Here’s the link to my new No-Hands SEO review.
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Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all. If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Note that I don’t reply to all comments, but I do read them all. If I don’t reply to your comment, it most likely means that I agree with what you say and don’t have anything meaningful to add, myself. I appreciate and read all comments and your comments play an important part in what I write about, so keep them coming.
Spammy comments are always filtered or removed. No surprise there.
Shane ,
I also was thinking about how I can get out from Google “tight hug” and get traffic some other way. The only option is see now, besides the paid one, is social traffic. This is my primary goal now to master free social traffic to my sites.
Hope I will hear soon about your approach to get free from Google “hug”.
Best,
Alexander Umanets
The only 3 things you need to do:
1. Create unique high quality content
2. Syndicate it to social networks
3. Grow your fans/followers
In that order too.
Once running, try to automate 2 and 3 and strictly focus on 1.
Thanks for the update, yours, not Google Panda’s.
Facebook!
My Adsense income has literally been halved! Seriously bad news as I wasn’t gaming the system – I’m talking about static HTML sites of over 10 years online!
Aw man, sorry to hear that!
Have you checked out the new sites that now sit on top, where yours used to rank? Sometimes, that can help in figuring out what Google wants to see on a site.
Hi Shane,
Thanks for sharing how Google Panda update affected your low quality sites. I bought your Backlink Battle Plan, which I am about to apply to a new site I have been building with unique quality content. My question is with your experince whether there are aspects of the I should avoid
It seems to me that the Panda updates are all about on-page content. As long as that’s good, you can still use the same backlinking strategies as before.
It is about on page content and avoid spinning for now. Spinning never has been a gereat idea, even whilst it was working.
Focus on putting top quality on your pages and syndicating that content for likes, retweets and google+
Another good idea is to use video, just like Shane does.
Next protect your content! Its yours. Add about/author links if you did not have those yet, also in your feeds.
If content was king, its now emperor.
Shane
It is interesting to hear what you say about Google panda and from my point of view this is good news for anyone building QUALITY and AUTHORITIVE adsense blogs.
The only downer I can see is if your hard work on an authority Adsense blog was to get hit.
I have now decided to spread my wings and build alternative to google just incase they do hit better quality sites in the future.
Let’s hope panda stops once they have got rid of the junk and content copied blogs and sites.
Looking forward to your ideas
Hi Shane,
Sorry to hear you got some sites down.. I actually got one down at around the same time. Since then, It has come back to life twice and disappears again. And I wondered the same thing. I can not afford to have my life dictated by what G does or not. I also want to find another way to get traffic to my sites so I can not be so vulnerable to algorithm changes as I am now.
I did follow you the battle plan, so I am do have videos uploaded, and documents and etc..so maybe we could better use that for traffic too.
I have a fan pages that got down with the SSL update, and I have not done anything to bring them back.
I will be looking and see what you come up with.. as I know you are really clever.. :)
I’m interested to see what your new approach will be. I’ve been thinking about the same think lately. I almost feel some shame building ugly sites. It’s hard to do.
Hi Shane
First thing I thought when you said you had a few sites go down to G at the same time was were the sites related in any way so that G could find others from just one site it didn’t like. For example, were they all on the same hosting and possibly sub domains? Was there a trackable footprint of some kind?
Good luck with seeing if any/all of them are recoverable or can be put into a network where G doesn’t matter anyway.
Tony
Some of them could have been linked through the domain whois information. I did not have that anonymized on all of my sites. But personally, I think that it really was just a change in the algorithm that got several of my sites affected. There’s some new criteria that these sites just don’t comply with, so they lost their top rankings.
When I saw your recommendation for backlinking to not take time to do a quality job on some of the 2nd and 3rd-level backlink sites, I immediately thought that was a bad idea in the long run. I’m now seeing reports that Google is starting to evaluate the quality of the sites that link to you, and if you have a bunch of crap sites linking to you, you basically don’t get any link juice from them at all. Even the little bit of time you spend on building crap sites just for backlinks will be completely wasted.
