I know I’ve fudged up something bad with this site several times over now; for example, I created too much content too quickly. I added individual products to multiple wordpress categories which ended up with me having a shit load of duplicate, fairly thin, content. Major problem with this was that some of the details for individual products was literally just copied and pasted from merchant like Furniture 123 etc.

I thought I would be safe because the urls on the Furniture 123 site where the products were were showing as PageRank grey…which I thought meant that the page hadn’t been indexed and therefore if I nicked the content really quick, I could get MY content indexed before F123. Foolish thing was, I should have actually checked to see if the pages were indexed or not using the google site command but I always try and get to point b via the shortest route possible and in this case I paid for it. The reality is, F123′s content was indexed and all I did was fill up my site with poor quality copied content – then duplicated as I added the bar stools to different wordpres categories thinking I was smart.

If this wasn’t bad enough crack, I also came up with a graphically heavy design which meant that I had to hide quite a bit of text content using css – not via the css display:none mind you, rather by resizing the containing div to ‘cut’ off the bottom of the box where all the content was. I think this is actually a safe way to hide content but either way, a manual review would find me out and I’d be screwed.

Then I blasted the site by paying someone on Odesk to make me 100s of ‘high PR backlinks’ using Paul’s and Angela’s Backlink Packets – which basically consist of a shit load of forum profiles with links back to my site. Not saying this is bad andit did work for a time, but I didn’t really spread my link building beyond this too much and I think ultimately, it just looked a bit spammy.

This guy looks strangely a lot like my organic SEO strategy for Bar Stools UK

Anyway, the result of all of this has been that the Bar Stools UK site has not managed to secure organic rankings – which means that its had no traffic (not strictly NO traffic, but not enough regular traffic to sustain sales each day). It WILL evenually calm down and settle because it’s not banned but throughout all of this time, I’ve tested and chopped and changed and used different linkbuilding strategies and I think overall, it’s just made Google’s job to validate the site pretty hard.

The really annoying thing though is that when it has got traffic, it has worked pretty well which suggests that my page layout is well optimised for conversion and my products and merchants convert pretty well too.

Why Not Just Throw the Towel In and Start Over?

Believe me, I’ve thought about this lots of times. Just dump the site, leave it for a while, let it age and then come back to it later with some fresh ideas. And I have sort of being doing this these last few weeks and perhaps this is why I’ve been a bit quiet with it’s progress. BUT, what I don’t want to do is leave this site without ever figuring out how to FIX it. I think whatever I learn with BSUK will serve me well with my future affilite sites so what I’ve been doing in the meantime is try to understand why it’s messed up (see above) and then come up with a more coherent and planned strategy on how not to do the same thing for other sites.

In other words, I’ve been working on another site, very similar to BSUK actually (even using the same WordPress Template really), but rather than copy what I did with BSUK, I’ve been doing things a little differently based on what I’ve learned.

This is What Has Been Working for the Other Site:

1. Add content slower.
2. Write completely 100% unique product descriptions and write them using better presell techniques. This also involves learning how to write good sales copy. Every single piece of content I now write I ‘spin’ using The Best Spinner (aff). This helps me maximise my time and helps me turn one article into hundreds of unique articles. This extends to product descriptions too…actually, especially product descriptions. Using the presell and sale copywriting techniques, every piece of content I write, I write to convince people to buy. Then I re-write it with The Best Spinner and this means that I can re-use this content anywhere else in the future (like Ezine Articles, for instance) without any duplicate content penalties.
3. Instead of using wordpress ‘categories’ to represent product categories, I’ve created wordpress ‘pages’ that act as the ‘category’ page. On that category page, I then link into all the individual products with images (as you would see in a normal category page) as well as some more 100% unique content supporting the category. This also opens up the opportunity to pull in product feeds with mysql and php directly from my merchants to my category ‘pages’ – although I haven’t evolved to that stage yet. This allows me to cut out all of the duplicate ‘category’ -> posts.
4. Make sure I’d followed all of the WordPress SEO suggestions made by Joost de Valk.
5. Build links using a combination of paced article marketing (aff). When I say paced, I mean submit sort of 20/30 articles per day over a period of time, rather than submit hundreds or even thousands of articles all at once.

All of this hasn’t meant that Ive made it yet or am even close to earning enough money from all of this shit to resign from my job yet, but it has improved the organic rankings of my other site way beyond those experienced by BSUK. So if I’ve been quiet, it’s not ‘cos I’m doing nothing, I’m actually working really hard (good few hours every night and a couple before work in the morning) in the background to fix the problems with BSUK using the techniques above whilst continuing to work on the new site to get top rankings. I’m not there yet but I am hoping that with the new link building strategies in place, I should start to see real positive results before the end of the year.

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Now, I write a lot about my barstools site on here because I wanted to share how to build an affiliate website from scratch with fellow noobs like myself. One day, I hope to have mapped out the proper formula on here in its entirety but for now, you’ll have to settle for ‘how to build a poor performing affiliate site from scratch’. Anyway, my barstools (BSUK) site has earned about £25 this month so far.

