I alluded to this concept in a previous post on whether on not you should build backlinks to Exact Match Domains and it’s part of some ongoing tests I’ve been doing.
Unique content is good and GOOD unique content is better, but not by much except for when it comes to visitor experience and reading value.
Unique content - yea, many people can say how their autoblogs are rocking just by pulling in article directories’ articles base don keywords selection, but in my opinion and experience, those sites rarely tend to rank tops with syndicated content, at least not for anything besides long tail traffic.
Is your site content unique? If it is, you might want to double check that because if you don’t get backlinks to each and every piece of content on your site as soon as it’s published, you’re now in the unenviable position of having to copyscape-proof, or unique-proof your sites to see if any site scrapers beat you to the punch and are deemed by the search engines are the first server originator of that content.
Good unique content - the search engines can’t differentiate between good content and bad, as I alluded to Why LSI for rankings needs to be a gamed thing
Good content is non spun readable content like you’re reading now, content that serves the main purpose of educating readers and trying to offer value (sic), and the better the human perception is of the content the better your click through rates will be, the better your average time spent on site stats will be, and there is also the increased chance of actually getting a new fan or reader to your site, which then leads to increased mailing list rolls, increased RSS readership rolls, increased social sharing (Tweets, likes, bookmarks etc…).
Unique content versus good unique content, how where, why and when to use this?
If you really don’t give a crap about your readers, aren’t passionate about your topic and just wanna build out your sites with content sewage to serve your site some food to offer the search engine spiders, then unique content is all you need, but when do you offer sewage, and when do you offer quality content?
Why bother writing a thesis on a topic when Google doesn’t know how to tell the difference, algorithmically between good unique content and unique content?
It depends on what your business model is…
Affiliate marketing driven sites need some babysitting of content because calls to action rely on some degree of proficiency with seo copywriting, which means you need to massage the content to make sense, but you still don’t always need to offer thesis-like value to your site, just enough readability to get readership or visitors to notice an affiliate link, or a banner or something.
Adsense sites - Adsense publishers are in the content provision business, meaning that their focus is on getting traffic, conversions and clicks, via high CTR methods, which has more to do with Adsense ads placement than it does with quality of site content.
However, with sites whose primary monetization is Adsense, there can be some downgrading of content, or rather…there can be a lower level quality of content on site that will serve to increase the CTR. People search the internet for information, and usually are in search of solutions to problems, so if you have a site primarily monetized with Adsense, then NOT offering the solution via your site content leads to higher CTR on Adsense ads, however you’re also passing up some chances at making sales via CPA, affiliate offers, Clickbank etc… by not massaging your content to be more value-adding and/or more prone to clicking on ads that pay more via affiliate sales.
Flagship sites - this is where you have a site that’s really important to you, and you work on this site almost daily, and you actually do care about providing visitor value content and want to offer the best content you can. In the flagship scenario, you need good unique content no ifs ands or buts about it, you need to write from the heart, you shouldn’t focus on keyword search volumes, or other stuff that has nothing to do with the fact that you’re writing for an audience that consists of people, human eyeballs and not search engines machine like spiders.
But enough about that, I think I digressed a little too much there, but hopefully that clears up what kind of unique content to write and when.
Now, on to some stuff I wanted to share, the meat and potatoes of my original intent for writing this post ( aside from feeding my blogging addiction).
Old school SEO tricks for getting more targeted traffic to your sites.
This isn’t really a trick, but more of a rarely talked about method for improving a site’s traffic easily, normally, and in a white-hat manner.
Site stats software can tell us where we rank for certain terms, and how many people found our sites for certain search queries, and also what page of our sites they landed on after entering in a particular search term.
How’s this useful to us, the site owners?
Because it we find out that we’re ranking for a search term that wasn’t really part of our focus for a particular content piece, AND we’re page 1 for that term, or even page 2, then we know that we can easily modify the site content found for that url in order to rank higher for it.
Being page 1, ranked #1 for a long tail search term can and will bring in more traffic than that mega-high, uber-competitive search term that you’re page 3 for, let’s say…
Many proficient Adsense earners who realize they are indeed in the content publishing business focus on the long tail traffic because it’s easier to rank for, especially when you have a big site getting spidered all the time, and this big site getting spidered all the time becomes more and more trusted by the search engines.
15 or 20 number 1 rankings for long tail traffic search terms have proven to be enough traffic for these site owners to enjoy a steady income from their sites, therefore if you can find a way to ascertain what long tail keywords you’re “accidentally” ranking for, then make a few on-page adjustments to offer up better optimized content to warrant, and deserve a higher ranking, then doing just that will increase your site traffic.
So exactly WTF am I talking about here, how to figure this out, what to do, how to measure it?
Use some site stats software to ascertain what keywords your sites being found for, use cpanel’s AWSTATS, or some other tracking software for this, but here’s the thing… some stats software won’t tell you real time what keywords you’re being found for unless you tell it what to track, and what we’re talking about here is doing something called retroactive keyword research.
Retroactive keyword research -
A little known fact about keyword research and search behavior in particular is… the way people search changes over time. does anybody still type in how to make 5 grand a month or do they type in how to make 5k a month?
