Affiliate Musketeer

I’m not kidding. My bar stools affiliate site is driving me round the bend. Its been online now since the beginning of February and whilst I have had a couple of spikes in SERPs, my site has pretty much stabilised now at the arse end of the rankings. I always had a feeling it was due to the site’s age but as we’re now 3 months plus into the project, I’m starting to think otherwise.

Despite my lack of posts in the blog, I am keeping the motivation factor up for this site and trying to keep working through this very tiresome, depressing time of its lifecycle. I have to put a name to this period and all I can think of is limbo.

How do I keep going when the site just isn’t doing anything? I have some good, well chosen and well priced products up there and everything is in order except 1 thing – there is no traffic hitting the site. Rather than bitch and moan about it (which I do do), the only solution that I can see (assuming my site is still in the google index – and it is according to site:www.barstoolsuk.co.uk) is to keep adding value to the site by writing new, fresh content whilst simultaneously continuing to build links.

This next section of the site is possible worth a blog posting of its own but I’ll stick it in here for the time being and hope it comes up useful for others.

How Am I Getting Links on High PR Websites?

I was browsing through another affiliate’s blog the other day (ShaneBrown.co.uk) when I came across his post about building links to his website. I won’t repeat the method he describes (and reviews) and will let you visit his blog to find out but essentially, I have used the same method over the last week for my bar stools site and have increased the links showing up in yahoo to the site from 23 to 37. All of these links were added to high PR websites using the method described and I can only hope that this method will contribute to my site returning to Google’s search results pages – preferably page 1!

This link building process has taken me about 2 hours each night for the last week as each time I add a link to a site. It takes me this long because I also add a few comments, posts, profiles and just generally give my links the best chance of being crawled by google without looking spammy to the site’s owners and this takes a little extra time over just whacking in anchor text and links which often get spotted pretty quickly and canned without question.

Essentially what I’ve done is used my site’s url as the keyword ‘bar stools uk’ (and a few variations of it) in order to try and rank for the exact search term. With the anchor links matching the site title and url, I really can’t see how this could fail to rank over time unless G somehow has some sort of filter or penalty or flag against the site – which at the moment I don’t think it has.

There is, however, definitely some sort of age thing happening that is preventing my site from ranking for its url (its not in the top 200 at least). As I said previously, the only solution I can think of is to continue building links and adding content and now that I’ve mentioned how I’ve built a few links over the past week or so, it’s time to move onto content.

I’ve Found a Quick Way to Re-write Articles

Well, it’s not really a ‘find’ as such, more of a use of tools that somewhat contribute to making this article re-writing process a lot quicker and less painful:

1. First of all I bought 20 ‘bar stools’ related PLR articles from a plr articles site for $5.
2. I copied the text from the PLR article into Google Translator
3. I translated the article from English to Dutch
4. I copied the Dutch version of the article back into the Translator
5. I translated the article from Dutch to Spanish
6. I copied the Spanish article back into the translator
7. I translated the Spanish version back to English and voila!

I ended up with an article that was similar to the original but not the same. A few quick exact match and phrase match searches on google for a few lines of the new article revealed that it was, indeed, unique. Sometimes the sentence went a little whacky but mostly these grammatical errors were able to be fixed within seconds.

Once I was happy that the article was unique, I submitted it to Ezine Articles and it was approved first time. The bar stools article is now live and sending me a backlink. The content isn’t really that useful but the link will be. If I had some sense I would actually use Ezine Articles to write articles targeting long tail products on my site for conversions but at the moment, I am merely trying to build links because I’m desperate to feel some love from the search engines.

Summary of Progress (or Lack thereof!)

• Built backlinks using High PR websites using this method
• Created a few unique articles with Google Translate and posted them to my site and submitted one to Ezine Articles

Anyone got any other reasons (preferably with solutions) as to why my site is still nowehere to be found in organic SERPs for its own url?

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