Zaheer Fazal

Ok guys, firstly, I want to appolige for posting such a late update….I’m not sure how many people are actually going to be reading this anymore…lol.

You probably all thought I disappeared or something, well I was still here in the background but it was just laziness that got the better of me.

Amongst all this chaos, I thought I’d take a bit of a break from everything.  I went on holiday for 2 weeks to ermmmm, well lets just say a ‘different’ environment than I’m used to with no internet access, no laptop, not even clean drinking water so yea it was a little difficult to say the least.

Anyway, while I was out there, I wanted to make sure that all my sites were taking care of themselves since I would have NO access to anything.  Guess what happened 24 hours I went away? Yup, you guessed it, according to ‘Sods Law’ all 3 of my hosting companies over a period of a few days had issues which in turn meant that pretty much all my sites were suspended.  That was about 70 odd sites, including this site as well!

My Holiday Turned Sour Due To Suspended Hosting

I was away on a family wedding and was a bit nervous anyway.  It was only when I got back that I realised the Google Farmer update (right hook) had also been rolled out while I was away, a double whammy.  So what was the problem with my hosting providers?  Well, it seems like WordPress was the culprit and also some article directory scripts that I had running.  A BIG mistake I made was to have my main money sites on the same hosting provider.  Do NOT do this if you can.  Wordpress without any type of caching solution means it becomes very heavy on the server.  What was funny is that from the report, my usage was over 25% for a site that didn’t get ANY traffic.  Complete and utter nonsense, why not just suspend the domain instead of the whole account??? What MAY have been the problem is that if any of you use WP-Backup or any kind of backup solution, this may have caused it, this is the only thing I can think of since that site did have WP-Cache runing.  Maybe some kind of bandwidth issues???  Either that or they were trying to sell me dedicated server space which JustHost are renowned for.

Anyway, I still haven’t recovered from that and it took me weeks to get a small percentage of my rankings back.  I also decided it was time to go back to HTML (this was very short lived though since it took me over 2 weeks on and off to get one site converted).

Google’s Panda Update

Contrary to some of my last algo changes, this change has actually worked in my favour.  Why?  Because I think it focuses a great deal on unique value content and on-page optimisation.  That is something my sites to an extent are quite good at.  Although what I have noticed that a lot of brand names are taking most of the key real-estate on page 1.  Hmmmm, I can’t help think that something fishy is going on here!  My main earner actually stayed exactly where it was, hovering between position 1 – 4, and although it fluctuates up and down on page one it is pretty solid.  Funnily enough I haven’t done much to this other than UAW and links in the content.  This site has never had profile backlinks or any of that done on it so maybe theres a lesson there.

A lot of my sites did get hit and dropped down a few pages, but I think this is something some good backlinking can solve.  I’m totally blind to where my rankings are so desperate times mean desperate measures. As a result I’ve just purchased Rank Tracker (this is another post for another day).

Integration of Social Media

I’ve become a bit of a Twitter fanatic recently and can really see how this can add value.  Using my personal account as well as the Twitter account for this site, tweeting and using social media can really help so I think it is definately something I will start to introduce to my sites.  I have already on some but it can become a nightmare when you have so many sites.  Ask yourself this, if it wasn’t important, why would Google have introduced the +1 feature??? They are also on the Social Media bandwagon with all guns blazing.

Unique Article Wizard (UAW) Still Rocks

A lot of people have knocked UAW but I disagree.  It has always been my backbone when it comes to backlinking and I know there are other tools that have come onto the market recently.  However, its never really let me down and has still been quite effective.  A number of my submissions are quite old so will need to create some new fresh runs but am confident that this will definately help.  In addition, the network has had a bit of a clean up so hopefully this may help.  I wont hold my breath but I don’t want to pay for another backlinking service just yet as funds do not permit.  I think I’ll just outsource some articles and use UAW as it is.

Some weird and yet positive results I’ve had are post Farmer/Panda where some of my XFactor 1 page sites started to acquire PageRank of 1′s and 2′s…..strange huh?  This can really only be attributed to UAW submissions which are run and run again once they are complete.  I do see some income from these sites (although not regular) which is nice.  However for the life of me, I cannot figure out how they’ve managed to get PR when some of my main sites rank so high yet no PR at all.  I won’t get anal over this though, I’d much rather have the rankings and traffic than some ‘icing on the cake’ PR, the cake would taste nicer though don’t you think ?

Old Backlinking Strategies Revisited!

I’m thinking about going back to some of my backlinking strategies of last year where I used an array of techniques.  Since using UAW and profile links, I’ve become a little lazy so it might be worth visiting RSS feeds, social bookmarking, and mainly Article marketing (using EZA & the usual suspects).  I doubt Hubpages and Squidoo will form part of this strategy as I think it is much better to focus on content on your own site.  After they were hit recently by the algo changes, I’m a little apprehensive to say the least!  Therefore its all about on-page optimisation!

I’ve never really done any blog commenting so any help would be appreciated, and more to the point, has it attributed to any increase in rankings for you????

Where to Now?

Even after the Farmer and Panda Shanda update, in a nutshell it really boils down to a few things.  Content that is very well written and engaging, ‘quality’ backlinks that are spread over as many IPs as possible and a good site structure that allows your site to be indexed and thematic organised by spiders.  It really is as complicated as you make it!!!

Mike Iser ‘got it’ and I admire him for sticking to his guns and just doing his thing.

Ok, so what am I hoping to do now?

Content Optimisation

Will be revisiting a lot of my old content and ‘LSI-ing’ it, interlinking it to boost rankings with an added twist of SEO Pressor.  Using this method, there has been some success without the need for any heavy backlinking.

Amazon Associates Affiliate Marketing

Amazon has been something I have been looking into for a while but to be honest didn’t know where to start.  I dabbled in it before but without much success and AdSense seemed like an easier method (how wrong was I? lol).  It would be nice to spread my eggs and am tempted to Purchase Amazonian Profit Plan which has been much talked about on the WF.  However my main reason is because James  has really ‘bigged it up’, he is someone that I have a great deal of respect for and he tells it like it is.  For me, driving the traffic isn’t the problem since I can do that, its actually having a blueprint from someone who is successful that is the tough part; this eBook really looks like something worth purchasing.  Anyway, we’ll see, its definitely a purchase on the list…….any results people have had with Amazonian Profit Plan would be appreciated!

Carrying on With UAW

Sorry mentioning UAW so much was not intentional but because it is such an important part of the strategy, it must be used.  Although its been a while since any content writing was outsourced, I think its that time again (even tho I hate to) just so that the business can grow and am not bogged down with all the ‘donkey work’.

See? I wasn’t sitting on my ass just watching TV and Tweeting but actually doing work behind the scenes.  Oh and I even got my Facebook account deactivated so I wouldn’t be distracted!  :-)