If you are ranking well in G then you know what Splork is talking about - spam articles, spam links - the backbone of ranking well in the search engines. Nothing new but this is. If you are using Blogger, Adsense or both then it's time to clean up your act.
For those who don't know it yet Blogger deleted Alan Liew's MoneyMakerInfo Blogspot blog a few days ago. While I haven't talked to him one of the members in the Keyword Academy forum ( Steve from nichemarketingweb.net ) apparently did and was told that the site was deleted for spam. For those not familiar Alan's site was 4 years old, had hundreds of posts and dominated the serp's for all the main MMO keywords for most of the last 2-3 years. And his site wasn't spam. Blogger may have used spam as the scapegoat but I suspect it has to do with Adsense. Spam or not the fact is that his site was designed to make money from Adsense and this is something you all need to pay attention to. If you are using Adsense you had better be squeaky clean and provide real, useful and original content. Yes they could have just disallowed him to use Adsense on his site instead of removing the site but he had run ins with them over Adsense in the past and his site was a template for how to optimize blogger for MFA sites. Much like another well know Blogger blog used to be before it removed Adsense.
About a year ago I had a visit from the Adsense police who were concerned with the many articles I had written in regards to optimizing blogs for CPC. While vague they seemed to indicate that I was responsible for the endless stream of Blogger blogs that had a strange similarity to this one. The one difference was that while this site had real and useful info on it the copycats were all thin "made for adsense" sites. In other words spam. Fortunately they were not my sites as evidenced by the Adsense ID's. I wasn't threatened with anything but I could read between the lines... stop talking about Adsense, stop making MFA sites and stop showing others how to do it.
A short time later a number of my less than stellar "support" blogs were terminated as spam by the Blogger police. (They were spam). Strangely they didn't terminate many other blogs located on the same accounts which were just as bad or worse. It took a bit of detective work but I finally pieced together the common denominator - the deleted sites all had or had used Adsense on them at one time or another.
At that point I sat down and began a huge clean up of my network. Thin posts were replaced with legit articles. Links were removed. Post titles were changed. Themes were gussied up and so on. In the process I watched how the changes effected my serp rankings - initially all bad results. You can rework a post or two and not much happens. Change all the posts at one go and you will see carnage in the serps. Remove all your old links and the Bot has a seizure. Interesting enough - it's temporary provided you don't continue to play with old posts. You can get away with a good housecleaning once but if you continue to fiddle then de-indexing follows.
(Oh - it's temporary provided you manage to supply fresh links to the updated posts.)
Now I didn't say anything at the time as I hadn't heard much chatter from others and assumed I was a target simply because of my not so subtle presence on top of the serps. Liz from Passive Income Online and Alan Liew had both received similar visits from the Adsense team but otherwise things were quiet. My concerns were obvious - I make a good living online and it was being jeopardized because of this site. I may as well of painted a bullseye on my forehead and yelled at G to come and get me.
So I cleaned up this site as well, I stopped posting which had the effect of stemming any more incoming links from my readers, I stopped optimizing posts and titles for the MMO keywords and finally removed all incoming links from thin sites that I had control of. At first nothing happened but within a month or two the blog finally began dropping in the serps. All good but then it rebounded over the next few months. What the ? This is when I realized that a good housekeeping only produces a temporary drop. So... I removed a few authority links that I had left previously - they were legit content links on very respectable sites. This resulted in a drop in the US data base but strangely not across all the other data centers. (Something I still haven't figured out yet) And then the damn site started rebounding again. So... enough was enough, I removed 90% of my outbound links, several posts, changed titles on many others and shed almost all sitewide links. The Bot crapped itself and presto I was banished to the last page - a common penalty you incur when your linking structure gets flagged because of spam techniques. Frequently adding, changing and deleting links on your site will raise the flag. It's an automated penalty that can be reversed in time.
I was originally going to post a 10,000 word post outlining all my findings over the past year - more specifically a detailed list of penalties, what causes them, how to reverse them and how to avoid them. Having given this much thought I won't be posting that article. Doing so will not end well from experience as it will bring the same problems as I've received from talking about Adsense and Serp rankings in the past. In other words I have nothing to gain from it and plenty to lose.
The advantage of having a top ranked site is that you can see almost instant results in the serps when you start messing with stuff. 90% of G's penalties are automated. Manual penalties are few and require re-inclusion to fix. (Selling links is the most common way to get a manual penalty) Automated penalties can be fixed by simply fixing the problem (almost always involving links) and waiting to be crawled again. Some penalties effect serp ranking and others only effect PR. PR does not effect your own ranking but it does effect your ability to send authority to other sites. You may rank well but you won't be able to help others rank well if your PR is penalized.
Now I decided to write this post to get people back on course before you see all your hard work go for naught.
