New Google Update 24th April

[retired_member33]

I will still rely on Google for my business and the recent update has made me more confident tbh..

I run 10-20 websites and overall I survived the update without too many losses.. A few sites with too many anchored links and crap content got hit slightly and the ones in which I invested a lot of time have gained a few spots.

Going forward I will continue doing what I did before, which is keeping my sites updated with as much quality content as possible and try to gain as many quality links as possible.

With regards to diversifying my business I have considered a few other ways of making money which I can do online and anywhere in the world withouth anyone telling me what to do as those were the three reasons why I started working in affiliate marketing/domaining.

- Shares, I haven't been actively involved in trading on the stock market but have always had a keen interest in economics and have a background in international business so I might dedicate a part of the money I have in my company in this.

- Ebay, basically trying to find out what people are buying on Ebay and try to fill this gap based on where I live.. For an example, I currently live in (Northern) Ireland and you can get Guinness stuff everywhere, perhaps there are a lot of Guinness memorabilia collectors out there so I would be able to fill a gap in the market.

- Invest in startups, there are several websites where startups can get in touch with investors, why not take a punt at a company/idea I really think is going to be the next big thing.

- Property, the rental market is booming, why not buy an old apartment, do it up and rent it out... Once it is done up you can have an estate agent who takes care of everything including maintenance while you are sipping some cocktails at a white sandy beach, as that is where all of us online people spend their days according to many ebooks

Just a few ideas...

Maybe this thread or a new one tomorrow will take a different stance - looking at the impact such ongoing changes will have to all our business models. and how we are all going to address them

 

[Bailey]

Always nice to have a few extra strings on your Bow

I've always thought whatever niche you work to in domaining/websites try to spead your bets. it's all too easy to hit on a wining formula and stick with it. Then unfortunately a change in wind blows the whole house down.

from a personal point of view i've always worked towards end user sales. ie wordplay domains. Not as easy as some may imagine. That mixed with generic word sales, A single wordplay registration may take a couple of hours of analysing, plus usually a day or two of consideration. But, it's worked for me. (my pending list usually a dozen or two long). and following this thread has made me a little more grateful



Traffic - i doubt any get 20 clicks a year before they're brought

 

[retired_member33]

Interesting... Mind sharing one of them?

Always nice to have a few extra strings on your Bow

I've always thought whatever niche you work to in domaining/websites try to spead your bets. it's all too easy to hit on a wining formula and stick with it. Then unfortunately a change in wind blows the whole house down.

from a personal point of view i've always worked towards end user sales. ie wordplay domains. Not as easy as some may imagine. That mixed with generic word sales, A single wordplay registration may take a couple of hours of analysing, plus usually a day or two of consideration. But, it's worked for me. (my pending list usually a dozen or two long). and following this thread has made me a little more grateful



Traffic - i doubt any get 20 clicks a year before they're brought

 

[Bailey]

I'll Pm you a couple of .coms - i don't really want them indexed.

This market really isn't easy for couk's due to it's size. (although I have shifted a few UK and considering they are not advertised or listed is probably pretty good). End users are always looking for Trade and product names, It's not to hard to latch on which market areas are in growth (and of course when you come across a domain that has a wider usage field. Happy days)

 

[retired_member33]

Thanks, should be interesting to see.

I'll Pm you a couple of .coms - i don't really want them indexed.

This market really isn't easy for couk's due to it's size. (although I have shifted a few UK and considering they are not advertised or listed is probably pretty good). End users are always looking for Trade and product names, It's not to hard to latch on which market areas are in growth (and of course when you come across a domain that has a wider usage field. Happy days)

 

[Bailey]

Future Flexible screen products have been my main area of interest as of late, - again i'm not looking for the generics - All the good one have gone but how they will market those products. Believe it or not if you sit a dozen market execs down in different rooms You'd be amazed at how common the names that they collectively arrive at are similar or indeed the same- just got to be on their wavelength before them

 

[Bailey]

Apologies guys

Between me and prodomains we seem to have taken this excellent thread well off course

 

[dougs]

our synopsis

Analysis here - http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/102385-penguin-update-synopsis.html

We have lots of sites and lots of tools so here goes. This is data we are analysing for pages/sites that went up and down, plus we massively compare against our competitors.

March 2012 - link warnings went out and offered link reinclusion
April 17th - loads of sites hit for certain pages ( google said this was a parked page problem...but not what we believe)
April 19th - another Panda update
April 25th - Penguin hit, no reinclusion

So what happened with the link warning and reinclusion? My personal view this was a bit of a mess internally within Google with miscommunication. Eventually they decide the story is Penguin only.

So Penguin:

several penalties going on at once:

this is a page penalty only and not a site wide penalty...unless you been really nasty with those links

keyword density has definitely been tuned down massively ( use seobook tool - http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ )
if more than 3% on page for ANY 2 or 3 word term that is not a keyword in your url you get a penalty for that page ( this is for ALL content on page inc links)
Solution - Adjust content ( maybe change anchor text links as seen below)

Internal anchor text links massive bashing especially for anchor text overdoing
we do not yet have any decent numbers on this to see
Solution - Reduce internal linking ( good video here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-change...r-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday)

External linking
Assuming you have a profile that is similar to how it should be...we use Tesco's and see what mix is and try to come as close as possible to them....then we are are seeing no issues. I just cant see anything to convince me it's external links as I am tracking pages with almost identical link profiles on different competitor sites, A and B, and A is thriving and B is dead. Then I look at other pages on same sites and site B wins and site A is dead

But we don't do the dirty link stuff so we are not able to test.

Country Location base searches....more weight being given to local country domains


The above things seem to all apply if a page has been downgraded, but to add to the confusion their are pages out their that have all of these and still ranking....our initial thought is these pages have some sort of get out of jail card, maybe due to domain power.

