Blue Mushrooms Affiliate Marketing » SEO

Improving your ranking keyphrases

Sapphire — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:17:19 +0000

Whether you’re building a new domain or rehabilitating an old one, you need to consider what keyphrases you want to rank well for in search engines. You have only so much control over this, as keyphrases come from the anchor text other webmasters use to link to you. Obviously, you can make clear what the title of your site is, and that shou00ld take care of any sidebar links to your homepage. As for links in articles, most webmasters will link to you with either the title of your site or relevant keywords, and the ones who don’t, you can’t do much about.

Picking your key phrases

The trick is figuring out which keyphrase you want to go for. You need to rank highly for your domain name, but other than that? If your domain name isn’t the exact name of your site, or the exact name of your site doesn’t describe what your site’s about, you have a little more work to do. Your keyphrase needs to be two things:

Relevant. Obviously, it needs to have something to do with your topic.
Attainable. If there are already 8 SERP pages full of big companies and huge bloggers ranking for your keyphrase, and you don’t have a huge marketing budget, you’re probably never going to reach page 1 for that phrase.

Since this series of posts is about improving or rehabilitating a domain, I’m assuming that when you first started the domain, you already considered your topic and whether there was any traffic for it, and so on. There are tons of tools online for finding good keyphrases, but the basics are simple: imagine you are someone who wants to learn about your topic. You don’t know anything special about it. What do you put into the search engine? Do the searches and see what comes up. Is it what your imaginary newbie wanted to read? Even if it is, chances are this search will make you think of other searches that might get you even better info. Do the search. Make a list of search terms that got you what you wanted. Remember that a lot of new searchers type in full questions, like “How to start affiliate marketing?”

Take your list of searches and look at the SERPs again. Do the high-ranking sites belong to big companies with big budgets for marketing and SEO, or not? Are some of them medium-sized blogs or sites you might be able to beat? What about the second page? The third? Balance how important the key phrase is against how easily you can get it. “Affiliate marketing” is a sweet but competitive key phrase – if you think you can get onto the second or third SERP, it’s worth pursuing, even if you think there’s no hope of ever ranking #1. But if you can find another phrase that’s close, that you think you could maybe hit #1, go for that one, too.

Don’t forget to look at your stats

At the start, you’re likely to find yourself ranking for phrases you weren’t trying to rank for – the search engines don’t always see your site the way you do. But these phrases might suggest other key phrases you should aim for. Keep an open mind.

Write about the keyphrases like a real writer

Don’t get caught up in ratios telling you how many times to use a keyword in a page or article on your site. Just write about that topic. Use the key phrase the way a real writer would, without considering the search engines. The engines keep getting better and better at looking at sites the way a human does.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 16, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Domain Rehabilitation: recovering pagerank

Sapphire — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:53:10 +0000

As I said recently, I’m working on rehabilitating this domain. One of the problems I’ve diagnosed with it is that my pagerank is zeroed out. Well, you know how I feel about that, but they won, we lost, and people still factor visible pagerank in when deciding what a domain is worth. Which really doesn’t make sense, because the visible pagerank can have to little to do with Google’s actual attitude about sending a site traffic. This one is a good example.

Does zero pagerank mean you’re banned?

No. Blue Mushrooms is still getting traffic from Google. I even rank fairly high on some key phrases. Despite that PR0 you see, Google is doing pretty well by this domain, considering how poorly I’ve done by it – when it started, I knew almost nothing, and I experimented on it almost randomly. If I was keeping the site forever, I wouldn’t even be concerned about the PR at this point. But in actuality, the reasons why I suspect I have PR0 do highlight some genuine problems with the site that I know how to fix now.

Why is the pagerank zeroed out?

Here’s my best guess.

