In my previous post on a new plan to try and get my Mayday affected sites ranking again, I mentioned the action steps I would be taking this week. I came up with this new plan because I have been trying desperately to get my sites ranking again by relying heavily on article marketing the current website’s pages and seeing next to no movement in the SERPs as a result. Well, the action I took this week is helping me to see the light at the end of the tunnel because things are happening.
This week I decided to work solely on site #31. Before the Mayday update it was sitting pretty on page 1 at the #4 position. After the Mayday update it took a huge hit and was lost in the SERPS. I can’t even tell you how far back it fell, all I know is I could not find it past page 10 in the SERPs. Everyday I would frantically check to see if it was ranking at least within the first 10 pages of SERPs for its main keyword and to my surprise an inner page was ranking at #78 for the main keyword but the main page itself was no where to be seen. So this week I started off with my new plan and today my site is ranking at #50 for its main keyword again. Now I am not sure exactly which steps have helped it the most, adding a new paragraph to the main page, adding a new page of content or the 4 new profile links that are showing up in YSE that I used via the Sick Profile Maker.
I am even considering going a step further. Some of you may remember a post I did back in April just a few days before the Mayday update called, Changing My Site Layout Has Helped Rankings. Well, I did see a dramatic change in my rankings on the site I had tested with it and then the second site I had changed over to wordpress and using the Thesis Theme. Both sites were unaffected by the Mayday update and are both currently ranking at #2. Now these sites have also lost some additional back links I had given them back in April that were from using Blog Blueprint; yet the sites did not suffer in rankings. I am not sure if they are more SEO optimized using the The Thesis Theme for WordPress than just my plan old HTML setup but seeing the sticking power of those sites is leading me to want to see if I can improve site #31′s rankings further by switching it over to wordpress and using the Thesis Theme.
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Interesting stuff – why dont you convert 10 sites over to thesis and do nothing else to them, see if it helps? Will help you pinpoint if that is helping. Wouldn’t imagine it would take long to convert them.
Yea, that’s a good idea. I am going to go ahead and switch #31 over today just because I created a really HOT banner for it that I am totally digging. lol
But I think perhaps some time over the weekend I will go ahead and convert sites I have not touched since before the Mayday update to see if it makes the difference.
Have been thinking about picking up thesis for a while now, so hopefully you get some postive results, then i will definitely get it.
When you said 4 new profile links were showing in YSE, how many did you actually create? I struggle to do less than 200 with sick these days, If i put my mind to it, I could knock out 10,000 in one day :O
That was from a run I did on Monday so my guess is that I actually posted to about 100 sites.
That’s great to hear, Sara! I’ve seen a huge jump in my SERPs for many of my sites since starting using Sick a few weeks ago (hundreds of positions for many keywords). I’m also doing other things as well, such as using UAW, making it hard to exactly pinpoint why this is happening – although for some of the sites I’ve seen a big jump in ranking I have only used Sick, so that’s my guess (these are all sites older than six months which I have thrown anywhere between 500-1000 links at them in the past few weeks). Remember that YSE only shows a small fraction of the actual links and that Google is likely responding to links not showing up yet in YSE. But of course the best thing to do is to try testing, as Dan suggests, to see if you can pinpoint the “culprit.” And it could also just be a coincidence as well (you’re site might have returned this week no matter what). Given it’s just one site, too early to tell, but it looks like at the very least you are moving in the right direction.
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Hi michelle, did you do anything with those links, like ping them/rss/bookmark? Im finding with sick, that I create so many, that Im struggling to do anything other than ping them. Some of the guys over at the sick forums are confident that google finds them no matter what – even if you dont ping them…
I ping a lot of them using the Sick Pinger, but not all of them. Probably about 2/3rds of the total links. I do think that Google will find many of them eventually, and if you want to try to minimize some of the dancing, you probably shouldn’t ping them all. I, however, am tending toward the other direction and am working on setting up my own blog network that I can use in conjunction with Backlink Indexer Express to get them indexed faster and more thoroughly.
Michelle recently posted..Free Tools Friday- Budget Backlinking System
The sick pinger is slooooooow, I have removed most of the default services to speed it up a bit.
I am subscribing to one of those indexing systems too, I just want to be sure that they are all counting for something.
Sick is great – I have over 10,000 sites in packets of 200 now, and im still not finished going through my list of forums. Considering selling them on the forum there, but my selfish side wants to keep them all to myself
True it can be slow to let it run its course (about an hour to get through a site list of 130 sites I registered on at once) but I swear its magic. You don’t really need to use the other indexer softwares out there with Sick. Having some links indexed in just a few days with Sick is much better than the results I was getting with previous attempts of trying to get profiles indexed on my own.