Language, idiom, vernaculars change as people change and doing real time keyword research and site traffic assessment is key to staying on top of, and cornering all the long tail traffic you can, which is why you should try to implement something to take advantage of ever-changing search query patterns.
So you publish content, you tag it with some focus keywords (keywords you want content to rank for) and then you wait and see what it gets found for by searchers.
Yes, there’s some plugins that do this for you, so if you have WordPress sites then you’re in luck, but I’m sure there’s plenty of 3d party software that can do the same thing I’m about to describe in the following ramblings…
Search Terms Tagging 2.0 plugin - free WordPress plugin that will tell you what incoming search terms brought people to each and every url , IF that url is actually getting any search traffic, and if you don’t have any search traffic coming to that url, this plugin will auto-promote that post or page by “re-publishing it” by putting it on front page of website to ensure that the search engine spiders find it again, and this does work well, especially if your site has some Page Rank to it, because then then auto promoted url is on the front page of a site with PR, and this will boos tit in the SERPs automatically, either by getting it re-indexed if it wasn’t already, or merely by hosting it temporarily on the front page of your PageRanked blog, and front pages of sites are the most heavily spidered, therefore you’re virtually guaranteed to get that post re-indexed, if it is still deemed the first server originator of that content.
First server originator of content? Yea, start back at the top of this post if I lost you at this point in my ramblings…
So, how exactly to use a plugin like Search Terms Tagging 2.0 (A.K.A> STT 2.0) to boost your long tail traffic by increasing rankings for certain content pieces on your site?
#1- STT2.0 will display on your sit,e if you so desire…the search terms that brought people to that url, thereby adding those keywords (search terms) to that page, and while this might seem like keyword stuffing or lead to a propensity of over-tagging your content, STT2.0 also have a limit on how many search terms it will display on each url.
#2- STT 2.0 also has the ability to ignore search terms that get less than XX # of visitors which is cool too but it’s best to put this value at 1 until as such time as you can rank your content to be found for more search terms and keyword
#3- Using STT 2,0 I discovered that my site was being found for a very low volume and obscure search term (outsource AMR). This obscure low volume search term won’t bring my site a ton more traffic due to its low search volume but it’s also very targeted search query that prone to good conversions if I had something to offer that person searching for that term.
#4- I was at the bottom of page 1 for the aforementioned term with an indexed blog comment (maybe i will share that tip with you someday on how a site that has lots of comments can be deemed a much larger site than it really is by having all the comments indexed, and keyword optimized), and I decided to throw some low quality links at the url that was ranking for obscure query and lo and behold the site rose up to the top 3 on page 1, but I also did some on page optimization to deserve the higher rankings for that url, which is really one of the main points to this post.
Using web stats tracking software or STT 2.0 effectively (or any other plugin that does the same thing….)
- Ascertain what CURRENT search queries are bringing visitors to your specific urls
- Ascertain current rankings
- Determine whether or not you “deserve” that ranking or if its accidental. If you deserve the ranking, don’t do anything else here, except maybe consider adding a cal to action if its a money term, but if you rank for it due to having SOME of the word son the page, then read the next lines.
- Add a new section of content geared towards this specific search phrase, and its keywords and include the in your content whether it be in a new section or merely added in throughout entire content piece. In other words, if you want to rank in top 4 for this long tail term instead of wherever it is you’re currently ranking, incorporate those words into that particular url or add a new section focusing on that. Add a few new anchor-texted backinks to this url using the long tail keywords and phrases as the anchor text and grab that top ranked long tail ranking.
(dang, I should have just made a video on how to do this, this post is taking forever to write!).
OK, does this retroactive keyword research thing work?
Yes, it works well and it helps build traffic to your sites, and one of the best ways to build a trusted site is to have lots of top ranked urls getting traffic, and it doesn’t really matter how much volume is behind those keywords, just as long as the spiders and visitors keep finding you there at #1 or close to it.
If a search term or keyword phrase actually has a decent amount of volume behind it (you be the judge here) then you could for extra credit, and traffic… write a new content piece targeting that particular term, then link to it amidst anchor text on the first url on your site that was getting found for that term.
For example, using the search term example (outsource AMR) referred to earlier, if I had a service of my own that could handle that need, desire… and there was enough volume behind the query to justify writing a new post dedicated towards that phrase, then I would do so, and would probably end up with double listings for that term in a heartbeat, due to already having a top ranked url for that phrase, and also having the ability to get a link form my top ranked url for that term towards a new dedicate content piece whose sole focus is to rank for that term, and not accidentally.
Summary of Part 1 (Yes this is a long post)
- Content tweaking and modification can be done to increase rankings and the subsequent traffic flow if there’s any search volume to be had via increased rankings for long tail terms and queries.
- On page optimization is more important than ever before, so watch this closely, and try to get into more details about what your site is getting found for without much effort (accidental rankings)
- Smart keyword research is an ongoing thing, not something you do once only before you build a site, so don’t whip out your copy of Market Samurai, or Microniche finder or whatever keyword tool you use, garner a list of keywords you wanna try and rank for, then go work on a keywords list for your site content. doing that in the beginning is fine and all, but search behavior changes and all sites behave differently, so use retroactive keyword research methods to work on your sites’ strengths in order to see more results (traffic, rankings) sooner rather than later.