As far as I can tell, the site was zeroed out for mainly having paid text links, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
There is the slimmest of possibilities that Google also thought my splogged articles were the dupes, instead of the other way around, but I think their algorithm is probably smarter than that (after all, both version of the articles had the dates and times, and mine were always earlier – how hard would that be for a robot to work out?).
Another possible reason for the zeroing is that over time, a lot of the bloggers who linked to me either went away or stopped linking because I wasn’t putting out new content, and all my inbounds are now super spammy directories.

Dumping paid links

I removed the Text Link Ads a long time ago, but the directory still had paid links until recently (and since it doesn’t offer unpaid ones, it would be a cinch for Google to detect those links are paid). I haven’t made any money from the directory in ages, and it gets more traffic than the blog, so I decided to kill it. But how? Should I just delete it and let all those pages go 404? Or should I 301 redirect them to something else? I really wanted to redirect that juicy traffic to the blog, but if I 301′d them to the home page, the PR from the directory might follow. Not that it could get any worse than zero, but it might delay my return to pagerank.

That’s when it hit me: I redirected the most trafficked directory pages to the advertising page. They want to promote their site, right? And your advertising page is not something you intend to score high in Google. If you’ve got promotional pages – directories, landing pages, etc. – that are hurting you but still getting lots of hits, redirect them to a legitimate advertising page. I haven’t sold an ad or gotten a new feed subscriber from this yet, but I am getting hits to a perfectly innocent legitimate page.

Got spammers?

If spammers have duplicated your content and are outranking you, this is obviously hurting your site. Check this post for suggestions what to do about sploggers that steal your content.

Getting quality inbounds

There’s nothing you can do to get rid of spammy inbounds. You could try to trace them back and ask webmasters to get rid of them, but I think a better use of your time and energy would be to focus on getting better inbounds. That’ll dilute the impact the spammy ones are having on your PR – over time. As I described above, Google is actually still sending me traffic with nothing but those inbounds to recommend me. Therefore, the bigger problem (in my estimation) is lack of good inbounds.

Good inbounds are natural, organic links. The search engines are just too good at picking up links that are about bots rather than humans. I mean, what human ever went to a directory site on purpose once the search engines got going? You need links that human beings have given you because they had a reason to link to you. There is no shortcut on this process. Here’s how it works:

Create content that’s worth linking to.
Email any pals in your niche and let them know you’re doing something cool they should check out and link to.
Participate in niche forums that let you have a link in your signature. This is not about getting an inbound from that signature link – many of them are nofollowed anyway. No, what you want to do here is actually participate in the forum. Answer questions. Give out helpful information or advice. Be funny. Have personality. Do any of that stuff that you can, and people will get curious about your link, check out your site, see the content that’s worth linking to, and link.
Do this for at least 6 months before expecting a result. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I warned you this is a long term project.
If you have an ad budget and know where to advertise, buy graphic ad space to send new traffic to your site. Nofollow text links might be okay too, but graphic ads are safer in terms of not offending The Goog.

The good news about today versus a few years ago is: years ago, you had to hope for other bloggers and webmasters to link to you. But now, if you’re in a young or techie niche, all sorts of readers might link to you on their Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or LiveJournal. Oh, and don’t forget StumbleUpon. There are tons of social networking sites that can send you new inbounds and new traffic that actually converts.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 5, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Domain Rehabilitation project

Sapphire — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:00:20 +0000

I changed my mind – I’m not selling the site yet. I was going to post about this the other day, then I discovered this site had been totally splogged, and that made me even more certain about getting the site into better shape and then selling it for a decent price eventually. Then I thought, “That could be cool to write about – my adventures in getting this domain to where it’s worth selling.” That’s what I’m doing.

If you want to rehabilitate a domain, the first thing you need to do is figure out what’s wrong with it. This is not always so easy, and as I work on this domain, I may find I’ve missed some steps and/or are working on stuff that’s not that big a deal. But here’s my initial assessment.

