’re also much further down the line than I am in terms of business plans. I know one site you won’t be building: monkeymania.com
[Whew! Glad we "cleared" that up.
]
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..Up Against A Wall – Round Two Of The Aaron Wall Interview At The Average Genius
I actually agree and disagree with the statement: “The XFactor style is low-ball, low-quality, and is just gaming the system.”
I was going to expound on this, but I felt it served better as my latest blog post since I was being too long winded.
Anyways, suffice to say, I believe there was a reason why many of these websites were hit hardest in the aftermath of the “Mayday Mayhem,” and it has a lot to do with the fact most MFA websites leave much to be wanted, and yes, I do believe their intentions are to game the system.
Like Matthew DC, I’m going to take the good ‘ole SEO approach because it hasn’t failed me yet, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to disregard my current EMDs. They will be built upon and turned into larger authority websites because they are “general” enough to encompass more than one specific product, service, etc.
However, I’ve also ventured into choosing my domains with at least one keyterm in the domain, but sticking to more “brandable” domains like the one I purchased in my expired domain case study.
Just read your post and fessed up. I’m caving here, I’m with you and MatthewDC, although I have no problem “gaming” they system as far as getting an EMD boost…
I dunno. I think I’ll need to run some experimentation on that, having a brandable domain name and just rank for KW’s (which I’ve done w/UAW pretty easily, I’m sure SEN and other would do the same trick).
I won’t say too much more on that, since I just poured it all out on your blog, Yolanda…darn you and Matt!
Smashing my game plans…actually, it was Matthew/you/Aaron Wall/Dan…and other blogs n peeps that got me to come to conclude:
I am *not* OK with an MFA, at least not a strict MFA, and I think I’ll make more money going all Frank Sinatra and doing it my way.
My strengths are more sales, from actual reviews, etc., in products and services I can stand behind. So far, that approach has worked for me, so why not?
It’s incredibly — well, *terrifying* — because I have a game plan but no “eBook” or guru to “hold my hand” so to speak, but forget it. I think this discussion helped me in serious ways, Matthew especially (your hurricane crashed my sails).
All that to say, I do want to re-iterate that I think AdSense is a great course of action, but an MFA doesn’t sit well w/me (even though my sites are not strictly AdSense, they all have product links, etc., reviews and the like).
[insert crickets chirping]
This is on one hand: liberating. I’m a creative fella at heart. On the other hand: scare E. I have no idea if it’s going to pan out….but I think it will.
More on that later, on my own blog. Sorry, Sara, for taking up so much bandwidth.
I live in Pensacola currently and I hate it. I am looking forward to moving to Denver in October for sure…
If you move to Denver you cannot use Amazon! I love it there–I am crossing my fingers that I get to leave on the 25th of June for a month in Colorado! I am excited about visiting Family and friends, but I have a few Doctor appointments-ugh!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
I tried Amazon for a while, but wasn’t ever really a big fan. I stick to mostly CPA, Affiliate Programs, and Adsense now.
I have never been to Denver, but it sounds awesome. I am really looking forward to moving there. It should be a lot of fun.
MatthewDC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
Out of curiosity, which CPA networks do you prefer?
I’m assuming that by CPA you mean pay-per-lead type of offers?
Testing to see if this Gravatar change went into effect…
MatthewDC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
Yup!
I understand why people would want to go the larger brandable site route. But there is risk there as well. It takes a lot of time which is focused on one site and there’s no guarantee the site will take off. It can be done successfully though. I met a guy in a blogging group who started a fitness blog about 3 years ago. His subject was body building and fitness for the average person. (Not BIG muscle building,but lean mucle building), He had a vanilla looking site, didn’t do any list building in the beginning and had no monetization. For over a year he just wrote about what he loved. He commented on other blogs and started getting traffic. I think his next step was an e-book he wrote about getting buff for vacation. He made good money with that. He uses it now as a free giveaway for list building. He did interviews with name people in his niche. Eventually rhis year he was making enough where he felt he could quit his day job. He did a site redesign – still very basic. Now he has another muscle building ebook for sale through Clickbank. He’s not using any other method for monetiation that I can see. His site is a PR-4 now. He also does some articles on squidoo. I’m sure he has other methods for link building but I’m not sure what they are.
Sandy
Why does the idea of ranking an “authority” website have to be any harder than ranking a EMD/micro niche website?
