Zaheer Fazal

BEWARE: Very Very long post ahead!

So its Septemeber the 1st.  A start of a new month and plenty of work ahead to achieve my personal goal.

I haven’t posted here for over 2.5 months and I do apologise for that but since the Mayday Algo update, its completely thrown me off my strategy, plans and goals.

That dreaded day of June the 3rd was like a bombshell to thousands of IMers (me included) and since then I’ve had to pick myself and literally try a different approach.

Just to recap, pretty much all my XFactor type niche sites spiralled into oblvion, dropping to stupidly low rankings such as 500+.  To check my rankings I use SEO Elite by Brad Callen and although I’m sure theres better tools on the market, it serves its purpose.

So heres an overview of what I’ve done over the last 2.5 months to try and claw my rankings back;

Changed some of the WordPress themes

Since most of my sites are developed in WordPress, the benefit of having a tool that can create designs and churn them out quickly has been one of the reasons I use WP.  I can quite easily design static sites in DreamWeaver since I have a background in web design but its a lot easier and a lot less messy to use WordPress.  Even before I started on this XFactor journey, I purcashed a copy of Artisteer which is possibly the best WYSIWYG WordPress creation tool out there.  Quite pricey but I think it can make you back your money, it certainly has in my case.

Anyway, I changed some of the designs to be more customer focussed and not the standard XFactor template (I never use the XFactor green template).  My problem is that attention to detail is something I do focus a lot on which is contrary to what you’re supposed to do in the world of AdSense niche site building.

Content optimisation

This entailed going back to my articles and trying to tweak them to ensure that they were offering the best user experience to my visitors.  I know they all make grammatical sense since they were professionally written but even then theres nothing like a human touch from somebody who knows the niche well (which I don’t…lol).

Pretty much all my content is a minimum of 500 words with the main keyword in the first and last paragraph.  What I did notice is that some of the content did seem a little repetitive so keywords which looked like they were stuffed were omitted.  Finding a good writing team is always tough for IM’ers which is one of the reasons why I advocate starting out in niches that you are familiar with…..Arrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh.

A great tool that I purchased last year and never really used was Content Mania from Big Mike at Icansoft, he had a sale on so decided to purchase it in the heat of the moment.  I initially thought it was an article spinner but have found it to be an  invaluable tool that helps to identify the keyword density of each article.

I have been aiming for about 2% for my main keywords with any ‘LSI’ based terms also included.

This brings me onto LSI terms.  Although I already have a copy of Micro Niche Finder, I prefer to go directly to the Google site to find my terms.

For this I used two methods.  The first was the Google wonder wheel; this allows you to figure out what Google deems to be related topics.  I then added a few of these  terms as separate articles within my site just to add something a little different.

The other is using the tilda ‘~’ operator.  I will try and explain the process in another post.

Submitted articles to Ezine Articles and the top directories

Initially after the first few days of being in total shock, I thought well the only thing one can do is to just keep adding links.  So that’s precisely what I did.  I got my article writers to create some content on areas such as weight loss, finance and other areas that generate a lot of interest. Why?  So this content could easily be syndicated out via Ezines, GoArticles and all the usual suspects.  As much as I’d like to have purchased hundreds, due to financial constraints I couldn’t so with what I had, I just simply submitted these.  Thankfully I’m a Platinum member so the articles tend to get approved pretty quickly.

Some of these articles were relevant to my topic and some of these were not.  More about relevant articles further down.

Purchased a monthly subscription of Unique Article Wizard (UAW)

Now being on a financial tightrope, I was thinking two main things that could get the sites back up and ranking, I needed fresh content added regularly and backlinks!  Getting profile links can be effective but it can also be expensive, especially if you do this on 80+ sites on a regular basis.  So, after reading many mixed reviews I thought about Unique Article Wizard (UAW). Now a few of my IM buddies such as Sara, and James both use it and with Mike Iser using it as part of his process I thought I’d take the plunge, its not a cheap piece of software but having dabbled in respun content before I could see where the value lies in this product.  Some swear by it, and some don’t.

Anyway,  I’ve had some mixed success with this but have only had the product for over a month so its too early to tell yet (just had my 2nd renewal email come through today).  What I will say though is that if you use the ‘spintax’ correctly, you REALLY can generate some quality unique articles. Some people just rush this process and miss the opportunity to make use of the potential of all these relevant backlinks.  Lets just say that it can take me almost a whole day to do a single UAW submission.  Once you implement it properly, there’s really no need to revisit it again unless you want to add more URLs or anchor text in the resource box.

Prior to this, I also have a copy of Magic Article Rewriter.   Its a great tool and with the Magic tokens, it really saves me some time.  Be under no illusion though, ‘quality‘ article spinning takes a great deal of time.  I personally don’t agree with people who say that article spinning generates a load of gibberish, thats only if you cut corners.  If a human does it correctly, you can have perfect grammar and articles that actually make a great deal of sense.  Like I said, easier said than done.  I tried getting my article writers to do this but even they couldn’t handle it….lol!