Google zeroed the pagerank some time ago.
I haven’t made any effort to monetize it (until last week) so I can’t tell potential buyers it makes any money.
My inbounds suck both in terms of quality and quantity.
Hmm, I’m ranking #1 for “affiliate marketing journal”, but a year or two ago I started trying to rank for “Blue Mushrooms” instead. Google never took the bait.
More traffic wouldn’t hurt.

Over the next few days, I’ll discuss what I’m doing about these problems.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 2, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Breaking up with AdSense

Sapphire — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:41:14 +0000

AdSense has been my big money maker the past couple of months, but for no reason other than it was what I had on the site that got Dugg. Granted, if I’d had AdBrite instead of AdSense on it, I’d have earned less. AdSense is not a bad earner.

But after a couple of days, suddenly all I was getting was three ad units full of that flat stomach ad, or the get rid of wrinkles ad. If you’ve been anywhere on line in the last month, you’ve seen these ads. You probably have developed the ability not to see them, in self-defense against the assault of seeing them every damn where you go. The ads sure weren’t relevant to my site, nor were they appropriate for that site’s audience. Here I was, already frustrated, when I got an email from Google informing me they’re not going to do relevant keyword ads anymore, like I hadn’t noticed they’d already stopped some time ago.

In a nutshell, the email says I need to update my privacy statement to let my visitors know that from now on, they’ll get a little present when they come to my site: a cookie from Google, delivered via my AdSense ads, which will follow them everywhere they go within the happy AdSense publisher family of website, determine their “interests” and then serve them ads based on those interests.

I started trying to compose the new language in my privacy statement, then realized there was just no way I could participate in this. Not only is it my final straw in putting up with Google’s snoopiness, but it just makes no sense practically. I mean, imagine how well this is going to work on shared computers in homes or internet cafes. “Hmm, I’m searching for sexy lingerie, but keep getting ads for golf clubs.”

The point of this change is probably to kill business for those webmasters who have cornered the market on building sites that bring up certain expensive AdSense keywords. Most of Google’s business decisions seem to revolve not around making more money – they’re richer than God already – but around crushing people they’ve decided need crushing. A couple of years ago, it was Text Link Ads, and now it’s successful MFA webmasters.

I got off the AdSense ride yesterday. I think it’s still running on a couple of sites I don’t visit very often, but I’ll have it replaced everywhere within a week.

Oh, Google. You’ve become the J. Edgar Hoover of the internet – deeply paranoid, way too powerful, and obsessed with getting the dirt on everyone.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on March 17, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Feedburner Google migration is an unmitigated disaster

Sapphire — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:45:34 +0000

UPDATE: if you respond to the email that says your feeds moved over successfully, Google does actually get back to you several days later with an email that indicates they’re reading the emails and getting to them as they can, but are overwhelmed at the moment. This might be the best way to make sure your problems are known to them. But do please search the forums to see if your problems are already known, or have easy solutions you can implement yourself! The less time we waste asking them questions that have been answered publicly, the sooner they’ll get everything handled.

Not since Coke decided to change their flavor in the ’80s has a major company done something so fundamentally backwards as Google’s forced migration of feeds from Feedburner to, um, a slightly different subdomain. The bugs in the forums are numerous. While some of the questions there are repetitive ones from newbies who didn’t bother searching the forum to discover the problem is known (but not yet fixed), most are about glitches that need to be taken care of. There are over 6,000 messages. It’s just ridiculous.

I haven’t migrated this blog yet. I have several different FB accounts, and am not sure I’m going to migrate this last batch. The first account migrated over pretty easily, with the exception of some hiccups in MyBrand, which I managed to fix by Googling for solutions. The second batch, however, simply didn’t migrate. I got the email saying they had, but they’re not in my account. With one exception, they are in fact working – that’s a big relief, since I have several hundred subscribers I’d rather not lose. But I can’t see them in my account, can’t access them, and can’t make changes to them.