I think that Google is going to continue to make it harder to game the system, so I have decided not to cut the corners. Unfortunately, that takes more time and makes less money. I just hope it turns out to be the best approach in the long run.
I’m even a little leery of SocialAdr for that reason. Anybody can come in, pay some money to get a bunch of social bookmarking accounts set up, and pay a little more money (or spend a little time) getting backlinks. The way it’s done is pretty clever, but it’s only a matter of time before Google learns to spot the evidence, and removes any value from that approach. Maybe SocialAdr will find a way to beat that, but then we’re back to the bit that you mentioned about staying ahead of Google.
I’ve been using SocialAdr for a while, and have had good results — but one thing I have always done is actually evaluate the links that I share, and I don’t share a bunch of crap. That means taking 10 or 15 minutes to do what would take a minute or less if I was willing to just take the 5 top entries in the queue without checking to see if they are peddling Viagra, a useless diet program, or a get-rich-quick scam. But, I still worry a bit about what kind of sites and/or accounts are linking to me. If you wallow in shit, you are going to stink. And Google will learn to smell it.
I believe, and apparently you do, too, that trying to stay ahead of Google by finding new ways to game the system is a losing proposition. The folks at Google are a damned sight smarter than either of us. I would be REALLY interested in learning how you plan to solve that problem.
Google again, Thanks for the update.
Shane, can you elaborate on why you believe the sites got penalised? were they emd’s, were the sites competing against a trademarked brand?
Also how much in ranking were you penalised on average?
I am really suprised by this as I assumed that you pretty much stuck to the ‘build quality for end user’ ethos.
What went wrong?
They weren’t EMDs and there were no trademark names involved. That’s never been part of my strategy. They were “medium” sites, maybe 20 pages of content each and they were comprised decent content a couple of images and affiliate links. Basically, “factory-built” sites with very little care given to them. The kind of things that you could churn out endlessly a year or two ago and that would make money like clockwork.
But as I said: Google did a pretty good job of detecting these sites as “low quality”. The content on them was generally good, but not something you’d write home to your parents about.
So what will you change on them to get them back?
Google is becoming more and more “evil” and a real pain for internet marketers that focus on SEO but they are simply too big to avoid dealing with and I don’t see that changing in the near future.
For anyone doing SEO and I recommend reading the great blog by Aaron Wall, SEOBook, as he seems to be the only one that tells the tale about Google and all of its recent actions as it really is without holding anything back.
I can second that recommendation. Although Aaron Wall tends to be quite pessimistic, it’s still good to get that kind of perspective, as well.
Hello Shane,
Thanks to friend Google all of my old time top sites were all taken down a notch in PR. My best old line dependable monster bragging site was de-indexed. (Took a couple of weeks to be forgiven…but I got it back up.)
The lesser quality sites built on the old models are about the same. It just goes to show that there is NO reliable pattern here.
So, everything is not so hot and then I get a mail from the Adsense100K guys advising me to visit their latest post…
Within about an hour of reading the recent depressing report on the future of Internet Marketing from the Adsense 100K team I had a new domain…
PandaCookbook.com. The goal is to place a Panda Update post a day on there.
Frankly, by its very nature this project is more than a little scary…but what the heck.
What I have discovered so far is that nearly everything we know about getting ahead of the curve is speculation, post Panda. Sort of like guessing what color an electron is. Just too many variables.
So going forward, I’m sticking with what we all of us here agree on. Quality *seems* to keep the panda from the door. Not a guarantee though.
I’m just fool enough to think we need to fight this thing.
Norm
Cool stuff, Norm!
A good authority site on the in’s and out’s of Panda updates could make it big, I think.
Hello Shane,
Thanks for the Sunday update. Interesting to me in that I experienced a similar occurrence on two of my best performing sites a few months ago. These had been built with links using all of the backlinking techniques I knew about and some other questionable techniques I had learned over the years. Nothing black hat but certainly grey hat and I admit I was trying to game the system. I thought that was what I needed to do.