Passing juice internal - I am am also thinking that maybe once a page is hit it becomes incapable of passing link juice, thus reducing the effectiveness of the rest of the site. I know people who on one day lost some pages and then watched their site slowly die.

Quick fix look at who has become the dominate player in the space and try to do a test on part of your site and match their keyword density plus internal linking structure. Watch for movements just on those pages...if it works replicate across more of the site. As a page comes back live it may be able to pass more juice to other pages.

We have started doing adjustments and are waiting to see. I believe that once you fix the content and internal linking issues you will see the real damage, if any.

This is an over optimisation penalty and everyone is doing dirty link building and ranking, so I don't see how it can be off page unless you are being really bad stuff, but there are examples of negative seo that do work, but they seem to take some grunt and you need to be targeted..

Hope that helps. Please note this is only our guessing from what we have analysed so far.

Anyones else's thoughts please

Doug

 

[damion]

Thanks for sharing Doug!

 

[namdas]

several penalties going on at once:

this is a page penalty only and not a site wide penalty

keyword density has definitely been tuned down massively ( use seobook tool - http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ )
if more than 3% on page for ANY 2 or 3 word term that is not a keyword in your url you get a penalty for that page
Solution - Adjust content

Internal anchor text links massive bashing especially for anchor text overdoing
we do not yet have any decent numbers on this to see
Solution - Reduce internal linking ( good video here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes...teboard-friday)

External linking
Assuming you have a profile that is similar to how it should be...we use Tesco's and see what mix is and try to come as close as possible to them....then we are are seeing no issues.
But we don't do the dirty link stuff so we are not able to test.

Thanks dougs those are some interesting thoughts. I've been heavily leaning towards external anchor text but hadn't looked too closely at internals yet - I know its been a factor in previous OOPs so it makes sense.

Also to anyone checking keyword density with the Seobook tool I get very different results with it than other tools (ie 0.5% and 2 instances vs 3.5%) - I think it stops counting when your page is over a certain size.

 

[dougs]

seobook

I believe it counts all links too on seobook, hence the penalty may be more towards the internal anchor text

I have updated the post with more things we are finding

I just cant see anything to convince me it's external links as I am tracking pages with almost identical link profiles on different competitor sites, A and B, and A is thriving and B is dead. Then I look at other pages on same sites and site B wins and site A is dead

Doug

 

[360360]

Thanks Doug, some good info and tips!

 

[julian]

btw, has anyone had any experiences of Negative Seo used against them?

 

[Jamie101]

Define great content? Paying £5 or £7.50 for 500 words of padded waffle is not going to get you great content. I've run a website site that used specialist writers and journalists for well researched content and we got special rates of £250 for 1000 words. One of the people we used wrote for the Times and at the time they paid £1250 for 1000 words, that's great content.

Many of the sites you see on here are built with no passion and exist for reasons that offer nothing to visitors (I include my own sites as well), they're parasitic in nature and Google is in many cases doing it's customers a favour.

That's a fair enough point, but how many people can afford to pay £125 per 500 words? I know that I certainly couldn't, especially if you want to constantly update the site with more content.

Im probably biased since I'm one of the people who write for £7.50 per 500 words, but as you can see from all the feedback I've got people are really happy with my work. I'm not saying my content is worth £125 per 500 words by the way.

 

[rob]

Define great content? Paying £5 or £7.50 for 500 words of padded waffle is not going to get you great content. I've run a website site that used specialist writers and journalists for well researched content and we got special rates of £250 for 1000 words. One of the people we used wrote for the Times and at the time they paid £1250 for 1000 words, that's great content.

Many of the sites you see on here are built with no passion and exist for reasons that offer nothing to visitors (I include my own sites as well), they're parasitic in nature and Google is in many cases doing it's customers a favour.

Nail on the head.

People are trying to grab middlemen traffic, rather than add value.

Tricks are great but if you do that 100% be prepared to have to rejig stuff every so often.

 

[dazc]

That's a fair enough point, but how many people can afford to pay £125 per 500 words? I know that I certainly couldn't, especially if you want to constantly update the site with more content.

The Times and Guardian are paying more than this and can't make money. So look forward to a world of gibberish and cat pictures.

 

[rob]

The Times and Guardian are paying more than this and can't make money. So look forward to a world of gibberish and cat pictures.

However the Daily Mail can make millions online...

 

[Jamie101]

Of course they're happy because you're making it even easier for them to be lazy and better than that, you're doing it for the thick end of fuck all. Your content isn't worth £125 because given that you often won't have any knowledge of the subject you're writing about you will probably use Google to find and rehash what others have written.

True, but what else can I do? It's either get a minimum wage job or write for £7.50 per 500 words and make more money and work whenever I feel like it.

By the way - Once I'm finished college I'll hopefully not need to write content since I'll have a well paid job, but until then content writing is my best option.

Anyway, I'm going off topic so I'll stop replying.

 

[dazc]

However the Daily Mail can make millions online...

Doesn't that prove my point?

 

[Jamie101]

Jamie, you misunderstand me, I'm not criticising you in the slightest. You're filling a need and I take my hat off to you for being enterprising. My point was that if their site is only worth £7.50 articles then am I wrong in thinking that the owners of these sites have little to moan about if Google penalises them?

Yeah I probably have misunderstood you actually. I suppose that I didn't want people to think that a £7.50 article will always be terrible, although it'll obviously not be as good as a really expensive article. But I see where you're coming from.

Then again, if you're in a small niche I personally believe that £7.50 articles will be fine in most cases. If you want to rank for something like "loans" then you might want to spend more though.