Part 2, Why Content and more of it is working well now for sites suffering post-Panda…
After Panda and whatever other algorithm updates have hit a lot of webmasters, I took a look at some sites that got hit, and tested out a few things on half of them.
Half the sites I left alone, didn’t add any content to them and left my automated linking systems in place
The other half I broke up into 2 categories (frequent updates, and occasional updates) for adding new content.
All sites had same old automated linking mechanisms working on them
The sites I didn’t add content to started dying slowly in the SERPs.
The sites I updated occasionally would do an upward dance in SERPs for a few days after new content was added, then would revert back to previous rankings points, but sometimes they settled at one spot higher than before the new content additions to site.
The frequently updated sites fell into another 2 categories, in regard to their rankings behavior as new content was added.
Half of the frequently updated sites started Google Dancing and are still bouncing around in the SERPs. I attribute this to the fact that
I “refreshed” my site, and made search engines aware of my site again, and when they came back to take a look they didn’t like what they saw
or
New content added to the front page of these blogs, altered the overall home page SEO of the site because some older posts fell off the front page and maybe those posts that fell off the front page had some keyword sin them related to the main keywords of the site, therefore the home page rankings were affected.
The second half of the sites with frequently added content rose in the SERPs slightly, but in cases where the site were ranked pretty well for decent search terms that are competitive, not much upward STABLE movement has been experienced.
Part 2 summary - More content means more chances for long tail traffic, which begets a more trusted site, with leads to more “love” from the search engines, plus it means more chances for site interlinking, which will prove beneficial once site is trusted in the first place.
- Implement retroactive keyword research processes
- Add more content to your site
- Link up everything new you publish, or modify
- Be smart about cross linking on site between content pieces, and don’t overdo it
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{ 57 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the long writeup. Very few of us actually test what’s working and not working.
Just to dig in a bit deeper into your testing… Could you attribute the various old link building strategies (profile/high pr/comment/2.0/etc) to the rise/fall of the sites? In other words, a site that you had ranked previously using X fared better when making regular content additions.
I think this means scary good things for autobloggers out there. Scrape, spin, post, backlink your way to the top.
Hi Justin, just the opposite actually… auto-bloggers got decent temporary traffic spikes during recent algo changes, but these algo changes were meant to serve original content sources, and protect them from who didn’t properly attribute their “borrowed” content, but I hardly see that type of penalty taking place. So maybe the algos are working differently than claimed, wouldn’t that be a surprise, but point here is, if you want to ensure that autobloggers don’t outrank your content, but get it indexed and get links to is ASAP upon publication. In my opinion the search engines are getting better at attributing original sources of content now.
Part of this might even have to do with their increased ability to detect non-unique (read” spun not well) content, which is why it’s harder and harder to get 100s of indexed backlinks from article submissions using spun content.
NOTE: I’m uncomfortable pontificating about autoblogs and autobloggers since I don’t have any so I really can’t say firsthand how they’ve been affected or how they’re ranking but I do have buddies with these kinds of site son autopilot and their traffic went up when Panda slammed some sites out of the SERPs, but these autoblogs don’t rank for any really competitive terms, they just re-publish content and use tools like WPUNIQUE or uniqifier and those still seem to do an ok job form what I hear…
Good points Dan,
Strangly enough after panda, I am finding site size to be more important in relation to the number of incoming links (havent done enough testing, just an observation so far).
Small sites that you used to be able to throw a bunch of links at and get ranking are now not responding as well unless hey have a decent amount of pages.
Whats your take on indexing tag pages? I have seen varying results and haven’t seen any clear data that indicates one way or another.
Hey Samuel, good to see you back here.
I think indexing tag pages should come naturally, especially for newer sites, but I would not spend any time doing it, or devoting any time towards that end, since the more content you add to the site, the more frequently the spiders will come, thereby increasing chances of getting these indexed tags found.
But so what is these tags get found? We want content pages to be found really, because a tag page doesn’t have a lot of content on it, therefore it will probably rank on pages 2 and below, and if it’s that’s important to rank for that tagged term, then use the methods I outlined in this post to see if it’s worth doing, ranking for, then just going ahead and ranking fo rthat term via new on-site tweaking of content
Auto bloggers don’t realize that simply “spinning” content by replacing the synonyms doesn’t fool the search engines long term, there might be a temporary bump, but Google is able to figure that type of spinning out and that is why Auto blogs (the way they are currently being done) aren’t going to last to much longer.
The point is that doing linking alone isn’t enough, adding new content is good, but constant new good content with the right type of links are appropriate.
@articlesearchenginemarketing.com … I disagree with google figuring out the spun content. For instance, search for “solar panel” or “solar panels” … extremely competitive keyword and solarhome.org ranks #1 or #2 under wikipedia.
How did they get there?
http://www.njcleanpower.com/
http://www.planetbiodiesel.org/
http://www.aquasolar.com/
And about 200 more spun sites just like it. All are little mini websites that are fully spun out, almost exactly duplicate with same links but spun content. solarhome.org been ranked #1 for longer than I can remember, and Panda didn’t do squat to them.
So you want to rank #1 for 250,000 exact match keyword? solution, spin spin spin your little butt off, google has no clue.
If you can’t beat em, join em … I’m currently writing software to duplicate what they’ve done far better than they’ve done it.