Does Google care? Oh, hell, no. They don’t owe us this free service, do they? We’re fortunate they condescend to deal with us scumbag webmasters, right? At least that’s how Google always makes me feel. They wouldn’t have a web to sell advertising on if it weren’t for us, but I get the feeling they wish we’d dry up and blow away all the same.

I will probably end up redirecting the MyBrand feeds on this blog and several of my others back to the usual old WordPress feeds – for now at least. Maybe if, at some point, Google fixed FB, I’ll reconsider. But at the moment, neither this blog nor several of my others are poised to attract advertisers or buyers on the basis of my lowly feed numbers, so it’s not as if having that metric would be a help to me.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on January 29, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Improvement in the SERPs

Sapphire — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:31:26 +0000

Suddenly, Google is sending two of my best site a heap more traffic. Is anyone else seeing this?

I thought I was getting a lot of search visits throughout last month, but I wasn’t sure until the Thanksgiving holidays drove away Stumblers and the others who send me little storms of traffic now and again. Suddenly, all my visits were coming from search engines (mostly Google), and my traffic levels stayed steady despite the holidays. My average daily visitor number has gone up on both sites, too.

I don’t think it’s anything I did – as usual, Google tweaks its algorithm and sometimes that works for you and sometimes it doesn’t. But I’ll take it!

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 2, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Finally, proof that Google is sometimes useless

Sapphire — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:56:49 +0000

There are actually times when Google does your site more harm than good. Unless all you’re concerned about is traffic.

A couple of months ago, I switched domains for Project B-2 Bomber. At first, the traffic stayed high, then it dropped from 20-25k per month down to about 13k. Reason: Google had kept the PR on the main page, but dumped all the internal PR. They went from sending me 10k hits a month to around 3k.

Here’s the thing. The site’s never been better. The amount of commenters are the same. The inbounds are growing by leaps and bounds. You know who I lost when Google stopped sending as much traffic as it used to? The wrong people.

B-2 constantly gets searches that contain the right words, but the wrong concepts. I’m not going to reveal the topic of the site, but to give a parallel example: Google bots can’t tell Republicans making fun of a Democrat policy from Democrats cheering about their policy. It can’t detect irony. B-2 has a lot of discussion that’s ironic and/or about stuff its visitors object to, and that’s the context Google can’t filter out. It sends me people who are very irate to read what we’re saying, which is not at all what they were after. It’s not doing them anymore good than it’s doing my site.

But who can tell the difference is the crazy amount of bloggers that keep linking every month. New bloggers, all the time. That site gets thousands of people from Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal subdomains, because one person will link to us and hundreds will follow that link.

That’s the traffic we want. I know sooner or later Google will reinstate PR and that traffic will come back, and that’s fine. I’m just realizing… I may find I miss this quiet time of getting nothing but quality traffic. No angry emails or confused comments. Just people who want to be there. And there are more coming every day.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on July 8, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Traffic is strange

Sapphire — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:11:14 +0000

I haven’t posted on ChillyCool in weeks, yet stats and feedreader subscriptions are up. Glad someone’s enjoying is…? I have no idea why that site does as well as it does (which is not well at all, I’m just saying it should be even worse).

I haven’t been posting as regularly as I like on Project Mai Tai because moving to a new apartment consumed my life for a few weeks there. But it got a huge, helpful inbound that’s given it a fantastic boost in traffic. This is super awesome, because that’s one of the sites I really hope to make it big with someday.

And Project B-2 Bomber is finally feeling the sting from changing domain names (.info to .com). At first, all my PR transferred and all my traffic kept coming so I thought, “Wow, cool!” Then suddenly the traffic got sliced in about half, and I slowly realized as I watched the numbers come in what had happened: Google zeroed PR everywhere but on the front page, and is sending maybe a quarter the traffic it used to. That was frustrating, but I knew it would be okay – I might have a penalty coming from the .info (if there really is such a thing, as has been speculated recently), this might be a normal hiccup in moving a domain name, etc. The bottom line was, everything is still as it was when Google loved me; they’ll be back.