The thing is, as I’ve been learning stuff with my BSUK site, I’ve been implementing these key learns on one of my other sites. It too earns about £25 a month but the really interesting thing is that the BSUK site has had so many links thrown at it whereas my other site has had none at all. Interestingly though, the other site has much better SEO rankings. Admittedly, I don’t think there is as much competition in the other niche as there is in the BSUK niche but it’s very interesting to know that my BSUK site, which has 225 ‘pages’ indexed in google (according to the site:www.site.com command) and 190 backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer does not rank as well as my other site which only has 55 pages indexed in google and no backlinks.

I don’t have any #1 rankings or anything like that yet for my other site but then I wouldn;t expect to with no backlinks. The interesting thing though is that google seems to be much more confident with the content of the smaller site than it is with the BSUK site.

The other site is pretty much using the same WordPress Theme and follows the same general on page layout (including the hidden text) yet it still does pretty well. The main differences are that the amount of content on the site is less but perhaps of better quality (not very much DUPLICATE content at all, if any), the fact that domain was registered in 2008 and that it doesn’t have any links.

So what’s going on? Clearly Google seems to prefer my 55 page, unique site with no links to my 225 page site with 190 links. I think the moral of this story is that building a site slowly, organically, and really making an effort to cut out duplicate content (especially if you’re using wordpress) is a VERY important factor in trust and authority.

As soon as I start a good, healthy link building campaign for the other site, I think it will do very very well in the SERPs. In fact, I wrote my first article for distribution on Friday night and submitted it to Ezine Articles, was this a mistake?

I really like the idea (suggested to me by one of my readers) of building 2 or 3 high PR links to solidify my position early on before beginning a larger linking campaign but where do I get these 2 or 3 high PR links? Do I buy them? Will having my first external link come from Ezine Articles confine me to the spam centre?

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Confident that my site was now fully stable in the SERPs, I resolved to increase its position from the middle of page 2 to the top 5! Generally speaking, you can increase your site’s rank in the results pages by building more links to it and that is exactly what I had in mind here.

I wrote myself a couple of (yes, that’s 2) articles with The Best Spinner which meant that I could turn these 2 articles into hundreds of unique articles quite quickly. The plan was then to distribute these articles to as many article directories as possible, making sure that each directory got a unique version of the article. This went perfectly to plan with the aid of a fellow affiliate and some automatic article submission software. The problem though, was that it was so successful, I managed to obtain over 100 links in the space of 30 minutes!

Now, whilst this was a fantastic way to build some super fast, high quality links, in my case it caused a little hiccup for my site.

As many of you who follow this blog will know, my bar stools site is skating on very thin ice and is pretty close to being a spammy site (or at least it was until I made some wholesale changes tonight). I say spammy because there are a few things the site is doing that I wouldn’t do next time around like, for example, hidden text content, too many mentions of the word ‘bar stool’ throughout the site, duplicate content caused by wordpress posts in multiple categories, no privacy policy, contact us page or much text content on the homepage.

So when I say my site was skating pretty thin to being a full blown spam site, that’s what I mean. So, when I’m so close to being a spam site and already have extra work to do to convince google that I’m legit, how do you think the big G reacted when all of a sudden, 150 or so links to my site popped up overnight?

Yep, you guessed it. Smack! Back out of the SERPs again.

At Least I’m Learning!

I honestly can’t say that this has been a pleasant experience and if anything, the whole debacle has contributed to me buying a whole hanging bag of fruit pastilles and eating them all myself. Now I know wallowing in self pity and eating sweets isn’t the best way to fix things but honestly, after this happened I seriously wanted to throw the whole site away and forget AM altogether.

BUT...fortunately, over the last few months I’ve managed to build up a couple of good relationships with fellow affiliates and when things got bad, its really helped me to send an email and whinge about it. Sometimes, as in my case, it really helps to get some fresh eyes on a problem and in the last couple of days, I’ve had lots of suggestions from kindly souls.

Solutions Not Problems!

Armed with this fresh info, I decided to tackle my bar stools site again his evening and have spent the last 4 hours making amendments; the sum of which are:

1. I have added sitemap.xml to sitemap link in footer
2. I have removed lots of links in right hand side bar (they were duplications of links in footer for the most part anyway)
3. I have actually added MORE hidden content, replacing the WordPress tag ‘excerpt’ for ‘content’ in the hidden text sections on the homepage. This should hopefully round up the links vs text argument. Its worked for other sites before so I can’t see why it shouldn’t work here – I know it’s hidden and generally bad crack but I’m prepared to take the risk. I can’t think of any other way to get text rich content onto the homepage without spoiling the visual layout of the site. If it doesn’t work, I can always remove it.
4. Ive added a contact us page.
5. I’ve added in a ‘guides’ page which should hopefully make the real unique content easier to find.

I’m driving now to fix the on page SEO factors so that all my link building efforts aren’t made in vain.

I still might eat another bag of fruit pastilles along the way though….