The only difference between the two is that the idea of an “authority” website revolves around the sheer volume of niche-specific content, the frequency of the content being added, the website’s “brand identity” overtime, and the ability to rank for thousands of long-tail keywords.
I think the word “authority” skews the underlying fact that even if you have yet to establish your website as the “go to place” or “everyone’s first place to visit on the web,” that doesn’t negate the fact that you can still rank for hundreds, even thousands of long-tail keywords…without spending 1+ years doing so.
HOWEVER, I do believe it will take a year to get to the point where you can rank for absolutely any keyword you go after, but that doesn’t mean that the other 11 months your website isn’t pulling in any money.
It’s a steady progression to a more profitable end-goal, and who’s to say that you have to invest your all into just one website? I, for one, intend to invest the next 4-6 months building up 8 separate “authority” websites, but if I thought for one second that I had to wait 1 year to see a return on my investment (e.g. time spent, content creation, etc), then I’d still be building websites, but more so websites geared towards quick and fast earnings via CPA — as well as dabbling in PPC.
However, I’ve already proven to myself that an “authority website” isn’t something that is far from my reach, and with the current one I have, it continuously makes daily sales via Amazon Associates and I’ve only been adding new content weekly for 3 months.
Yolanda recently posted..Day 38: Pondering the Mayday Mayhem and Why I Believe It Was Necessary
I am with Yolanda on this one. I think maybe some of us have different ideas of what “authority site” means. When I say I want to make a brandable, authority site, I don’t just mean a micro niche site with 200 pages. I also don’t mean taking one of my current sites and just expanding it out within it’s micro niche.
What I mean is attacking a niche from the high level domain down to the micro’s by making a site that is readable, attractive to look at, offers valuable content, and people learn to rely on for news in the industry.
For instance, when I want to read about video games, I go straight to IGN. When I want to know about the tech industry or business, I go straight to FastCompany and ArsTechnica. Health, I go straight to MensHealth and search for whatever topic I am interested in.
Now am I going to make a million+ hits a day site like those? Probably not. But you get what I am saying. As Yolanda has said, I want to be the site that everyone just automatically goes to within my industry and one in which people remember my URL or have it bookmarked.
Sites like SEOBook, SEOMoz, and SearchEngineLand all started out small, and now they are the goto blogs for SEO. Yes it takes time, a little money, and a lot of energy, but in the end, thats what makes a sustainable business.
This blog we are reading right now is the perfect example of the journey to authority. While I wouldn’t say it is the “goto” blog in the micro niche world, many people have been flocking here, including those who have been doing this a while. When Sara started this site, it was a simple blog to keep her motivated. But now look at her Alexa rank. Look at her backlinks. It’s something that organically, because of the quality of content, is becoming something much more.
And thats with no promotion! Imagine if she was attacking keywords and backlinking / promoting this site along with the quality content…. she could easily be making a list of a 1000 people and even selling an ebook / training course. Not that I am saying she should, but hopefully you see what I mean..
MatthewDC recently posted..I get sidetracked…alot..=)
That’s pretty cool-It kind of makes you wish you would have set up a bunch of these sites 5-10 years ago. Hopefully when I look back in several years I will have a good amount of authority sites that are doing really good, plus small sites!
Kelly recently posted..New Theme….again Plus Updates
So I was just thinking – instead of speaking theoretically, lets look at real life examples. During keyword research has anyone actually come across an x factor site which has successfully been “built out”? Either a site like “thin yoga mats” with 100+ pages, or a site like “thin yoga mats” ranking for a niche broadly related keyword like “womens yoga bags”…..
I can tell you – I have not. Only ever see 1 – 10 page x factor sites, and ranking for the exact same keyword, never ranking for other keywords. And when i say xfactor sites, im not talking about the green and black theme, im talking about adsense sites where the domain name is an EMD for a micro niche keyword. In my experience, inner pages are not easy to rank for other keywords without some decent amount of backlinking.
I think a lot of people kid themselves that they will build out all their factor sites in authority sites. An authority site isnt a 20 page site, surely its determined more by how many backlinks it has, and the authority being passed through those backlinks. I have seen lots of large sites which low PR, and low backlinks, and they only rank for 1 term. Having lots of pages doesnt make your site an authority site. Other trusted sites linking to you is what passes authority.