In my defense both were high quality authority sites that delivered real value to my visitor and both had good rankings, traffic and high conversion rates. These were by pride and joy sites – my money sites. I was proud of both. Both went down in flames.
I decided to continue with both sites as I had too much invested in them but I knew I needed new methodology. I continued adding more content to both sites. With Site B I continued the same linking techniques but concentrated on using adding quality content plus I added fake Social linking. I used a paid social linking service. I won’t mention any names but they charge outlandishly high monthly fees.
The other site – Site A- I tried a new approach (for me) of adding videos to every new posts, asking for comments, backlinks and requests for sharing in the videos. I started emailing my list on Site A with daily content alerts, posting on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages with a lots of content with links to the site. I also tried something new for me – doing an incredible amount of internal linking of my keywords on both new and old content. Every piece of content is interlinked structurally by keyword. Siloing the content by keyword on the whole site. I know that is old school, but I was essentially throwing everything up on the wall to see what stuck.
On Site A I did absolutely no fake backlinking. However, I am now showing an incredible amount of new links but all from my own site. After 4 months or so using these techniques, and a little secret sauce I won’t reveal, (as I need to verify it was influential with another test) the site has come back and is stronger for almost all of my keywords plus many more long tails I never targeted. Site A is ranking higher with more traffic than ever and making more money than before. Site B despite all the new content, all the backlinking and months of social linking is still in Google oblivion, regardless of how much new quality content and backlinks I added.
I found this whole process very interesting and IF I can repeat it with a new site or Site B (as one site does not a trend make) then I will know I am on to something and I may never fake backlink again. Never do any more article submissions to directories for links. Everything came back too quickly and too fast on Site A to be a coincidence. I am hopeful that I can save myself a whole lot of money and time if this can be repeated. Time will tell but maybe, just maybe it is time to quit gaming Google and the other search engines. I hope! and hope is a good thing – maybe the best of things. William “the boing” Hanley.
Wow, thanks for this awesome comment!
Very interesting to see you got these results. And this also matches quite closely some of the things I’ve been experiencing with my own sites. Congrats on raising that one site from the dead! :)
I would like to thank you for this comment too, it was really helpful and will be testing your technique on one of my sites.
When you know if your little secret sauce was influential, will you come back here to share it? That would be great!
Thanks
I agree with you Shane – I’m also looking at other ways of tapping into traffic apart from G. My first line of approach is itemizing where the massive traffic is right now.
Mike
Same thing with me, i had a site that was earning 100 per day that went to 20 the next day and now makes me 6 dollars per day. I think one thing that made that happen was that nearly all my links came from blog networks, with spin content. All links are do follow, 3 per post etc. so its very easy to get cought by google.
Damn, that’s a shame. Do you really think the slap was caused by the backlinks you have, rather than on-site factors, though?
The one site factor was bad. Good unique content, big posts (which i think made my visit time perform very bad, because i saw big posts most of the time make people leave your site once they get there). My CTR (site about cell phones, electronics) was about 10%, my site was really ugly (theme to increase CTR).
But i dont thinks google can recognize when a site is ugly and when its good looking.
Maybe the time stuff, visit time… in the 2 new sites i am testing nw i didnt put analytics, adsense or webmaster tools, just stat count. Making some tests now, hope to find what can help sites to get ranked.
Made a 301 from the site penalized by google, in my opinion, to a 14 year old domain. One month now and the revenue with adsense has dropped to 1 dollar per day. Thought i could keep the PR and escape the google penalization with a 301, very wrong… And i think buying aged domains dont help rankings at all.
Oh wow, that’s harsh.
So, the penalty was basically passed on through the redirect?
In that case, you have to be extra careful about aged domains…
I would be surprised if it was really quality of backlinks that did you down. As is often said – if poor backlinks could do this then competitors could do it deliberately.