Kevin, that’s a good example of the mini-nets strategy there, albeit with spun content, also might have something to do with having close to 4k YSE links to home page url, and almost 6k to entire site, according to YSE. either way, good job with the semi-EMD mini-nets, solid work there
As Dan points out tons of links to those sites already, but if a site with original content becomes competitive link wise, and is fully new and unique it will out rank those sites. Additionally, just because it hasn’t been “caught yet” doesn’t mean it won’t.
I am not saying spun can’t work, it still does, but Google has already started to catch on and they will continue too. There are some spinning techniques that can be extremely hard to use a mathematical formula to figure out an article has been spun. But articles that merely replace synonyms is a very easy one to see, figure out, and track. As we have seen the last few months the things that people “got away with” applies differently.
During a recent conversation with a business relationship expert she made a very interesting and thought provoking statement, why spend all this time pretending to build relationships when you could be spending the same time building up relationships and getting links that Google will penalize or hurt you with when new large algorithm changes occur.
I was able to show that it is still important to do SEO link building, but only while the relationship building gets into full swing, so that your site can be competitive short term (that is what Grey and black hat are best used for), because the relationship building is the real long term “link building” strategy.
I quite like the idea of ranking for 15-20 (or more) longtail keywords, rather than spending months trying to rank for a competitive term that gets more searches.
Currently, I’m focusing more on a latter and it’s definitely taking a lot of time/effort, while you get almost no results due to low rankings.
The good thing about low volume longtails is that you can get ranked for them pretty quickly and the traffic will slowly build up as you get to #1 for more and more terms, meaning you will be earning something while still improving your site.
In the competitive keyword scenario, you earn nothing for many months and have to be VERY patient before you get to the top spots…
Food for thought.
How much more traffic do you get from using Search Terms Tagging 2.0 plugin? 20% or 100% more?
Won’t all of those tags on the blog post make it look unappealing and turn off any potential customers?
Making a few distinctions — auto blogging was grouped with spinning, and from that association, spinning was shot down as a concept.
Most auto blogging has mostly to do with scraping other people’s content, and then (if there is 100% software auto generated spinning involved) it is true the end product is quite horrid, would not pass a manual inspection by Google, and would crash and burn miserably by the time the blog hit profitability.
Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, quality spinning is the key concept behind at least one multi-million dollar operation (the one referenced above). If you want investigate their backlinks to reverse engineer their success and discount the over-200 PR3 and PR4 spun mini-sites, and tell me that has nothing to do with it, its no skin off my teeth.
The Panda update just spanked websites with various quantities of duplicate content. Logic would dictate that, if anything, that should open the way to quality spun content as being even more effective.
I personally don’t give Google the credit for being able to distinguish (by algorithm) two articles that are 70% similar, grammatically correct and human readable, and show the original one as a SERP result and stick the 2nd one into supplemental as being a duplicate of the first — not now or anytime in the next decade.
Got more to say but will make a 2nd reply for it hehe.
@articlemarketing … you had lots to say about the best way to develop a website. Depending on the type of website you’re talking about, you’re correct (but even then, there is more than one way to get to #1).
For instance — if I have a teach-people-SEO blog, it is a complete no-brainer, relationships all the way. Why? SEO’s actually blog. If you have something good to say, it’ll reverberate around the interweb at light speed. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of eager-beaver SEO websites just itching to pick up the latest tidbit of ranking ingenuity and rehash it with a faithful backlink back to your site — because as professional SEO’s they know that is what they’re supposed to do.
But — what about an adult website? (hears crickets chirping) What about a product website? (Creak creak creak). What about the above #1 example of a website that just features nothing but solar panels for sale. Is being personable and building relationships going to get anyone over 200 homepage links from PR3 and PR4 solar-panel related websites? I don’t think so.
When you’re dealing with anything that can generate traffic for adsense, sure build relationships. When you’re directly selling products — and the top websites out there who you want links from are all your competitors — building relationships is not the way to go in my opinion.
PS Daniel, I wanted to comment on your LSI post, but for some odd reason I can’t seem to comment there, so here it is …
Google tells you exactly what their LSI conclusions are in their keyword tool. When you use their keyword tool, they give you related keywords. For instance, if you search for “Bangus”, it returns “MilkFish” as the #1 related term — how? Because Bangus and Milk Fish are two words for the same thing. But, how does Google know that it is a related term? Quite simple — the milkfish keyword turned up the most times on the most popular pages that ranked #1 for bangus.
When I want to write any article, I go to google keyword tool and type the keyword in, and then I take the top 20 “related” terms and work it into the copy.
You wanted to write a LSI review article based on “Backlinks Genie”.
Before I discuss the LSI terms, and before I even look at the Google results, I already know what the top pages are going to show. Backlinks Genie has an affiliate program. That means that all the top pages for Backlinks Genie are all going to be telling you how much money you can make and how many backlinks you can get with Backlinks Genie (a sales promotion landing page).