It would probably take over a year of hard work before you could make one true authority site. Doing this with 30+ sites isnt practical, or profitable. (If you look at earnings the site will make Vs time spent building and backlinking the site)
Whenever someone makes a logical argument against x factor, the believers flock to angrily defend him, and say that the people are not understanding what he is saying. Lets look at the evidence. Who here is truly earning anywhere near $300 – $500 per day? Sara has 100 sites and is now on ~$15 per day. X factor in the original thread claimed to have around 30 sites, and was making $200+ from those 30 micro niche sites (not including his health authority site)
I am saying that maybe you should draw your own conclusions and be realistic. If you were making $500 per day from adsense, would you waste time writing an ebook, managing a forum etc? Or would you keep doing what your doing, and stay under the radar? The man is a brilliant marketer, in fact, that original thread on the warrior forum is a masterpiece of selling, and was originally started with the intention of creating demand for his ebook.
Anyway I know you are alll going to disagree with me. I am not saying micro niche sites dont work, but what i am saying is that you can make real money when you stick to making micro niche sites. Building sites focused around one low competition keyword, minimal backlinking, then move on to the next. I am making $60 per day from 30 sites following the original x fator method, before he started talking crazy about adding 100′s of pages to ALL of his sites, not just the successful ones – which IMO was just something said to counter all the deindexing fears, and pave the way for the next ebook, which you can bet your life will be about expanding sites – how convenient.
Many well rounded people on the warrior forum have come out and said that number of pages does not affect whether your site is deindexed. Building your product site out to 100′s of pages will not save a site. What puts you at risk is having loads of sites on similar subject – i.e loads of product related sites with a big adsense square slapped above the fold on the home page. That is what screams MFA network to the guy doing your manual review.
Yikes i got so much to say/rant about but im going to shut up now lol… im only posting this because i care. Dont get caught up in systems people, just take the basic principles and run with it.
“Whenever someone makes a logical argument against x factor, the believers flock to angrily defend him, and say that the people are not understanding what he is saying. Lets look at the evidence. Who here is truly earning anywhere near $300 – $500 per day? Sara has 100 sites and is now on ~$15 per day. X factor in the original thread claimed to have around 30 sites, and was making $200+ from those 30 micro niche sites (not including his health authority site) ”
I would agree with that…..Anybody who is in this game will know that it takes much more then 50 to 80 page sites to earn 20K a month on adsense…. there is more to it then meets the eye……IMHO….
I am sure I will get bashed here but my 2 cents….
ITA w/ you Steve…no need to hide under a rock.
The only person(s) I know of making figures like that are two IM buddies of mine, and possibly BenK (who I don’t know) from “Make Money Online with SEO.” However, his (BenK’s) network of micro niche websites is well above 200+ websites (according to his blog — and I’m sure my figures are a gross understatement) and even when 100 websites of his MFA websites were deindexed, you can tell from his stats that he was averaging over $100 per day, or a few cents to a few bucks per day across that specific sector of MFA blogs/websites.
…the point being…making $20k per month isn’t going to come from having hundreds of blogs, and that’s where I agree with you about it taking more than 50-80 pages to earn via Adsense. Instead, I believe those figures are going to come from a smaller, more intimate network that you put your time and attention into. It’s also going to come from ultimately turning your website into such a powerful or authoritative website in your niche that you rank for every possible long-tail keyword and people come back to you for more information or buy whatever you’re talking about next.
People like Cary Bergeron, and Plenty of Fish’s owner (who I believe was quoted to make over $100k per month on Adsense alone) are examples of what building larger websites can do if you put the time into it.
Yolanda recently posted..Day 38: Pondering the Mayday Mayhem and Why I Believe It Was Necessary
also look at mike iser – a smart guy, did his keyword research, and backlinked his pages. Even with 200 sites he was only making $100 roughly from adsense, prior to “mayday”… now he is at ~$50….
I’ll have to say that I’m taking the smaller/more focused route. I can’t keep up w/Iser and even with Sara here as far as volume – I don’t have the time currently, and do much better focusing on 1 thing at a time.
This discussion for me has verified that I just need to get a bit away from “doing it your way” to doing it mine — no eBook author knows what *I’m capable of* nor what *my strengths are,* and I do *much better* when I focus on doing one thing/niche/sales page etc. well than trying to run roughshod over a wider net.
Part of success is doing not only what works, but what works for you, the business owner. For me, it means getting focused and doing what I do well and multiplying that (i.e. more sites when I have “x” site built and running, go onto “y” etc.).
Thanks all. This is either “make” or “break” time for me. You’ll all get the bill if it’s the latter…