I can’t go into the intricacies of the product since it breaks the terms of use but it does involve article spinning but in a very clever way .

One of the reasons why I’m focussing so much time on UAW is for several reasons, the first is that Mike Iser seems to use it all the time so if it works for him then he must be doing something right.  Secondly, I want to make the best use of my monthly subscription.  For $67 per month, I want to use it as much as I can and not just make it another idle purchase.  Finally, it allows me to test if it actually works or not.  I want to just put lots of articles on autopilot and see if UAW does actually add value for the long-term

Created lots of new content

What I did was I took note note from Mike Iser and as a regular reader of his blog, I noticed how he just keeps adding content to his old sites and new sites regardless of whatever happens.  I kind of then took this approach.

After carrying out keyword research, I had my writing team create batches of content, so for example one site may have needed 8 articles, another 15 articles, another 10 and so forth.  With each niche site, I also had 3 rewrites done for UAW so I could use these for that sole purpose.

I do have a feeling that my sites are sandboxed and need regular content to be added if there is any chance that they will start to rank again.  So, only a few days ago I finally completed adding the content to about 8-10 sites.  It was alot of work reading through all of the content and adding my own stamp to it but it was worth it and managed to create all the posts.

So for example, I added 14 articles for one of the sites but the beauty of it was that I have scheduled only 1 article to go out per week.  This means that over the next 14 weeks there will be new content added and Google will hopefully see this in a positive light.  In addition to this, there will also be a UAW submission at a rate of about 10 per day.  Once it finishes I’ll just resubmit it.  If you have XML Sitemaps plugin, then you’ll know that there is a last modification date on there, this is good since Google knows the last time that content was updated.  You don’t really need to worry about indexing as with WP chances are that they”ll be indexed within a few minutes.

Silo Structure

Since getting on this XFactor site bandwagon, you do tend to sometimes lose sight of the obvious.  Just becuase someone says something, does this really mean you should do exactly as they say?  John did loosely mention site structure in his eBook and I’m a bit of a fool for not picking up on this (wish I sooo had).

Being in web design for nearly a decade, I have always designed client sites which were properly structured into relevant categories, this was so that it was logically organised for humans as well as search engines.  Buying exact match domains and creating 5 page sites really made me lose my vision for good web design and for a short period I enjoyed the success until Mayday!  I even use to pitch to potential SEO clients how important site structure was! Duh!

Anyway, some of the sites had a complete overhaul in how they were structured.

Before, sites were mydomain.com/product-keyword.html

Now I have mydomain.com/category/product-keyword.html

By changing the structure to a silo, this means that search spiders can easily identify how to categorise content, allows pages to pass link juice and also you can build it into an authority.

For those of you who know WordPress, the permlink structure was changed from;

%postname%.html

to

/%category%/%postname%.html.

I’m quite embarrassed that this wasn’t used before as I used this initially on all my pre-XFactor sites which are still ranking well today!

Bruce Clay has an excellent example of Silo-ing

Theres also a great visual exmaple here.

Baclinks, Backlinks & more Backlinks

What is interesting is that I was looking at one of my competitors and noticed that her site was ranking in position 10 purely on backlinks from article directories.  Now, thesse werent your Ezines or your Buzzle’s, these were very low PR WordPress article directories.  I can’t help thinking how link diversity plays an important part in rankings.  Another obsevation in backlinks was that one of my other competitors was ranking on page 1 for a site that only had one 500 page article.  However, it had over 5k backlinks…..I was like whoooooaaaaaa! I’m now starting to think that a shed-load of backlinks from relevant article directories may be something to test out.  This is the exact reason for subscribing to UAW .

Image Optimsiation

One thing that I have noticed over a few years and I said this to my sister about 2 years ago was that we should really focus on ‘Image Optimisation’.  Thankfully I’m glad that we did.  We have been quite thorough in the way that we did this and as a result, sites that are nowhere to be found in the ‘Web’ SERPS are doing quite well in the ‘Images’ search.

The best way to do this is to ensure that every article you add has at least an image.  Now, name that file with the keyword that you are targeting for example  ’main-product-keyword.jpg‘.  In the ‘Alt’ text, do not use the exact term but something similar, like an LSI term. You can match the page title and filename to increase relevancy.  Lastly, do not add this image in its own somewhere but try to embed this within some content on the page.  Don’t ask me why, but it seems to do the trick.

If you have Google Analytics installed then these visitors will show up as Google (Referral) traffic.  Unfortunately you will not be able to identify the keywords that were searched to get to your page.  To overcome this, you can use Google Webmaster tools, heres how; simply go into;

Google Webmaster Tools > Choose your domain > Your Site on the Web > Search Queries > Dropdown with ‘All’ should be changed to ‘Image’

Videos

I have also added several videos to as many posts as I can since I read somewhere that this can increase your rankings, to be honest I’m not sure how much of this is true but have tried to add as many relevant videos as possible just for the sake of it……desperate times…desperate measures…lol.