So here are the actual top related LSI terms according to Google’s keyword tool …
backlinks software
buy backlinks
quality backlinks
get backlinks
seo backlinks
build backlinks
one way backlinks
backlink software
backlinks forum
how to get backlinks
cheap backlinks
backlink building
getting backlinks
find backlinks
high quality backlinks
anchor text backlinks
high pr backlinks
backlink service
free backlinks
backlink services
In google’s eyes, the most reputable pages on the internet which discuss Backlinks Genie have the above terms in them. Those are Google’s LSI conclusions.
I just read your Backlink Genie review — it doesn’t reference any of the above terms in your copy. So although you have a quality article, it is not written at all for LSI advantage.
Kevin, the comment got eaten by Akismet due to being so long, you’re not banned or being blocked or anything and I welcome your input…
Building a relationship is more than just with your customers. You can build relationship with other sites in the same niche or related subjects or niches. So let’s use your examples:
Adult Websites can build relationships with their viewers/readers, not going to get into it, but they can with their viewers/readership. They also can build relationship with other sites, they can build relationship with “adult toys” they can also build relationship with dating relationship sites (related niche) etc.
Product websites can build relationships with their customers. They do it through newsletters, through participating on niche/product specific forums and blogs. They can also participate in blogs and forums of competitors.
The example of the solar panels is easy. There are tons of sites dedicated to our environment and alternative forms of energy. Building a relationship on these types of blogs seems like a no brainier to me. You don’t have to get “links” from just solar panel sites. That is simply just silly. Related niches are just important to SEO as are the exact niche.
Building relationships is a very important part of business in general, and it relates to SEO as well.
@article … here’s my biggest problems with the “make personal relationships” approach.
#1) Completely non-scalable.
#2) You are fully putting your success at the whim of other people.
#3) Your approach makes you a salesman. If you’re going to be a salesman anyways — real salesman who are selling physical products in a show room would make more money than being an internet marketer in most cases (if you really feel like being a salesman). Then again, being a doctor is also great money (not that any of that is that related to internet marketing).
#4) Some of the biggest social people out there didn’t hit success through being social. Take for instance shoemoney. Yeah he’s a cool guy, has a popular website. We’ve all seen his $70k+ adsense check. But if you read the nitty gritty and the stuff he doesn’t really go into detail about, he’s a big time scripter and he makes the most of his money exploiting the living poo out of exploitable systems (be it PPC arbitrage or farming backlinks to game Google).
#5) There’s already so many automated software that solicit one-way backlinks from competitor sites out there, scraped from whois databases, that by the time you’ve emailed the website you want a link from — they barely know if you’re a real person or a bot. Having this hurdle to jump over every time is akin to knocking on someone’s door to make friends and having “jehova’s witness” stamped on your forehead.
#6) Begging for backlinks to me feels cheesy and though I may do it if its the right niche, most niches are not the right niche.
#7) Your domain is “articlesearchenginemarketing.com”. Article search engine marketing can be summed up as trying to game google’s serps by posting articles that few people will ever read, in the hopes that the link juice generated by the articles will make your website #1, with a minor side benefit that sometimes you get direct sales from the article itself. That concept is like at the other end of the spectrum of just focusing on personal relationships — sorry just keeping it real :p
#8) This is a blog on SEO, with an emphasis on tools for automation to make internet marketing easier. Most people that come here are looking for that.
#9) I’m afraid if I did it your way, I would go bald from ripping my hair out by everyone ranking above me who are doing xrumer blasts on their spun articles.
I could go on and on, but I’m afraid this comment might get too long and won’t show.
I think you corrected yourself in another thread of this blog when you said:
“Now the articlesearchenginemarketing.com guy can laugh at me for networking an adult site lol. Maybe he does have a point (I’ll readily admit when I’m wrong, only thing I care about is making money lol, there’s no paycheck that comes along with pride).”
I didn’t laugh when I read it, just smiled.
#9 of your comments above “use” to be true xrumer profile blasts are no longer effective even on spun articles. I am not saying not to get back links to your articles, I am just saying profile links are extremely ineffecient and have very little SEO effect on the articles. My expertise is in getting articles to become authority in the eyes of Google. There are far more effective ways to do this.
The most effecient thing in SEO these days is a mix of White Hat and Grey Hat. I do both, for my SEO clients I do new and unique articles published to the top 50 article directories (ranked by alexa/traffic rankings). We then build tons of “links” back to each article. How I do that, well my clients know.
The other thing I have found effective is private blog content networks that limit the amount of people in it (nothing like, link boss, UAW, BMR, or BLG) but private blog content networks that do SEO to each blog and ensure they are still quality. I know one that will be opening up soon as well.
If your strategy is completely white hat, links directly to your site, and you do quality Grey Hat links to your back links, you will be very effective. This of course includes doing 100% on-site optimization of each page on the site.
This is an interesting post for me because earlier today, I decided to dig into the Analytics results for a page on my site that has seen an *increase* in traffic since Feb 24th (Panda v 1.0).
I decided to the following:
1. I made a list of all the WORDS in all the top 100 most often searched keywords for this page. (Removed dupes and stop words and about 15 misspellings). That left me with 31 words.
2. I plugged my url into the GAKT and took the top 50 keywords and did the same exercise. That left me with 32 words.
3. I merged the lists and de-duped them. I now have 52 unique words that have a high probability of being related to my page.
4. Next step is to add content to my page so that I can integrate as many of the 52 words that I am missing from the content and check the results.