Then I found out something very interesting.

I got an inbound from someone who sent me several hundred new readers over a few days. This bounced my traffic up by about a fifth of what I’d lost. This confirms that my site has a good variety of inbounds and isn’t really dependent on any one search engine or source of traffic.

It’s so nice to be able to look at a major Google letdown and think, “Eh. They’ll be back. Meanwhile – oh, look at all the other who showed up! Hi, guys!” and forget all about them.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on June 13, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

One of my sites is getting toasted, and I’m happy

Sapphire — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:10:56 +0000

I’ve got a bunch of article reprint sites and used to make several hundred from text link ads, back before Google went on a rampage about that. During Google’s rampage, a curious thing happened: this site, one of those reprint sites, and one other site got their visible PR zeroed out. I eventually took paid links off this one and the other one and requested PR back (and got it). But the reprint site, I left: people were still buying links even with the zero PR, and I was curious to see what would happen.

Now the site is suddenly losing its TLA advertisers. And none of its little reprint friends – which do have some PR – are raking in the money either. It may sound strange, but I’m finding this a relief. Because it’s such a temptation to build more of those sites so I have at least some money coming in while I wait for my other sites to take off – the sites I actually think have a future. If these sites aren’t doing so well anymore, the temptation is gone.

I still have to say this, though: we were all idiots to let Google push us around. That whole paid link thing was nothing but an attack on TLA, a competitor who was kicking ass. But we knew that – many of us talked about it. Where we were idiots was in letting that affect how we ran our sites. It’s very clear to me that my sites that got toasted were handpicked by a competitor – I could tell that by the sites they missed which were selling text links, never stopped selling them, and never lost a point of PR. So not only was the whole thing about Google trying to squash a competitor while pretending they had a more “do no evil” motive than that – it was also about us trying to squash each other.

And I’ll go on record right now saying I turned in one site for paid links. Not a site that had anything to do with affiliate marketing, but just this really nasty site full of trolls who attacked another site of mine. Did Google take even a nibble out of their PR7? Oh, lord, no. Interesting, isn’t it?

If I had the whole thing to do over again, I wouldn’t have blinked at Google’s game of chicken. They cannot purge sites from the index for having paid links, because that is the step that would put them over the line and in violation of US monopoly laws. They can reduce visible PR because PR was invented to sell AsWords and if folks are using it to sell other ad products, that’s folks’ problem. But if they exclude you from their directory for doing business with a competitor… that’s not okay by law, and one of Google’s competitors – probably Microsoft, who’s been on the wrong side of monopoly laws itself before – would secretly fund a “grass roots campaign” by a bunch of alleged nobodies and take it all the way to the DoJ.

(For anyone wondering, “Hey, I thought she had a rule against talking about Google!” – I should be more specific about that rule. I refuse to speculate about Google’s latest shenanigans like 90% of the other blogs in this niche do every time Google sneezes. That’s just free PR for them – they feed it to you, and you spit the links right up for them. I won’t do that. But I will occasionally talk generally about Google and how they affect my sites, and what I’ve learned about working for, around or against them. Because that’s something we all have to deal with. The shenanigans are best ignored.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on June 11, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Better than domain parking?

Sapphire — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:18:29 +0000

I was looking for a better option than SEDO for earning some money from my parked domains, and came to the following conclusions:

SEDO works because it forces people to exit the page, which they sometimes do by clicking an ad.
If that’s not working for your particular site, or you’re concerned about the domain building some pagerank for later on, the best thing to do is create a mini-blog, stick ads on it and submit it to a few directories. Just write 5 or 6 articles, maybe with links to other relevant sites of your own, and pad them with some ads and get them a few inbounds. Nothing elaborate that needs to be updated regularly.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on March 9, 2008 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.