Well, last week was a funny week. I did not meet my goal of getting 10 blog posts queued up for my authority site. I did manage to get 10 done so basically I wrote 2 posts a day. So what exactly did I do the rest of my time? I managed to write 7 articles throughout my week for ezine submissions. So that was enough to back link 2 xfactor sites. To some this may look like not much work done at all but considering I ended my work days around 2 or 3 pm and I took off the entire day on Thursday due to a last minute schedule change. My sister was going to take my son to the local zoo with the kids that she nanny’s for (there is a boy my son’s age so it would be perfect) but then she called to tell me that the family car did not have a seatbelt in the middle. Since my son was ready to go and excited about going; I couldn’t let him down, so I ended up having to go too to drive us there. It was  actually a really enjoyable day. So for 4 days of half days of work, it does seem pretty productive to me at least.

When I originally talked about the correlation between LSI and the Mayday update, I decided to test this theory out on 3 of my xfactor sites. I tested site #24 (which is 7 months old), site #31 (4 months old) and #86 (about3 months old). As a result of the mayday update site #24 and #31 were beyond page 10 in the SERPs and site #86 was at position #24 in the SERPs. When I decided to test out the LSI theory, I went ahead and edited the first page of content by adding a minimum of 4 more LSI words and used each LSI word twice. I decided to add 1 article ezine backlink to just site #86. It has now been 3 weeks and these are the results.

Site #24 still lost in the SERPs but it is #1 in Yahoo and #10 in Bing.

Site #31 still lost in the SERPs but its #5 in both Yahoo and Bing.

Site #86 is position #17. It moved up from its previous position of #24.

This mini test seems to support the idea more that quality backlinks are the way to boost sites that lost their rankings due to the algorithm change. It doesn’t matter if you spam 1,000 article directories with articles to get backlinks. What is going to matter is the quality of the backlink, its the same thing that has been preached about all along. Essentially nothing has changed with this. All I know is when I embarked my xfactor empire, I originally started off my first few sites as John suggested using just his article marketing suggestion. I hated article writing and ran into some issues with ezines accepting a few of my articles or just giving me a hard time. This had deterred me from wanting to backlink my sites with John’s suggestions. So then I moved on to find services that could aid in the backlinking and those services did help; but still, the quality of those backlinks was not there.

I kind of knew that in the end, I would be returning to article marketing as John had suggested. So even this past week while I wrote my blog posts for the site I am working on building out, I knew I would be writing articles for ezine submission in order to get my better performing xfactor sites back to ranking again.  I wholeheartedly believe that the reason why my sites dropped in ranking is due primarily to the fact that I did not article market them as John suggested and why a few of my close friends did not have their sites effected. The difference between us was that I was using every backlinking method that could automate or speed up the backlinking method while they slaved away writing their articles. Ultimately; my sites suffered and theirs did not budge.

I will be sure to update you with the results of the sites I was  working on article marketing last week.

Adsense earnings have been ok. Yesterday I did $27.00, Saturday I did $14.85 and Friday I did $20.83. Today looks promising, its only 11:30 am and I am already at $14.44.