Btw, all of this took me maybe 15 mins to do.
Glen.
Hey Dan and everyone else,
I’ve been working on a site that falls into the flagship category, but also is uses affiliate marketing: alluserreviews.com. I have been working hard to create the most helpful site possible for those looking for the best workout supplement products by aggregating user reviews.
The content comes mainly from reviews that are scraped from Amazon (sources are cited) as well as embedded YouTube videos.
I have been using LinxBoss and BuildMyRank for a few months to try and rank the site for certain keywords. Got first page within two weeks, then got slapped to the bottom. It’s been 3 months and my rankings have yet to get past position #100 even for my brand name. I’m not sure if it’s because of my link building, duplicate content, or affiliate links.
Am I screwed right off the bat because my content is not unique? Do you think I should create separate pages with only unique text and try to rank those pages instead? I’ve been talking with a lot of people and everyone has a different explanation on what the cause is. Anyone who can help me out, it would be greatly appreciated.
A page of only duplicate content is bad. A page that has a portion of duplicate content is not bad.
What I would do if I were you, is take a product with for example 8 product reviews. Include the 8 reviews at the bottom of the page. Preface the reviews with your own summary of what everyone said, a good 300 or 400 word article which represents the pros and the cons everyone mentions in their reviews. Then after you have given your lead-in which is unique content, go ahead and list the actual reviews.
I agree with Kevin here.
If your whole site is duplicate content, then you should go back and do your own review and have at least 300 words (I still suggest 500).
If you don’t know the product well enough then you shouldn’t do a review on it. I was once showing a writer (I was thinking about hiring) that I could write a 500 word article on Unsecured Business Loans in 5 minutes. I was able to finish the article in a little less than 5 minutes, (1) I type over 100 words per minute (2) I knew the topic well enough to pull it out of my head. If your running a review site, don’t just take other peoples review, write your own.
Just like our good friend Dan does. He doesn’t just take someone elses review or opinion he writes his experiences down. Sometime he may not have time to review a product, and he gets someone else to review it, and he gives them credit.
Well written fresh and unique content is very important for all your onsite content, and any content linking back to your site.
Thanks for the advice Kevin.
With over 700 products, it will be a huge feat to summarize every product with no guarantees that it will make the difference I need in the SERPs. I eventually plan on allowing users to post their own reviews on the site so it can generate unique content on its own, though that will be a slow process.
I think I’m going to create separate inner pages with only unique content that simply talks about each category (ie: protein powder and build links for “best protein powder”).
So you are reviewing over 700 products? Wow, that would be a lot of work. It can be done, properly, but you might want create a list of all the products starting with what you know down to what you don’t. Start writing reviews for the ones you don’t know. When you get to the ones you don’t, do some research, and then write a review off of what you do.
Hey man,
The concept of the site is a little different than that. It’s not meant to be like a blog format where I personally review a ton of products. I want it to be seen as more of a tool that allows you to figure out the best product according to the overall weighted score of everyone who has tried it. My scripts collect the ratings of each product from several websites, aggregates them, then gives out a overall percentage based on all 5 or so sites and lists in order of highest rated. The text reviews and videos reviews are listed in order of most helpful and highest percentage of YouTube likes. Since they’re scripts, the data stays fresh. So it’s more like a tool that allows you to find the best products in a given category and the most helpful reviews for those products based the collective people who have actually tried it. Haha I hope I didn’t loose anyone there.
With that said, you’re right. I definitely do need to make room for unique content. I’m just hoping I can do it in a scalable way.
Right, that’s not a bad idea, and sor tof what I was suggesting by having 100% unique pieces on the site. the unique content can bring in some traffic, the longer articles can rank fo rmore terms, then you can redirect your traffic to the reviews.
You might also consider doing something to insert unique content to each post before during and after the content in an automated way by writing a blurb for a category that goes before the content in category X, then a mid-post/article blurb, then end of post/article blurb.
My plugin will do this for wordpress sites.
Lemme know if you need this explained further (how to utilize the plugin to add unique content to each post on a per category basis),
Dan
Awesome. I’m definitely going to try out the unique content approach on alternate pages.
Unfortunately it’s not a WordPress site. I’ve written scripts that go out and update all the ratings and reviews for each product and run it through a database so it’s all custom built.
Got several comments to make.
#1) If your website scrapes data from several websites for prices including amazon, good luck because you’ll need it. If you pick 700 products off amazon I hope your script is prepared to deal with the high percentage of products that get dropped every week and can automatically pick similar products all on its own, and what are you going to do when there are no similar products? This is one of the things I hate about amazon, you pick a product and do a review and tomorrow that product went poof (but popped up again as a different product number that you have to hunt down). Heck, amazon can’t even keep their own astores accurate (they built in a “find broken product links” button right into the interface). That’s the problem when you’re dealing with thousands of sellers under one roof.
#2) If you don’t have the time to write good content for 700 products, how are you going to find the time to promote 700 products? For all the backlinking effort you’ll have to do to rank them all, writing good content is the easy part.
#3) It seems you’re shooting for quantity. You should be going for quality. The two gals here http://www.amazonianprofitplan.com/ they make about 10 grand a month with Google. They say that the majority of that money comes from just 10 product reviews. 10 product reviews = 10 grand a month. They took the time to do their 10 pages right on a competitive keyword, on a high ticket item. I’m not big into amazon but it works the same with other product sites of mine … I’ve got a 300 article product website and 4 of those pages give me 90% of the sales.