On a general note, and I’m not saying this applies to you Miron – I think a lot of us who have had sites around for a few years need to look at “refreshing” our content. G will keep raising the bar in this area year by year. Because content is at the heart of their business – that’s what people use Google for.
Mike
I don’t think that poor quality backlinks will actively hurt you, for the reason that you mentioned. However, I don’t think they will help you at all, and if that is all you have pointing to your money site, then it’s an indicator that you have put all of your time and money into automatic backlinking, and *that will* sink your site. Net result is that what little time and money you spent on that sort of backlinking is 100% wasted.
I’ve also read that blog comment links have been seriously downgraded in importance, in response to the overwhelming abuse using automated tools. I think I made the right decision to avoid using any of them. I still do blog comments, but only on topics which actually interest me (like this one), and instead of links, I will occasionally drop a fairly unique keyword with a call to action: For example: “Your small intestine has taste buds!” (Google it — I have a site that owns nearly all of the first page — and 2nd — of Google for that keyword phrase). I think that has been a fairly good strategy, at least so far.
BTW, if you *did* Google that and read a few articles on that site, you will see that it features mainly guest authors. That has been another challenge for me. I initially tried an autoblogging article service, and the result was horrible. Worse than horrible. I ended up deleting every article and starting over by writing most of the content myself. Then I actually started getting inquiries from potential guest authors, and I wrote up (and enforced) some guidelines to avoid getting crap articles. It’s still not up to the quality I have in my goals, but it’s improving, and the site is getting lots of traffic (and a little money). I think that if I work on it long enough, it could be a serious competitor to EzineArticles (especially considering the almost uniformly low quality of articles on that subject there).
But it’s a lot of work, and not much money yet. So there is still something I’m not doing quite right.
do you know any plugging to insert new content in all pages every day, like q news plugin? but the updates of content should be in html, javascript i think wont help.
i am making tests in some sites, lets see what helps and what doesnt
1. I am concentrating more on facebook, twitter and google plus
2. Rewriting content to make presentation more unique.
3. Stop doing simple product reviews.
Hi Shane,
I’ve kind of had the same thought in the back of my mind as well. There’s got to be other avenues for affiliate marketers to get traffic besides being so dependent on Google. That company is a “wildcard” in our income flow and has way too much influence on our finances – especially when they decide they don’t like you anymore!
I’m looking forward to your updates on this.
Thanks for the info,
Cliff
You’re really scaring me :(
I’m just starting out my business, and I don’t have any sites build, yet. I was thinking to go with the AdSense $ 100k blueprint… But maybe that’s not such a good choice anymore now.
Oh well :) I’ll just give it a try… Get going, then everything will turn out quite fine.
Greetings
Tashi
Don’t worry, it’s not that black-and-white. It’s not like building profitable AdSense sites was the easiest thing in the world yesterday and now suddenly, it’s impossible to make money that way. ;)
It’s just that slowly, you have to take care of more and more details on a site, to make sure it remains “Google safe”. The approach outlined in the A100K blueprint is still a good approach.
#1 – Google hates affiliate links. It’s not a solid model anymore. But at start, it’s good to test things out.
Once you have a site that’s rolling in the dough, you create your own product.
#2 – You’ve gotta keep building links to your sites. If you stop building links, you are going to be affected by stuff like Panda.
#3 – Quantity beats quality anyday with Google… At least now and so is for the next few years.
The reports are depressing because all of these guys are trying to sell you their own product.
They all try to tap into the fear we have. Get over the fear and ACT. ACT, ACT and ACT…
The best thing I can think off with these affiliate/adsense websites is once you have an established steamline of traffic, sell it to somebody in the same industry who have their own product and stuff.
You can sell it to such guys for more MONEY. Certain brands (not really popular brands) but some small players in the physical market are willing to pay the dough for a site that’s already there.