My next project will be to try and create some videos to see if YouTube and video does bring much traffic.  I would appreciate some help on software and tools if anyone has any.

Contact Us & Privacy Options

Recently, there have been many people complaining that their AdSense accounts were banned or sites were deindexed because they did not either have a  privacy policy or becuase it was not up to date with Google’s policies.  If you are a serious IMer and have a sufficient income then you may want to consider this.  There are many WordPress plugins you can download that will do the hard work for you.  Still best to read all the the small print.

Now I’m not a robot but  I’ve been working tirelessly day and night to get back to the pre Mayday rankings.  Contact pages were also added so that the site seemed more personal and not a MFA (made for Adsense) site.  What is funny is that the other day I actually got some enquiries about a particular type of product, this was excellent and it just reinforced my view that the contact page can actually be a point of access for your visitors.  What I did was directed them to an Amazon page.  Not sure if they purchased anything but this opens up potentially another door of opportunity.

Thinking outside the box – Not relying solely on Organic Search

The one thing I have learnt about this business is that one minute you can be enjoying a stable income and the next it can disappear from you.  You can’t sit on your laurels and expect everything to be hunky dory.  I am more and more inclined to go down the ‘authority site‘ route and also towards actually making these sites drive traffic from other sources.  In addition to organic search, I have created Facebook groups and twitter accounts for a few of these sites and am starting to see an increase of traffic as a result.  One of the other things that I’m considering is also to use a list building tool so in case it all goes ‘belly up’, at least I have a pool of users who I can market some affiliate products too.  Again its a good idea (I think) but time constraints don’t allow me to implement all this, especially with all my personal life issues…lol

Backups

Last week I had an unexpected surprise when I received an email from my hosting company who had suspended my account.  Image my horror when I found this out, I literally went as white as a sheet thinking about how on earth I was gong to get my data.  Being in IT and being through this many times, I still didn’t learn my lesson.  I had to kiss their backside (JustHost) and managed to get the account back.  What was strange was that they said that I was using up too much server resources…..ok I thought, not good!  What was even stanger was that the sites in question had never been used!  I think maybe they were just trying to sell me a dedicated server (which I didn’t purchase)…..it was a steal at $149 per month!

Anyway, moral of the story, there are plenty of backup plugins and tools, just make sure you save your work regularly so you can get back up and running quickly in case something similar happens.

Results!

Ok, so over the last 2.5 months I’ve really only focussed on a few sites just so that it keeps me from going insane and allows me to loosely test what I think works and what doesn’t.  My mentality was really to try bits of everything to see if I could get my rankings back.

My main site that used to earn me between £5-10 per day has actually got back up to page 2.  It was sitting in position 300+.  Now this I think was due to some aggressive Ezine submissions and maybe some  UAW (although its too early to tell).  I also ensured that I did some RSS submissions with RSS bot (although this was very minimal).

Other sites that were sitting in position 400+ are steadily climbing up and are now into like position 139.  Theres still along way to go but I can see that its starting to increase slowly but surely.

It brings me to the conlusion that this whole process is going to take time.  In  my mind I think to get out of the sandbox will take maybe about 6 months.  All these domains will be about a year old this month so maybe age will play a factor.

In the meantime, my plan this month is to;

• Add spintax to the pile of  rewrites for UAW.
• Add more images and videos
• Submit UAW generated articles to various other ‘powerful’ high PR article directories and web 2.0 properties.
• Restructure of sites into the Silo mthod (if I have time)

I know that maybe these sites will not rank for a VERY long time so I’m planting the seeds now so they can solidify in a few months time.

Earnings wise, still nowhere near what I was making before!  After Mayday, I suffered a 90% drop in AdSense earnings and this was my ONLY form of income.  Now thankfully, earnings are up at around the 30-35% mark of my best month.   There were a handful of sites that were generating about 50% of revenue which is why there was such a massive drop.

What Now?

I’m thinking whether it is the right time to create some new sites?

To be honest at the end of this month I’ll be evaluating which direction I need to head.  Its been such a roller coaster ride, physically and emotionally that I’m not sure if I can do this anymore.  I’m not one to give up, Ive never given up on anything in my life but with the personal issues with family and the fact that results are so slow, its quite disheartening …..feel free to send me messages of support…lol!

Sorry about the long post everyone, I hope its given you all an insight into whats been happening and why I’ve disappeared from most forums, blogs etc.  I have been literally working every hour God sends around my personal responsibilities and its been very difficult but you have to do what you have to.

Thanks for your continued support everyone and looking forward to everyone’s feedback.

Zaheer