Well this month’s update was quite a system shock, I’m not too sure what it targeted specifically on my sites because I use mostly the same methods and some sites are doing terrible while others have not changed at all! One of my older “authority” sites got destroyed in terms of domain/inner page rankings (luckily it still gets traffic from Bing :P). However some of my newer sites are doing even better. It compensates somewhat, but revenue from adsense is definitely down by like 50%.
Figuring it all out
Some people call it the over optimization penalty but honestly I never really followed keyword density guidelines. At most I have my keyword in the title/url/image alt tag/1-4 times in the text. Maybe it’s the fact that this is true for most of the pages on my website? But why do I lose rankings for keywords that I target on a specific page and that I am not specifically targeting in the title/url/image alt tag? I often target 2-6 keywords per page. So maybe Google would see that I’m targeting this one keyword per page a lot, but it should leave the others alone…
Social signals helping?
I see a lot of high quality sites getting trashed with this update. Some of my older sites (the authority one I mentioned) had a lot of natural likes and “pins” form pinterest. A few +1’s and retweets but no page with more than 10 of those while I had some pages with 100-300 likes (ya, 300+ natural likes!). I also had bought some likes/tweets/+1’s on some of my other pages and that does not seem to be directly the reason why they would of maintained/lost rankings.
Backlink Anchor Text Over Optimization
I think what this update did is target over optimized backlinks. For example, not enough anchor text variation leading to your site and more specifically, if you have a lot of articles (think AMR, or blog networks like AR) that link 3 times to your website with spun content it’s kinda of a signal of manipulation to Google when a large majority of your backlinks are in this group/type. I’m not saying these do not work, I’m saying randomness in linking profiles such as some articles having 1-2-3 links towards different URL’s of your website MIGHT be a better idea (and a bit harder/annoying to do). I’ll be testing this out…
Is Do follow/No follow important?
The other thing I would mention that I would think makes a good do follow/no follow portfolio but a site of mine that is still ranking really well (and making quite a bit of my current income now) barely has any no follow… Mostly (90%+) links from ezarticle links to certain pages … All do follow.
Negative SEO, seems to be real and super easy now
Basically, it’s really easy to make people lose rankings for certain keywords by sending them a lot of shitty links with the same anchor text they are ranking for. I saw a lot of people mention this and I tried it out of curiosity and yup, made one of my competitors for a #1 spot (he was there for at least a week now, before the April 25 update) go to #5 since. Some of my own websites that I don’t use for rankings but just as backlinks for a test network I was doing last year also lost a lot of rankings when I was applying this. Some of these “network sites” were actually ranking on the first page near my money site and boom, gone. Definitely does not make me want to reveal more of my domains…
Anyway, you can’t be 100% sure about anything in SEO, but for me I’ll have to clearly find out why some of my sites are still doing great/ok while others got demolished. I see a lot of weird things in the search results so we’ll see what Google does to this, first update that actually affected me a lot. I remember last year the first Panda update was brutal to some people but they eventually recovered…
For me it’s…
How are your websites performing since the update? Any websites that you feel should of not been penalized? Any websites that are still ranking well that might of had a different backlink portfolio than the other ones? Any comments would be good to help us all figure this out 🙂
All my websites kinda stink anyway, this whole SEO thing seems harder for me than others, even a dollar a day seems out of reach (Ive made 0.87$ this month). It seems it takes money to buy all these tools and nothing works, I don’t think AMR has done much for me, I see that on the few % that are accepted, the links really don’t do much, however they all pretty much link to my main page.
Well you don’t want to have a few websites if you want to learn SEO. You need a lot. When I say I’m testing things on AMR it’s not just one one website, it’s on multiple websites that I only test AMR for certain pages and keywords. And I repeat the process with many other things, Bookmarking demon, seo networks etc. I don’t just try one thing and hope it works, I’m testing a lot of different things on different pages at the same time and I use the winners on my main keywords I want to rank for (and then I test other stuff on other pages that had nothing done to them for a few months).
I’m just getting into SEO so I set up 2 sites a couple of weeks ago and 2 sites this week, all pretty much the same: emd low competition, untapped, basic sites minimal content. bought a few packages off fiverr: social bookmarks, edu, high pr, contextual articles, link wheel, social button likes,
2 of them are on the front pages.. one took a week, one took 11 hours, the other two are nowhere to be seen, think they are still to be indexed.
SEO = random!
