Penguin Update: Where To From Here?

I’m afraid the day has come. A lot of my business relied on organic search traffic from Google and unfortunately with the latest Penguin update a lot of that traffic has disappeared.

Some of my sites which had secure #1 rankings for over 2 years have dropped drastically. This is the most serious algorithm update I’ve experienced since I’ve been doing this business.

Penguin Killing My Site

The site in the image above has ranked #1 for over 2 years for the main keyword and has over 20 pages of uniquely written content which also ranked (past tense :-(…) in the top 10 for their respective keywords. As with all my sites they all have a lot of strong social signals (all real) including likes, +1’s and tweets etc… My data from Google analytics shows lower than 50% bounce rates and an average of around 1:30 minutes on-site per visitor. Unfortunately this obviously isn’t enough for Google. Something I’m doing triggered the latest algo to penalize these sites. This result is typical for most of my sites.

The bad news for me is that I’m going to have to suspend some of writers and VA’s. I’m sorry guys, but my business costs just won’t cover you now. It’s time to downsize and consolidate. Until the dust settles, there is really no need to continue building backlinks or make new pages for my sites (some may disagree with this). But, really creating new content on sites which are penalized is not productive. I don’t see any reason to continue building links until I know that this strategy still works.

My diagnosis: I’ve been reading a lot of opinions on what flags/triggers people think are causing the drop in rankings. Here’s my opinions based on what I’m seeing on my own sites.

Keyword stuffing: I don’t do keyword stuffing in meta tags or on-page. However, I do use the keyword in the title tags, URL and meta description. As this is one of the things being thrown around I’m going to change one of my sites by removing/changing these things and see what happens.

Brand / High PR authority sites: Looking at some of the search results in my various niches I can see that there is not a disproportionate number of authroity sites dominating the rankings. The results I see show the usual mix of exact match domains, affiliate sites and so forth. So the idea that these types of sites are getting more weight in the rankings is not something I agree with.

Anchor text backlinks: This is what I think is definitely included in the new algorithm. I do have a fair share of these types of backlinks because they used to be ‘the best backlinks you can get’, now the opposite seems to be true. Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to remove all of these links. If this is hurting me (which I think is highly likely), my search traffic is effectively gone.

So, where to from here….

I don’t see it as productive to try and resurrect my rankings since there is no way to know what to do to gain my rankings back. Here’s a brief outline of what I’m going to do;

1. I did after Panda, but the first thing I did was cancel ALL of my blog network subscriptions. I also seriously looked at thee other services and subscriptions I use and ditched the ones to do with link building ( I cn always pick them up again if this strategy still works later).

2. Change the meta tags, title tags and meta descriptions on 1 site only. This is for me to determine whether it’s worth while changing the on-page facotrs for the rest of my sites. I’ll probably choose my most authority site. If that site site doesn’t go back, it’s probably going to be an off-page factor (not in my control).

3. The main thing to do is change the focus to my non-Google traffic sources. I’ve been getting good results with answer sites, YouTube and other social media sites. I’m going to start investing more time and energy in this direction.

Hopefully, by NOT worrying about search engine traffic, it might come back anyway. If my sites start doing great again, they’d hopefully be hard for Google to ignore (well, that’s the theory?). If they don’t rank again, so be it, but this time I’ve definitely learnt my lesson.

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Black SUV For Sale – Nissan X-Trail

My X-Trail

My X-Trail

We are leaving Brunei so we’re selling our baby below market value! We absolutely love this car. It’s a dream to drive and had served us very well here. We’re sad to have to get rid of it.

When we first got to Brunei we were only looking to spend 10k, but luckily for us we decided to spend a bit more to get something nicer. I’m glad we did because in Brunei you spend A LOT of time in your car! Having a nice car is worth its weight in gold.

Here’s the boring stuff;

Nissan X-Trail 2001 – SUV – Black – Automatic – 2500cc Petrol – Beige Interior – 180km

Asking price: $12.5k
Nissan  has given Market Value of $16k

Service record at Nissan Boustead
Available: 12th Dec 2011 (deposit required)

Full service Oct 2011 at Nissan;
– New battery
– 2 x new tyres
– 4 x new spark plugs
– Full cooling system flush
– Oil change, filters etc…
– Road tax / insurance paid until 09/12
– Only 2 owners

Call or TXT Neville on 7103657

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Planning and Monitoring for Clickbank Success

I’m in the middle of my beach holiday writing this post, but I just read a sad post on another forum which moved me to get these thoughts down on paper (keyboard?).

The most important thing to do in this business is to have a clear set of goals and then come up with a plan of action to follow to achieve these goals. This involves more than just writing down ‘I want to make $1000 a month’. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Goals should be achievable and you should be able to see, at least, a realistic way of how you’re going to achieve it.

Once you have a goal, usually in IM this will be a monetary goal. The next step is to reverse engineer what you need to do in order to achieve this goal. This will be your plan. Using Clickbank Analytics (under the reporting tab) this step is very easy. Let me explain.

Once you’ve been promoting Clickbank products for awhile you will have compiled some very valuable information. My advice is, if you’re not doing it already, to keep a monthly spreadsheet of all of the main KPI’s (key performance indicators). The main ones to monitor are # of hops, net sales and total sales amount. Personally I also add in others like order form impressions and average sale value. This is a task I do myself at the end of every month. You simply change the date range to last month and download the CSV file.

I simply copy the bits I want from this file to my master spreadsheet and they will automatically be added to my overall stats. Monitoring in this way is essential to both my continued goal setting and also is a great motivational tool. The numbers don’t lie, statistics give you a lot of power!