In summary, a 700 data scraped website, even if you can work out the logistics of products that get dropped, even if its useful … Google won’t love it if it doesn’t have unique content. You’re better off doing research on a small handful of products (those 2 gals pick 5 products at a time … promote them and then don’t move on until they’re making money with those 5 products), and then promoting them properly.
** when I said they make 10 grand a month off google, I mean they make 10 grand a month off amazon
Thanks for the constructive criticism Kevin.
In response to your comments:
#1) In the couple months I’ve had the site, I’ve only had a few products get dropped from Amazon. I tend to get products with at least 5 or more reviews (more popular) which decrease the drop likelihood. It’s not much of a setback because my scripts have 4 other sites to get ratings and 2 others to get affiliate links from. It’s not meant to rely solely on Amazon. Text reviews sourced from the other sites are in the works as well.
#2) My idea was to promote (build links) to the category pages that the products rely on instead of the actual product pages themselves. So for example, I’d try to rank the protein powder page for “best protein powder” through link building. Before my site got slapped, I was ranking on the first page for that term for two weeks and it was making enough to make the business model worthwhile if I could scale it right.
#3) I’m definitely shooting for quality for the site as whole. Making it more useful is my #1 concern, even before rankings, but I know rankings is the best way to get traffic. I want enough products on each page to cover at least 75% of the top selling products in each category so the users can research a product they’ve heard about.
My aim is to make this the most useful site possible when searching for the best products. That’s the overall concept. In most cases (especially for popular products), the most useful text review on Amazon will trump any review I could write myself. I feel that allowing the users to read several of helpful reviews from real users is more useful than reading an opinion from one person who calls himself an expert and is clearly trying to sell the product. Promoting a few products I test out and uniquely review myself will probably make me money quicker, but I’m trying to go long-term with this site and add enough features where it can’t help but to stand out.
Really hoping to figure out a clever way to get over the duplicate content issue. I’m going to try making a separate page for each category filled with unique content and see if that makes any difference.
Let me get this straight, you’re against doing the summary of the article reviews because if you do your own summary, that makes you the “expert” when that is against the whole concept of your website, where you want people to only rely on real reviews of other people, and not based on anything you have to say or your summary of what other people said?
You can do tons of stuff for unique content that doesn’t involve you rehashing other people’s comments. You can put the product stats and reword it into paragraph form. You can hunt down the manual for the product online and give some insight into the product that goes beyond anything listed in amazon. The “unique” portion of the page would then be a 300 to 400 word article explaining how powerful the motor is, how easy the parts are to replace, etc — just factual statements about the product but not in a review capacity. Then the reviews will come after your unique content.
Tony, Kevin’s reply is good advice.
Expend a little effort into making the pages more unique.
CMS-es have footprints, Auto Amazon review inserts have footprints…
Footprints aren’t always bad if you’re doing “good things” on your site,I want to be clear on that, but if you make your site different, sometimes that’s all you need to rank better and stand out from the crowd. Being deemed more unique than the rest is a good footprint, if you catch my drift.
It also doesn’t hurt to put up some lengthy 100$ unique content pieces that aren’t reviews but long-tail catchers, then use the long content piece to interlink to your reviews onsite
Thanks Dan.
I’ve heard that Google mainly focuses on just the page not the site as whole. I’m hoping this means that maybe just the pages are penalized but not the whole site. Would you think it would be wise to create separate page with only unique content with the purpose of pushing my visitors to my other pages with all the scraped review content?
Yes, please re-read my replies
Tony,
I have a site that I used an Amazon plugin for all of my content. Got it up and running and then began doing my own unique intro’s as Kevin noted above. I was using 350-450 words there. I was still leaving the Amazon scraped info after my unique content. I did this to the most opportune keywords. I then took the posts that had the most potential for top rankings and built an entire page of my own reviews and placed just an image with price and more details link of each product in there, using another plugin. Needless to say, that is when the site took off and is now one of my top earners. I have slowly replaced all of the content with my own unique content. I took all items that did not seem to have much potential, usually due to low searches or low prices, and 301 redirected all of those to my homepage. I am done with scraped content on my review sites and am fully convinced that the unique review content is what launched my site to the top of the SERPS. I should mention that I mix adsense on this site and that also prompted my initial switching to unique content which then proved to be a big win.
Jeff
Thanks for the comment Jeff.
Very interesting. I like your strategy of slowly switching it all to unique content. Seems like unique content is the way to go.
I want to add that my rankings did go from first page to past position 600 overnight so I’m hoping that Google will eventually forgive me. I really want to make this site all about the users. The fact that I rank #252 for my brand name (All User Reviews) has really got me worried because my homepage is at least 100% unique. I’m wondering if unique content will even be enough to change my site in Google’s eyes.
Which also makes you wonder, if Google only ranks pages, not entire sites, why did tons of dupe affect main url, in effect…the whole site?