Hi Shane
My quality authority site was also hit by the update in mid October and my income dropped by about 70%. My first thought was that onpage factors had been the cause of the drop. However, in comparing my site with the sites that are now ahead of me in the rankings, this doesn’t appear to be the case. The content on my site offers useful original and helpful content, and a couple of my high search volume keywords have not dropped in ranking even though the pages they are on are far less optimized than the pages for other keywords. I have no direct evidence for this assumption, but I suspect that the drop in ranking for my other keywords may not be a penalty per se, but rather a devaluation of some of the types or source of the backlinks by the new algorithm.
I appreciate the content on this thread and I am very interested in your future attempts to resurrect your sites.
Sorry to hear it, Shane. Panda hit quality sites, too – it’s funny to read some comments here saying that it’s just about quality…no, not quite: Panda hit plenty of quality websites (Ask The Builder being one that comes to mind).
It’s an algorithm, so it’s going to happen – good and “bad” sites will get hit.
My main earning site got hit in May of 2011, and came back a month later. This phenomenon happened to a friend of mine as well around October or so, came back a month later.
Around Dec 23rd, 2011 – Google again hit a minor Panda update or tweak and a few of my pages were caught in the mix – but of the affected pages, 1/2 have come back, the rest are still climbing: all without any intervention from me, which is what happened last time.
So worst case scenario: I build some high PR comments (manually, thanks – believe it or not they work just fine, Scrapebox isn’t necessary, people), build other high PR links via BMR, Authority Link Network, Link Authority, social sites like Twitter and Facebook for traffic and other SEO signals….
Boom. Back on top. You sort of answered your own question in the video, though – admitting these sites were some of your lower-end sites…
My philosophy is to build assets and not websites. Niche marketing doesn’t have to be done in such a way that quality content is rare – I think that’s what saved me some trouble with Panda in 2011 and will continue to be my philosophy (even though G hits high and low quality sites, it’s inevitable).
Here’s hoping you bounce back – and like you: I’m experimenting with some non-Google traffic, too (social media isn’t so foreign).
I have about three over 50 page authority sites that were hit in October. All went from about 10K visitors to about 3K. These are pretty solid sites over 7 years old. I did manage to get several of the rankings back for a few pages but there’s just no way I’m going to get over 150 pages back up to ranking where they were.
I have starting a new site, doing as many have advised about linking and social networks. We’ll see, still too early to tell if it will work.
The websites that replaced mine don’t look so great on content or user experience so I’m not sure what to think. Lots of maybe’s and no solid reasons are apparent for my dropping in rank across the websites.
And I have about 5-6 pages on each website that have left the planet. Just to see if I could I picked a couple to try and bring back with no joy in over 60 days and lots of TLC on the linking and content. Why these particular pages got smacked so hard is impossible to determine.
And I also think I’m seeing another round of Panda crap that started last week on a few websites. To say this is frustrating doesn’t really cover it. I really don’t know what to think these days with very little proof of any one factor being the culprit.
I started with some friends what became a high traffic authority site in 1995 called http://www.audioweb.com, worked on it a few years and gave up before there were good ways to monetize it, outsource work or even sell the site. What a mistake. Then I totally ignored IM and eCommerce until about 6 months ago. Since then I have become totally addicted. I should start a blog called Rip Van Winkle Returns or something. Anyway that was all to give you context for the following observations. 1) IM is to fixated on SEO. The lure of “cheap” traffic that in the end is not really cheap has become IM Crack. The thing about niche communities especially passionate ones is that they are by definition small, ie easy to reach 80% of the active community. Traffic was never our problem and we ranked for the least important keywords that I cared about. A passionate community is constantly looking for the next big thing. They crave connection (web 2.0), fads and new or advanced content. BTW Shane this gets to your other post about how people share great but not good content. Actually they share “new” or cool content. New techniques, products, websites etc.. Deep hobby stuff. Find passionate niches or subsets there of, as opposed to brides niches (woman only care about brides stuff while they are planning a marriage. People only care about car insurance once a year) that dont have a community binding site with a forum or classifieds engine, build it, and they will come. Additional tactics should be clear if you think through the above.
