I want to expose several mistakes I have made throughout my professional life to you, that allows me to better understand how to build a business that is less Google dependant.
Most people rely on search engine traffic in order to get clients, especially the Adsense guys. I want to share with you some specific examples of the lessons I have learned with some of the Google algorithms.
I want you to take a look to the stats of this site:
This was an EMD that was created around June 2011. I started with a few articles just to get it indexed, my idea here was to create satellite websites that would help me to rank other sites, but I suddenly had a great idea, why rank a site with just a few articles when I could create an authoritative domain.
This is shown in image number 1, the moment where I install a plug-in to my website that allows the website to get articles from one of the big site networks. The articles I was getting were human readable spun articles with 70% to 80% original content, as you can see I start getting traffic from many key phrases.
All the traffic I was getting was from long tail keywords, no backlinks and I was getting from 50 to 70 visits everyday. The strategy here was to create an article directory, get backlinks from the inner pages and increase the PR of some specific pages in order to be able to send some backlinks from this site to other web properties.
In no time the website got ranked on the first page for the main phrase, life was good until we got to the point shown in image number 2.
The Panda update hit us, Google stopped sending me a lot of traffic for many long tail keywords. As you can see the traffic diminished to 10 to 30 searches per day, not a biggie really since the domain name was still ranking for the main key phrase, some pages were still getting back links, and
increasing the PR, since this website was just a satellite website the only thing we really wanted was to increase the PR of some pages and having as many indexed pages as possible. By the way, the highest PR level the domain achieved was 3 and it was in the time frame between point number 2 to point number 3.
At this point, we were not too concerned, we lost some traffic, but as I have stated before the real intention of this domain was just to help us push the ranks to other web properties. At this moment in time I realized that they were already “penalized” and the domain name got a “slap” furthermore the domain was in good terms with Google, so we decided to start generating sub domains with articles and content in “edgy” niches. Why did we do that? Because our experience has proven that when a domain name gains Google’s trust the sub domains of this domain can be banned or de indexed, without affecting the main domain.
At that moment we thought we had already passed the worst part of the storm, we were setting up some affiliate programs for the sub domains when the “Penguin” update hit us shown in image 3, this specific domain name was totally de indexed!!!
Then all the sub domains where de indexed as well, everything was lost.
This was not the only case, there where several other domains that we were using in order to create our own blog network that passed the Panda update, but the Penguin was relentless, here is another picture.
Lessons Learned in the Process:
a) One of the main problems we detected in the sites that were hit: All of them have Google Analytics, and all of them were “over optimized”.
Having Google Analytics in your website is like having a little spy telling all your movements to Google. All the websites that had Google Analytics were de indexed , the ones that did not have Google Analytics just lost some ranks.
When I talk about over optimized websites, I am talking about the anchor text we were using to get backlinks, most of the time we had the same anchor text in more than 50% of our backlinks, here the conclusion can be to use different anchor text, like “click here”, “here”, “more info”, etc….
To see original link click here
