June 6, 2010
As some of you may be aware, Google continuously makes changes to its algorithm, about 400-500 a year in fact. Most of these have little impact on us internet marketers.
There are always some huge updates, recently Caffeine was a major way in which Google indexed and ranksed sites.
Now on June the 5th, something bad happened, I mean something terrible, I noticed that one by one, the majority of my sites that had been holding page 1 positions started to drop of the SERPS like flies. Sites that were earning me a decent income had completely disappeared. At the time of writing this, pretty much 99% of my XFactor sites have vanished from the top 10 and gone into oblivion.
There has been much talk about this on the Warrior Forum, Webmasterworld, Digital Point and lots of other popular forums as well as blogs.
There has been much talk about the Mayday Update from Google which happened around the end of April into the first few days of May 2010. Its main focus was based around long tail keywords. By that, my understanding is that Google didn’t have a good way of indexing keywords that were longer than 3 words. Now, with the new update, they are able to do this with much more precision and can ‘improve’ the quality of the sites that show up in the top 10 SERPS.
I can’t help but think that Google haven’t just done this for the users but to protect their earnings. Long tail keywords are highly lucrative and are generally the first port of call for starting out micro niche sites. I can’t help thinking that Google has done this to give authority sites more credibility than newer sites.
It actually makes me feel sick to think that all that hard work and effort over the last 8 months has come to this. However there’s no point in crying over spilt milk, and when the going gets tough, the tough MUST get going. I have worked too hard to get this far and boy I’m not about to give up!
My Obsetrvatons
Over the last few days, I have been reading lots and lots to try and figure out how we can overcome this update and try to get back to some kind of normality.
From my own network of sites I have ascertained the following;
Sites less than 7-8 months were the worst affected. These were typically XFactor sites. By this I mean those where I used the XFactor methodology. All WordPress themes, content etc have all been customised so you can’t tell it was an XFactor site. I had content specifically written by professional copywriters so it was useful valuable content. These sites dropped from page 1 right down into position 500, 278, even down to 798. Absolutely shocking I know. All these sites targeted keywords between 3-6 words.
My older sites prior to starting up all this XFactor malarkey stayed around the same. Some of these domains are like 9 years old and they’ve always been solid. They haven’t been hit much at all, just a slight blip in traffic, earnings still seem to be the same. I don’t really earn much from these but I may start to grow these since I know that they are more stable.
There was one or two exceptions however which I am closely monitoring. One of my sites has actually stayed stable. Its been hovering around position 12-13 and hasn’t moved from there. The internal pages (6 of them) have all gained rankings, 3 of these pages are sitting on page 2, the others are position 36 (up 46 positions from yesterday) and 55 (up 18 from yesterday). Now what’s interesting about this site is that although it is developed in WordPress, my strategy on this site was slightly different in that my main page was 1,000 words as opposed to my usual 500. Also, the main article contains an anchor text to each internal page naturally. Now I read somewhere that this is the way to go and it seems like this theory may have some weight to it but will have to keep monitoring this over a period of time. Oh and I also have a privacy policy page that actually has content on it! This was created via a plugin that I installed. I’ll try and find it and let you guys know the name.
Exact match domains seemed to have disappeared from page 1. I did see one or two on my travels, but these were heavily backlinked, something like 4,000+ in YSE. Maybe this is an end of an era for these types of domains???
I also noticed that my Hubpages rankings didn’t change either.
So how do we move forward? I think in my opinion, based on some of the data that has been derived above, my assumptions would be to do the following, the key focus will be to get my rankings back and diversify, until then I will;
- Increase my main front-page article to 1,000 words. It seems to be working for that site so why not? Within that, interlink it to the other articles (which are 500 words).
- Create 500 word articles on Hubapges for some of your main keywords and link it back to your money site. Because I didn’t see any major drop in my Hubs, it may be worth doing this. Also, Hubpages doesn’t link out as heavily to others like EZA so potentially more PR. Remember no more than 2 links to 1 site.
- Backlink smarter and not just harder. I think we can still use some of our tactics like social bookmarking, profiles etc, but it will just be a great deal harder. I will continue to social bookmark for the time being and see if this has any affect whatsoever.
- My main methods for backlinkng will be Ezine Articles, Social Bookmarking using BMD4 and Hubpages.
Lets just hope that something works towards a positive direction.
Zaheer