2)IMHO Adsense sites should be (please correct me if im wrong im a newbie with this!) great as “phase 1” sites. Generate cash flow and most importantly test market a lot of niches cheaply. Phase 2 being focusing the real money and attention on the winners and turning them into primarily web 2.0 sites that you sell stuff on and build a mailing list from.
Bottom line you don’t want your livelihood in the thrall of an increasingly monopolistic company.
Thanks for a great site, secockpit and a place to rant :).
Since the “Quality Content” seems to me to be the main ranking factor, I would like to (for what its worth) point out a post by Big G.
*What counts as a high-quality site?*
Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.
– Would you trust the information presented in this article?
– Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
– Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
– Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
– Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
– Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
– Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
– Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
– How much quality control is done on content?
– Does the article describe both sides of a story?
– Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
– Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
– Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
– For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
– Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
– Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
– Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
– Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
– Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
– Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
– Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
– Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
– Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
Writing an algorithm to assess page or site quality is a much harder task, but we hope the questions above give some insight into how we try to write algorithms that distinguish higher-quality sites from lower-quality sites.
(Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html)
@Dave:
I do not know enough about Google to give them the *evil* tag, but to me all BIG Corporations are suspect. Google seems to cater to the Big Boys (Brands) with large advertising fonds and “normal” marketers are not their preferred clients.
However, there may be departments or people in certain departments that still try to be helpful to all of us. If all of them are happy with Googles policies? I hope not!
end-@Dave
I’d like to ask if somebody has incorporated these insights into building their content and what has been your experience in general and specifically with Panda?
Since (very) recently my NEW Off-Page SEO priorities are avoiding linking to low quality sites and avoiding automated link building services (SPAM). There are services around that submit original human generated content to top quality sites but their rates are not within my budget.
I’m having problems showing up in the Big G SERPS for my keywords and do (much) better with Bing/Yahoo (surprisingly – since PR0). My prior automated back linking efforts (paid services) where next to useless. I ordered something like 1000 backlinks (mix= blog/bookmarking/edu-gov). Majestic SEO shows 19 domains created 76 links :(. Google Search for my domain shows about 30 pages of results.
Shane – in one of your replies you mentioned anonymous sites. I wounder if not being transparent, may be “frowned” on by Google?
Are you doing this just for spiders? Anonymous WHOIS and in the legal pages you display your personal information using a picture?
BTW, your WHOIS Information for this site, using WhoRush, states your site expires 16 Nov 2011 at 16:38:00 ;).
Hi Shane,
Great update. I also had a few sites de-indexed in the 4th quarter of last year. What I did was spell check and re-write some of the content. Then I used Google webmaster tools to ask Google to reconsider my sites. This resulted in 6 out of 9 sites getting back into the index.
P.S. I had a question about Linkvana. Have you used Linkvana, and what do you think about them?
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
I’m not an affiliate marketer, but I’ve been following the Backlink Battleplan guidelines since last summer. My company’s website has increased it’s mozRank to about 5.0. We took our first Panda hit last fall when we fell to about #7 on page 1. However, I’ve continued to plod away at the Battleplan, and also re-read Shane’s materials about creating rich content for a good user experience. This included adding a second picture to each page with an alt-tag, and choosing photos that lead the reader’s eye to the text. Short paragraphs and alot of bulleted lists, etc. So now my site has over 50 pages, and is expertly written – we really take alot of time to post good, meaningful content.
Just in the last few days Google must have readjusted from it’s latest “snapshot” of the web, because my site and some of it’s most optimized pages shot back up to #2 and #3 on page 1. I’m generally right below a government website with domain authority around 96, that I’ll never beat. However, buyers aren’t interested in the government site, so they skip right down to mine, and we get several callers and several inbound leads per day.
So I’ll very interested to see over the next few months if the continued following of the battleplan will work just fine because I’ve got quality content. I won’t stop the backlinking unless there is some proof that it begins to hurt my site. As of right now, I think it has helped so far.
Hey Danielle,
Great stuff! I’m glad you’re getting such good results and well done on sticking to the plan, even through the “tough times”, when Google wasn’t favoring your site.