Well those are a bit different, when you have an EMD for something that is basically “untapped” Google doesn’t have much of a choice to bring you to the first page. Though some of the small EMD’s I have lost some rankings with this update I think it’s more because they are overoptimized than EMD’s losing value.
That is so wrong. I have two sites with EMD and I have bulit links to them and they have almost NO competition and still they are not ranked or in the 100’s after 2-4 months.
Well you probably did too many backlinks already, and anchor text which was not varied. I bought some low competition EMD’s a month ago and they are already top 50 and I haven’t done backlinks yet (figuring out how I’m gonna plan different backlinks to each of them to test different stuff). I’m just building content to them. These are 2-4k keyword per month searches that will probably make $5-15/day on adsense once they are #1 🙂
Hey Alex great post! BTW, I need to find a way to get in touch with Becker. I’m located in the same town as him and would love to talk some business.
dunno, i’d expect all the emds to be ranking high by now. SEO just seems totally random now, interms of how long it takes to get indexed and where you will end up ranking…
I usually get indexed within the same day of putting new content up on a blog tbh.
Great post…interesting too.
I am finding some weird shit this past week. I have a local satellite site that took a huge ass hit to infinity after being #2 forever and ever…it’s gone as shit, and I didn’t point a single blog link at it. It has a lot of useful content too and had fairly good bounce rates, so I don’t know what happened.
I have another site which is on page 2 around #12 for a fairly competitive search that hasn’t budged since it came off of “probation” from my initial blog blast a few months ago.
That thing is MOSTLY made up of blog links a few wiki’s and not much else…and it hasn’t moved more than a few positions up or down.
I’m also trying out some super untapped KW’s that don’t have shit ranking at all to test out some quick rankings and it’s really random.
I have a post on a self-made posterous freebie network ranking #1 after a few hours, and the actual post on my site not in the top 100.
These Google guys need to get drunk/laid/a life or something and stop ruining my good time.
Posterous/blogger/wordpress.com web 2.0s are also suprisingly ranking really well for me too lol. I’m considering putting adsense on one of them which is now ranking #2 for a keyword that used to make me $5-20/day at #2 on my main site.
I think i might have got slapped on a couple of my higher (although low) traffic sites.
Fingerman suggested it might be over-adsensized, what do you think about that?
i’m gonna try to monetize my sites in other way, and also make them more web-2.0 ish looking.
Also i’m going to try over optimization using small PR sites, and try to invest in higher PR blogs with fewer, but higher quality backlinks
This sucks, i’m not even making much money off my sites and i’m already slapped lol.
Also i haven’t updated content in over a month or something, how about you? still regularly updating?
To add to this, i heard from a google employee (who quit google because of this madness) that they are focusing significantly on google plus, and they cut down on a lot of things at google so they could focus more on developing their social site.
This might also apply to the search results (and probably does).
I was thinking of linking my sites to Google Authorship. I tried to do it with the linkback but for some reason my picture still does not appear near the search results 🙁
that seems legit, i mean you won’t get your articles copied either with that.
overall i think things that work now might be:
-social
-pr
-videos with viral trends
-authored articles on blogs/sites
…+ web 2.0 design/interactive websites
…Also i’m going to try *AVOIDING* over optimization using small PR sites, …
I had sites that did not even have adsense yet slapped. While they said a while ago they can detect by algorithm how many ads are “above the fold” it wasn’t necessarily that which gave me a penalty this time. It does lower your rankings though somewhat (it’s kinda of a -x points, not really a penalty but makes it harder. Though, if you get a manual review than ya it could become a penalty).
I don’t think updating content had anything to do with these changes, I still add some content to a few newer sites and some I do not do anything on… Did not seem to affect whether they got a penalty or not.
Hi Alex,
I would like to thank you for your posts.They are really useful.
Hey, I was just about to get the AMR but now after the updates I’m not sure anymore.. do you still suggest AMR for backlinking etc. or now do you think it would be better only doing manual HIGH PR backlinking maybe using fiverr, or focusing on social bookmarking, or what else ? Great website by the way.. p.s could you email me your health – website ? I’m interested!
I’m using AMR currently to dilute the anchor texts my sites have been receiving. In the future I will probably use it to dilute anchor texts and to use it to power up guest posts I am making on other sites 🙂
I use BMD and social bookmarking to dilute anchor text and I don’t use fiverr at all now… I don’t like not having control of my backlinks nowadays….
It helps me a lot. thank you. I’d like to have “control of my backlinks nowadays” like you