Now here’s how to use this info. Firstly, you need to use these numbers to calculate your conversion rate as a percentage (# of sales / # of hops * 100). Next up, work out your average sale value (total $ sales / # of sales), and finally I also like to work out the earnings per hop (total $ sales / # of hops). Now I’m not gonna hold back here. Here’s a close indication of my own stats for use as an example;

Conversion rate: 1%
Average sale value:$25
Earnings per hop:0.23c

Now here’s how to use this data. A conversion rate of 1% means that I get one sale for every 100 hops I generate. So, if I want to make $100 a day I need to generate 400 hops per day. Yes, it’s this easy if you keep good stats! Working it out the other way 100 hops multiplied by 23c per hop gives me $23 per day (almost the same result worked out differently).

Can you see how easy goal setting can be if you use these stats? To make $1000 a day on Clickbank I’d need to generate 4000 hops.

The good thing about keeping these stats is that these numbers get more and more reliable the longer you track them. You can also keep stats for each product/offer you run, it’s really up to you.

Clickbank, Amazon and I’m sure most other sites offer these stats for free, so if you’re not using them yet, you’d better move your ass!

 

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Clickbank Conversion Rates Bombing This Week?!?!

I’ve been on holiday for most of the last week, but as always I’ve found a way to check in on my clickbank stats daily, and I have to say that it hasn’t been good at all!

I track my stats monthly and have my own spreadsheet. My historical hops per order number is 51 (I make a sale every 51 hops I generate). My earnings per hop is $0.48 which I’m quite happy with.

The start of this month (March 2011) has been quite good for me going along at this similar pace. But in the last 7 days I haven’t made a single affiliate sale AT ALL! Unbelievable!

I’ve done 393 hops during this time frame and going by historical stats I should have made at least $188.

I’ve checked my links and they’re all intact. I know this anyway because I’m still receiving data in my clickbank analytics. However, it seems strange for me that these sites are just not converting this week. I wonder what’s going on?

My goal is still to make US$100 a day. I know that I need to generate 1500 hops per week to achieve this mark and I’m getting to closer to it every week.

Hopefully, the CB stats don’t any worse for me or this figure will probably go up.

 

 

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Christchurch Earthquake

This last week has been very distressing. I have to say that I am very sympathetic to all of out friends, family and the whole of the city for what you must be going through. I just can’t imagine what it must be like.

The videos and news clips are truly frightening to watch. I just can’t believe that my town is in ruins. All I can say is thank god for Facebook! The first thing Carole and I did when we heard about it was txt and then check FB.

I truly don’t know what will become of Christchurch now. People seem to be leaving town in droves, most of them for good, and I don’t blame them. We got to Brunei just a few days after the September 4 quake and nearly 6 months later and they are still going on. I can’t imagine functioning in that sort of state of fear, it must be scary.

Just last week Carole and I finally decided that we would go back to Christchurch after our time here in Brunei, however the events over the last week have totally changed things. Unless the shaking stops for good soon I can’t honestly see us bringing out family back into that. The town I once loved is crumbled and seeing that we are in a privileged position to pretty much pick anywhere we want to go after this, we’d be crazy to go home unless it was totally safe – Is CHCH really going to be safe again?

Our hearts go out to all those people who have lost loved ones. We are following the news closely, probably more than most people back home! Hopefully the quake in Wellington tonight won’t turn into anything major.

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My Hangi Site Outranks Wikipedia!

Thought I’d share on my blog because it’s just the best news I’ve had all week.

My Hangi site www.howtohangi.co.nz now ranks in the number 1 position on Google NZ – www.google.co.nz, the .nz Google is the most important for this site.

The best news about this is that I have managed to outrank Wikipedia. In the internet marketing world this is BIG! Wikipedia has huge page rank and authority in Google’s eyes, so quite an achievement for this modest site.

The Hangi site currently makes honestly about 1-2 sales a week (NZ$38). Not bad earnings, considering it’s all on auto-pilot. Hopefully this new position will increase my traffic and sales.

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Brunei Internet: b-Mobile vs e-speed

We all know that the internet services in Brunei are not what most of us are used to back home. This subject is rather important to me as I work online and a slow connection really affects my productivity.

This post explains what I’ve found using both the b-mobile pocketmodem service (prepay $35 for 18 days), and also the e-speed service through telbru ($68 per month, least expensive package).

First, here are the results I did through speedtest.net. I did 3 separate tests at 3 different times of the day over several days;

b-mobile

test 1: download 0.73mbps upload 0.18mbps

test 2: download 0.66mbps upload 0.08mbps

test 3: download 0.55mbps upload 0.11mbps

average: down 0.65mbps up 0.12

e-speed

test 1: download 1.23mbps upload 0.36mbps

test 2: download 1.07mbps upload 0.34mbps

test 3: download 1.29mbps upload 0.34mbps

average: down 1.2mbps up 0.35mbps

RESULT: e-speed IS 3x faster than the b-mobile pocketmodem connection

As a user I have also found that the e-speed service is a lot more reliable. I do a lot of file uploads/downloads and ftp transfers and so far e-speed has been giving me much better results.

I haven’t tried out skype yet, but I’m sure I know what the result will be.

IMHO if you are still using the dongle you NEED to ditch it! Just wait until telbru have one of their special promotions and jump on in. I did the new year special and got a free modem, wireless router and no registration fee. They seem to have these specials every now and again.

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My new blog!

This is the very first post to my new blog. I’m gonna be posting stuff on here about my life, my lovely family,  my life in Brunei and last but not least… how I make money online.

I hope you enjoy my content. Be sure to ‘like’ me on facebook using the box to the right.

Sorry this post isn’t longer, but I’ve been spending hours setting this up and now I’m going to bed….

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