Maybe it’s just a temp bounce back in SERPs, watch for a slow crawl back as you add new unique content to the site
That’s what scares me. I got slapped before actually having a ton of dupe content (back when my site mainly a list of affiliate links) which makes me wonder if it was too many links from LinxBoss on a new site or a thin affiliate penalty.
I put a reconsideration request to Google and they responded saying it was not a manual action taken by their spam team but strictly algorithmic … which doesn’t really help me at all. I’ve spent days trying to figure out if there’s a such thing as fixed length algorithmic penalties, but no luck.
Does anyone have any recommendations for find high quality article writers, at affordable prices? I’ve heard that a good article writer will cost you $7 – $10 per article…….but I was wondering if anyone knew a specific source.
http://www.articlesearchenginemarketing.com
The Content Authority has been a great resource for me lately. They have a few levels of quality and their pricing is based on this. They have a review time during which any article can be rewritten if you are not 100% satisfied and they have a completely automated system that makes the entire transaction go extremely smoothly. Note, i am not affiliated with this service in any way other than being a very satisfied customer.
Jeff
Thanks Jeff !
I’ve also heard http://www.textbroker.com/ was pretty good – have you ever used them?
Anyone else used them before?
Text broker is pretty good, decent quality and quick turn around
I second Textbroker – quick service, good quality (with different levels you can choose), using native speakers of English only. If you are happy paying over $10 for a decent article (I am) then it comes recommended.
Anyone have any ideas on paying $4 to $5 per article for a high quality article? I’ve heard Elance & Guru were two good places to try.
If you are planning to outsource to elance or one of those sites, some things to keep in mind:
a) start with a small project
b) don’t be afraid to try out 2 or 3 writers at first
c) ALWAYS check for plagiarism
d) be prepared for disappointment/rejects/firing writers
e) be as specific as possible in your project explanation but also indicate that complete details will only be given to selected candidates. Here is what I mean. Explain what you want, what you expect and when you expect it. For example, I need 10 articles of 600 words in length hand written by someone extremely fluent in English writing on the topic of ‘blue widgets’. I expect these 10 articles to be delivered in 5 days tops (including weekends). I will be checking for plagiarism and any copied or duplicated or spun content will not be paid for. Etc.
Then get examples from people, make your choice(s) and finally give the writer your writing guidelines. The more details you can give in your instructions, the closer you will get to receiving good quality. Last point is that templates and examples of content/style are also a great helper.
One time I did this the writer responded very quickly with my articles and commented how much easier it was to write for me because I knew exactly what I wanted and I gave her specific instructions to create it.
Glen.
Wow…..thanks for the advice Glen – the help is much appreciated !
Just out of idle interest, are all these Amazon reviews being displayed in iframes, as per Amazon’s TOS?
I’m of the opinion that Content + Links is KING. Daniel, this blog is proof of this fact. A lot of my current/past clients have just worked on the content part and have gotten “pretty good” results. This is probably a discussion for another post but the other C word, conversions, whether it be to sales, optins, or even comments is really the “Holy Grail”. One of my websites that I sold last year, had a two day stretch where I got over 12,000 visitors, but I was expecting it, so I was only able to get 35 subscribers from the traffic influx.
As far as where to get articles:
I’ve used NeedanArticle.com and I outsource to the Philippines. I have my assistant do the quality control. What I’ve found is that if you can find someone to outsource to, you can almost have everything running on autopilot because you don’t have to keep giving them assignment if you have them writing about one niche.
I LOVE what you’re doing here Daniel. I would like to interview you for a webinar that I do for my coaching clients.
Folusho, I’ll trade you webinar for webinar/interview…
I’m trying to help folks out here on this site with reviews, but as you probably know, some people are hard=pressed to fork over a couple of hundred a month in linking services, but if they pick good niches with higher ROI, then one sale, or 10 clicks, or whatever…. would pay for their site promotion/SEO.
So, what I would like to do is, do an interview with someone who is especially good at finding niches that can pay out well, and cover the costs of their ongoing SEO for that sites,and/or ALL their sites.
Warning, I ask a lot of questions and don’t go form a script, read the other interviews her eon this site and you will see what I mean.
Thanks,
Dan
Cool, that sounds good. Let’s schedule something. I do my webinars on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4pm PST, so just let me know which one you can make. I can do the interview/webinar for you on Wednesdays or Fridays, let me know which day works better. By the way, what plugin are you using to link the comments back to this post with the commentor’s name? Thanks.
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-super-comments
I will be in touch soon
Thanks,
Dan
Hey Dan,
Where have you been? Did the marathon go well? Haven’t seen or heard much from you recently.
My exact match domain was ranking on page one for the keyword in my domain even though I built no backlinks to it. Then I used article marketing robot to build links to it and now that site is not in the first 20 pages of google.com for that keyword. The site did not get deindexed. It just got severely penalized for that keyword. Can you tell me why this happened?
If it’s a new site…….it may have been sandboxed, but I’ve heard this is normal for new sites. I would just continue to build links steadily and it should come back at some point.
Excellent article. I am new to this whole SEO thing and have to figure it out fast for my job. So far, our strategy (or lack thereof) has been long tail keywords. It took a while but we are growing search traffic at a good clip.
Hi Dan
Are you still doing still blog? If not it would nice to inform the many readers who are waiting for the next post
http://linkvanareviews.com/back-from-the-dead