You guys make me sick.
(( rim shot. thanks. ))
10k a day, Dan? Yowzer. Nice – how are you finding all your forums? Just a simple manual looking for footprints (powered by: phpbb, etc.)?
I’m assuming the software has that built in?
Oh, and Sara – nice to see the upward trend. I’ve seen the same using direct linking with ArticleRanks, pretty dramatic so far.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..ArticleRanks Or Unique Article Wizard
I use scrapebox, but to get that many you have to do some really thorough (and lengthy) scrapes. Sick doesn’t have software for finding forums built in… You don’t even want to know how many forums I had to go through to get a “clean” list of 10k that work in sick… probably only about 10% of forums work with sick….
Could you just do an exact search for:
“Powered by: pHpBB”
“Powered by: SMF”
?
I haven’t been using forum profiles, but that has to be easier to find those types of footprints (feetprint?) vs. trying to find a WP-based article directory, for example.
JamestheJust on Elance recently posted..ArticleRanks Or Unique Article Wizard
ah if only it were that simple. Sick is basically just a macro, so if a forum has anti bot puzzles or any other shenanigans, it can’t automatically sign you up. And a lot of forums have such shenanigans, so the only way to get a clean list with sick is trial and error… Basically you stick a load of smf forums in the smf template, and hope for the best… delete the failures, and keep the winners for your “clean” list.
Glad to hear that things are looking up. Do you think it’s the Thesis theme, or just WordPress in general?
I started playing around with WordPress about a year ago, and I love it’s flexibility – but I can’t image the maintenance (version updates, data backups, etc..) on them if you had 100+ websites. I have only a few sites, 2 on wordpress, and one is overdue for an update as we speak.
Its hard to say since right now my micro niche sites are either HTML sites, wordpress using Clickbump’s themes or I now have 3 sites that are using Thesis. I guess what I could do is switch a few Clickbump themes that are not ranking over to Thesis as well to see if there is any improvement. The problem is that it takes me some time to setup a site with Thesis since I have several steps in which I have to go through just to get the site layout exactly as I want it.
The best thing about Thesis is the theme is so SEO optimized that it eliminates the use of plugins such as All-in-One SEO and other various plug-ins for doing any sort of “SILO” set up. There is a killer feature that allows you to display posts and pages in the sidebar according to category tags and post tags. It makes it pretty hard for someone to tell if you are displaying static pages or blog posts, all while giving the search engines what they want in terms of related content links.
The new 1.8 Beta version is making things easier with the new clickable header upload feature. Fantab-ulous!
That’s awesome.
One of my best sites went off the face off the earth after the mayday update and it was upsetting because I had only been building backlinks via article writing to it. I had it up to page 3 and then after that it was gone – couldn’t find it anywhere. Well I persevered and I just kept doing articles..and after about 2 or 3 weeks it showed up again on page 1 of google
so chuffed! And it has been increasing up the top 10 slowly but surely. You really do have to have faith that what you are doing is going to make a difference and I am glad I just persevered!
Hey Dan,
Since you own Scrapebox why not use the ping add-on? It works super fast for me.
TJ
Hi Sara!
I totally agree about Thesis – this theme rocks in terms of SEO and works really well. Btw you can check out my last post about the same issue I had, I’ve shared a strategy I used to quickly regain my rankings.
Yesterday I repeated this with my 3rd site (clickbank sniper) and I see rankings improvement today already. It definitely won’t work in 1 day, maybe in several, but after 2 sites that I got back to #1 I think it’s worth using.
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I’ll check out your post. I changed site #31′s layout on Friday and on Sunday it had already moved up 8 positions. I can’t say for certain if Thesis alone did it or if it’s still getting some new links from Sick but I will be testing out switching over to Thesis on a few sites this week that I have not campaigned with article marketing or profile links to see for sure.
My micro niche sites are now officially all dead. Been lingering on for a while and now they have been completely disappeared in the SERPs.
maybe time to move on to something else? Working on a couple of larger sites seems to be the way everyone is going these days…
Have you been doing anything to try and get them to rank? If you aren’t taking any action on them then of course most likely nothing is going to change. Granted, I did have a few that are rising slowly without me touching them but that is not the norm. The norm has been no movement without action on my part.
I agree with Dan. Pick your best performers prior to Mayday and build them out and back link them.
If you check sites in google like site:domain.com do you see any indexed pages? If the site is deindexed – it is really dead.
Adsense alone is not the way to make stable money, my personal opinion is we need to diversify as much as we can, create sites for different affiliate products, CPA, amazon maybe… If one strategy dies, another saves the butt…
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