Internet Marketing Update-The Move Went Well…

Man, oh man, it is good to be back. Got the house all renovated and even took a week off from the computer (no email…no checking bank account or anything for that matter) to pull everything together. It was hard, I have to admit but I have to tell you that after a couple days, it was almost like I didn’t even miss the computer. All that said, it is nice to know that while I am not working, I am still pulling in income.

This is a long post so I am going to be a bit proactive and give you a little table of contents as to what is on this page:

• First Things First…What this blog is about….
• What would happen if you were to throw 10,000 backlinks at a page all in one day?
• Hubpage and Infobarrel update
• The Link Wheel? Why you should use it with caution?..
• Google?s Sandbox?Why does anyone really care?
• Why do-follow/no-follow doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things

First things first. I think I need to address this because I have received a few emails and even a comment from readers who have gone over and did a check on this site to see how I am fairing. This is a vanity site. Nothing more…nothing less. It gets traffic, roughly 200-400 visits a day. I actually started writing for this site to chronicle my internet marketing endeavors almost like a diary.

And since there are so many who struggle with internet marketing and get suckered by the various make money online products out there, I figured I could help those who are looking for more realistic answers to the typical “earn $xx,xxx in 30 days” crap that marketers are pushing on gullible people.

Just to prove this point, notice how there are no ads at all….I have pushed one product in nearly a year since this site was “born” although I guess realistically I could push more since there are a few that I really like. I even took down my newsletter sign-up because frankly, I have no time to screw around with it. This is an internet marketing blog, sure. But it ain’t one that I plan to monetize in the near future and therefore is very low on my list of priorities.

So take this blog for what it is….if you disagree, you disagree….if you think I am wrong, test the theory and see for yourself. I am not here for a popularity contest and this blog isn’t meant to catapult me into internet marketing fame.

The last time I checked, I am ranked somewhere in the 300-500 range for the search term internet marketing. All this said, if I was actually going to make a push for that keyword, I would do a number of things:

1. Do a complete link analysis of the top 20 web sites including an architectural analysis of the site itself
2. Point directory links to my home page using a variety of similar but different anchor text. This would include paid directories that google trusts.
3. Grab as many links as I could from my competitors and use different anchor text for link equity purposes than my competitors (in other words, if they were linked with internet marketing, I would make mine, internet marketing tips)
4. Rather than point these links directly to my home page, I would point them internally to other pages and use internal links to the pages I want the link juice to go
5. Internal pages with the most inbound links would get the most internal links to other pages within my artchitecture
6. Build a “partners” page for reciprocal links…I know..the juice isn’t great but it does add a bit of lift and enhances user experience.
7. Oh…and I would improve my navigation…something that is seriously lacking right now due to time constraints.

Of course, there are more things I would do, like keep a tight monitor on long tails traffic in my analytics as well as purchasing links and making deals with other folks but that is a nice, tight list that I would start with. Then again, because I am not really gunning for it and because my niches are removed from the make money niche, I wouldn’t even consider trying until I am in the game…or within the top 200 search results.

I may make it there eventually but if I don’t I don’t really care….after all, considering that wikipedia is supposedly the “best” most riveting source of information according to google for people searching for “internet marketing”, I would say that unseating that giant is far from worth it and probably isn’t even possible.

What would happen if you were to throw 10,000 backlinks at a page all in one day?

I asked this question a couple months back. You see, many of those marketers who are in the viagra and prescription drug markets typically will spam their way to rankings. They do this by using black hat tools like xrumer (which is an automated backlink builder for forums) to build 1000’s of backlinks very quickly.

A couple years back, they used to simply point the links to a new domain and google would rank it accordingly. These days, things are a lot different and a huge surge of thousands of backlinks going to an obscure or new site is a big fat red flag which will cause google to deindex the page.

Black hat marketers are smart though. They figured out that while sending 1,000’s of crappy backlinks to a new site would get the ban hammer, sending them to sites that were already trusted by google would get different results.

So, rather than going out and buying throw away domains, they instead used forum profiles from trusted sites to rank quickly for competitive keywords. And as I am speaking right now, at this very moment, it works for niches that are heavy with spam marketers, like prescription drugs.

But, what would happen if you used the same methods for trusted sites that internet marketers use? You know, like ezine articles or hubpages?

Would you get the same results?

Would your page skyrocket up to number one simply from shoddy forum backlinks?

I did this with one of my hubpages that was ranking on the second page. The page was a PR2 and already had a few internal links going to it. It gets roughly 50 visits a day, most from organic search.

I put in an order for 10,000 backlinks with a black hat marketer. He was going to use xrumer and I wanted to see if it would fall from the rankings (it was page 2), get deindexed or banned, or climb in the rankings.

What do you think happened?

Well, 2 months later and it has yet to get deindexed or banned. It hasn’t lost pagerank either. However, it has dropped like a rock from the rankings for the primary keyword. Interestingly enough, traffic has actually picked up marginally (it is averaging 100 visits a day) despite losing the ranking.

Oh, and out of the 10,000 links, only 134 have been indexed. Now this test is far from over and as each day passes, I should pick up more backlinks as google finds them. I could also wake up in 6 months to discover that I am number 1 for the primary keyword as well.

The reason why I even decided to do this was because I have noticed that there are some eza articles that are doing this on the primary tier or the secondary tiers of their backlinking strategy and staying way out on top of the market.

Speaking of parasitic hosts, Ezine Articles still easily outranks hubpages and infobarrel coming out of the gate for whatever reason. Google loves them almost to the point where I think they have a stake in the company or something because I have seen some pretty shoddy articles on that site that my 2 year old could probably have written better.