When I started this site no one talked about backlinks online. Or the importance of G. SEO. I did and I explained how I made money online. The advantage I had over all the other MMOers was that I made money using my system - not selling it. In fact I gave it away for free. In fact a central part of my system is the "free" bit. Give free info that others charge for and make money off of CPC. A classic MFA site. Rank it number 1 by obtaining keyword anchored backlinks and collect your money. Not only did I talk about what I do I actually proved it with this blog. The result - everyone started doing what I do, and telling others. Unfortunately like most things, the system breaks down when too many people start doing it. You could get away with a thin MFA or affiliate network 4 years ago - not now.
If you are using Adsense then beware; if the sites only real purpose is to make money from Adsense and its obvious then you had best fix it. Your site had better be legit (and you know the difference) and watch out that your ads are not too aggressive above the fold. The days of using my system to build thin sites is over.
As for serp ranking some of you are being misled into thinking that backlinks don't matter as much as frequent posting and social networking does. Backlinks are still the dominant factor in obtaining top ranking. Links are weighted differently based on numerous factors but simply put you can dominate the serps using nothing but crappy comment links (including no-follow btw) as long as you keep a supply of fresh links coming. In a non competitive niche you don't need a steady supply. If you have been watching mooladays.com or 101waystomakemoney.com you can see they have steadily climbed the serps using MFA sites with nothing but crap comment links, forum links and site directories. I call these crap links because they are all obvious manufactured links designed to effect the search engine. They were created by the site owner and not by the owner of another site willingly linking out. The point is that they obviously work and provided G doesn't do a manual review the algo doesn't care that they are crap links.
A good link and more importantly, a safer link, is any link contained in a "legit" post on a "legit" site. In short - a real link from another person who links to you voluntarily. If the site is an authority site (as fuzzy as that term is) then so much the better. The New York Times is an authority site. Why? I don't know but they are. One link from them is worth a thousand blog comments in terms of ranking.
Those are the two extremes of the backlink spectrum. Both extremes work. Crap links can cause you problems if caught - authority links won't. Current links are important in competitive niches - not so much in non competitive niches.
Something new and I can verify this from testing, load speed does play a part in rankings now. Most of you won't have to worry but if your site loads extremely slow you will lose ranking. I don't know the exact point where G decides you are too slow but I did see ranking loss on three sites (including this one) that I loaded up with tons of crap which put me in the slowest 20% or worse. I then removed the crap and saw my ranking return within a few weeks. I repeated this several times and had the same results on all sites. Ironic but the thing that slows this sites load time the most is Google's own "Friend Connect" widget.
I haven't totally lost interest in this blog as I have some ideas in mind but I'm not going to be so open about what I do in future. Those of you who watch what I do have written asking questions and I haven't answered. I'm cautious these days as things I've talked about in the past have come back to bite me. I lost a lot of money when some of my readers outed a few of the link networks I talked about. My Adsense account was constantly being attacked by jerks. Every week or two someone would pay money to add my site to a traffic exchange in order to get my account banned. I had to have my lawyer send out threats to the exchange owners to remove my blog from their system and of course no income from Adsense as I had to remove it from my allowed list while it was on the exchanges. Other idiots would click an ad 50 times in a row. (Google can filter out that nonsense without you having to do anything) I probably would have expected crap like that if I was selling the usual drivel to people but it surprised me that providing useful free info could produce such hostility... the fact is there are dipshits out there who will try and screw up a good thing just for the hell of it.
My old system is dead because I talked too much. I'm not going to talk much about the new system. I will tell you that the basics haven't changed. Ranking is still done the same but the quality of the sites are far more important now if using Adsense. How you optimize a site is far more important. (Target keywords subtly in titles and posts) Same for the URL. In short avoid anything common to MFA sites. You don't get to argue with Adsense - they are on a mission to weed out crap Adsense sites and don't need a lot to disallow your blog or worse, ban your account. Many of you will never get a manual review but if you make over a $100 a day you should assume you will get checked eventually. (I've heard this number mentioned by others although the only reviews I have had came after sites passed the $200/day mark and did it repeatedly. 3 times actually and all 3 about a week after the sites managed to stay at or above the $200/day level.) Each time I was warned that my ads were too aggressive (above the fold) and I was given time to correct them.
I'm still here and I keep an eye on things but I've never wanted to be another blogging guru like Darren Rouse. My network is still chugging along, I now live 2 minutes away from the golf course and I'm retired at 47. This site has been fun but it also occupied a lot of my time. Time that wasn't being spent keeping my other sites in shape. I'm mostly caught up now and have a few stories to tell you that shouldn't get me in trouble and should give you a few ideas you can try. Yes I mean making money online.
Cheers
Fashakin
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