Hubpage and Infobarrel update

I have stopped creating hubpages and infobarrels and refocused my efforts on my websites. A couple months back, I asked the question could someone with very little knowledge of the internet make money with adsense by simply creating swarms of content? Well, 2 months and nearly 160 properties later and I can verify it. While I won’t get into the actual numbers, I will say this- Last month’s adsense check for infobarrel and hubpages was right under $1,400. This month looks to be the same despite the fact that my traffic has dropped a bit (I am getting higher CPC at this point).

I have read a couple forums where there are claims of a hubpage slap. My traffic has gone down a bit but like I said, the money hasn’t.

Infobarrel, on the other hand, is finally outpacing hubpages in views but the CTR is terrible, something I wish that the admins over there would fix. If you guys are reading this…please…for the love of god….take a page out of hubpages and clean up your site a bit…..pretty please?

Hubpages, infobarrel……they shouldn’t be used as a means to end though. All of these parasitic hosts that ad share, while some are great for the potential cash flow, are better used to test long tail traffic when you are considering building a full fledged site OR for the potential link funnel. In fact, if any site has the potential of ranking high coming out of the gate on the back of their trustrank, you should be dropping links to your main site. But then again, most of you know this already. More on that in a second though…..

The Link Wheel? Why you should use it with caution…..

The newest internet marketing strategy on the block is something known as the link wheel. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is pretty much a link scheme in which you use several sites to index all of your properties. Most use them on forum profiles because they are kind of out of the site of the forum administrators and visitors.

The premise is that you sign up with a forum that is dofollow and that has page rank. On your profile, you simply add a little relevant text to your niche with your anchored keyword. The relevant text changes the theme of the site. In other words, you can make an auto forum profile page relevant simply by connecting your niche topic with autos. It is called topical theme vectoring in case you are wondering.

Then, as you build up more forum accounts and keywords, you simply link all the forums up with each other with the prospective anchored keywords.

I have seen some link wheels with hundreds of backlinks on the profile. Currently it works.

Now, for the 1 million dollar question- Should you use a linkwheel to game the search engines?

Here is the issue…..you are going to have to fight several things when building a link wheel. An over zealous forum admin will drop your account quicker than I can say black hat if they discover your spammy profile. Some may even do it if you aren’t using a link wheel but are simply using it for a crap backlink. And given the fact that you have some people that are currently selling backlink packages to hundreds of people en masse, a webmaster is going to notice pretty quickly and wonder why he/she is suddenly getting hundreds of new sign-ups a day.

Then there is the google problem. Currently a link wheel works. But it is a short term solution and if you are trying to build a website that can stand the test of time (which you should be doing), then little “fads” like this will eventually be devalued in the grand scheme of things by google.

Make no bones about it. The link wheel is black hat and most black hats could care less if it goes away tomorrow. They are in it for the short haul and will move on to a new scheme to game google for the short haul. If you are trying to build a site that lasts, it is something that you should definitely not hang your hopes on.

Just something to think about.

A better approach to getting building backlinks is to simply either grab links that are freely available from your top 20 competitors OR broker them out. That way they are about as clean as you can get and while you are still gaming the system, there is very little chance for all your work to disappear overnight because some forum admin figures out what you are doing….

Google’s Sandbox…Why does anyone really care?

I read in forums how people are crying over getting parts of their site or pages sandboxed weekly. It seems like people can’t stand the idea of losing ranking for a period of time and as a result many folks who teach backlink strategies all advocate backlinking slowly at first. But I really want to know….who really cares?

Getting sandboxed may suck but it ain’t forever. And usually, when you come out of the sandbox, your rankings are very good…..much better than they were before. So, if you ask me, I would say that if you get sandboxed, keep doing what you have been doing….pump out more content and see what happens once the dust settles.

Come on, folks….it isn’t like it is the end of the world. Your rankings will be greatly improved in most cases on the other side. Just continue on as if it hasn’t happened.

Do-Follow/No-Follow

Another thing that kind of gets to me is when people complain that so-and-so doesn’t pass link juice so therefore it isn’t worth it to drop a link. These people get so consumed with the prospect of building links that they forget that links build traffic as well.

Look….in a perfect world, all links would be followed. But they aren’t. And to be perfectly frank with you, the “dofollow” backlinks that are freely available for anyone aren’t worth much and won’t help you as much as you think for ranking purposes. After all, if anyone can serve up for themselves an easy backlink sans the work, why wouldn’t it get devalued? Just something to chew on though.

At the risk of sounding crotchety or cranky, what do follow backlink hunters miss (and what internet marketers understand) is that a link can also be used as a traffic funnel. And considering that you can rank for a semi-competitive keyword coming out of the gate on a trusted site, why wouldn’t you take it even if the link was no-followed?

What would you rather have?…..

• A backlink that is followed that is solely there for getting ranked BUT you would need hundreds of them to rank? ie. digg

OR

• A backlink from a site that could reach a #1 ranking and in which you would share the traffic with? ie. zimbio

Don’t get me wrong….do followed cheap backlinks have their place but your main goal is to get traffic to your site, right? Use the parasitic hosts that can rank easily EVEN if they are no follow. In the end, the worst case scenario is that you get the page ranked and you get trickles of traffic pointing to your site. The best case?…..you get two or more listings on the front page all pointing back to your site a la Howie Shwartz.

Well, I was going to write a little more but really need to get back to doing what really makes me money…and this blog ain’t it. So until next time….I wish you godspeed in your internet marketing endeavors.

Advanced Link Building Techniques the Black Hat Way