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It’s probably not #3 by the time you read this but it has finally settled in the first two pages of SERPs. This, I’m convinced, is primarily down to a couple of things that are happening right now:

1. I’m continuing to build links at a speedy pace and because my site is still relatively new in the ‘trusted’ SERPs pages, Google isn’t yet quite convinced by me.
2. Google is picking up different rankings for my site from their different data centres

Why Was I Bouncing Around (and out of) the SERPs?

When I started my bar stools site with WordPress, I left the default wordpress setting to ‘Block All Search Engines’. In the meantime, I pulled products from my merchants and made individual posts on my affiliate website that related to the products from my merchants. I believed this would contribute to good long tail rankings. It might – one day, but not yet.

Whilst my site was still in the ‘block google stage’, I added about 50 products thinking that more content and more products would equal better quality site and rankings. I then wrote 3 or 4 original articles in a number of formats, article, buying guide, best of and press release.

After I had done this, I made sure my sitemap.xml was set up with the relevant wordpress plugin and signed up to google webmaster tools. Once I was satisfied with these things, I unblocked the search engines from finding my site via the option within the WordPress Admin -> Privacy settings.

Voila! I was being eaten up by google who took no more than a week to first appear on the site. Initially, for about a week, the site got good rankings (page 1) but they quickly died off.

For the next 8 months I bounced in the SERPs for a day, then completely out for 4 weeks, then back in for a day, then back out for a month etc etc you get the picture.

Now I know why it happened. It happened because I had TOO MUCH content and TOO FEW links when google first saw me. I was also running WordPress to power my site and this was generating a fair bit of duplicate content because some of my products were appearing in more than one wordpress category. When google came to view my site, it actually got about 250 pages of 70% duplicated content with approximately 10 (poor quality) links. Poor quality because they were simple link exchanges with PR 0 sites and a couple of links from a nofollow press releases and a couple from 1 or 2 articles.

Mostly these incoming links were going back to the homepage which wasn’t really doing anything for me because all that was doing was sending google back to the beginning of a duplicated content website. If I could use one word to sum my site up…it ‘looked’ shallow. Ironically, this wasn’t down to lack of content though, but more down to poor site structure that prevented google from seeing a majority of unique content. Instead, it saw a majority duplicate content.

Failing the content test, google then looked towards my link profile. Were high quality sites linking to me? Was there enough? The answer, of course, was no and despite months of trying to correct this, it took me a whole 8 months to really make a dent in this opinion of my site.

How Did I Do It?

1. I stopped writing content.
2. I hired a virtual worker from oDesk and paid them $3.59 per hour to build me links. I stressed that I didn’t want spammy links made up of forum profiles with random names, no posts and two links in their profile. The forum profiles needed to have at least 2 posts to their name and a paragraph of text in their profiles. The links being built would also not ALL link to my homepage but would be split between 3 urls on my site. 1 homepage and 2 deeplinks (wordpress category pages).
3. I also made a more concerted effort to get my vworker to post on related blogs (dofollow and nofollow) with relevant comments and reasonable links. I managed to get one win on a fairly decent PR interior design blog that had my dofollow link sitewide on their site. I did the same thing with links – not just homepage but inner deep links too. Google loved this one…
4. I repeated everything I just did in steps 1, 2 and 3 again, then again.

All in all this link building exercise lasted approximately 3 weeks and resulted in over 400 links appearing in Yahoo Site Explorer at one stage (before I begun the links, it had been around 60). The day before the links started showing up in yahoo site explorer my site had been ‘out’ of the SERPs. The day after they showed up my site was ranking #6 on page 1.

For a week the site kept it’s rank and I made a sale a day. Then the profile links started to dissapear as they moved into the ether regions of their site or admins deleted them. Blog posts were removed or links dissapeared from home pages. This resulted in yahoo explorer losing almost 250 links and the site falling out of the SERPs completely for a day, only to return on page 3, at position 25.

It’s held that position for almost 2 weeks now and the only reason it’s so far down is because I haven’t built any more links yet (at least I hadn’t until yesterday/today). In the last 48 hours, I’ve used The Best Spinner to turn 1 article into hundreds of unique articles easily and have begun the process of submitting these articles to article directories, ‘how to’ sites and other content focussed sites.

I’m pretty sure that in the next week or so, the several hundred new articles I’ve created with 2 or 3 links in them will start to get picked up by google and I’m absolutely confident that my rank in the SERPs will increase substantially as a result.

If my bar stools affiliate site was able to get top 3 rankings for 2 or 3 good keywords, it’d cross into the £xxx per month category.

If your site has been bouncing in and out of the SERPs, follow the instructions in this post to stop it and start to take control of your rankings!

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When I say rolling around, I mean from ranking on the 1st page for no more than 24 hours to then rolling off the edge and into the abyss of nowehereness. This was the pattern until 3 days ago, that is. This time though, I returned to the rankings higher than I’d ever been before and things really felt different this time. Was it too good to be true?

Well, what makes this even more fascinating is that in the last 3 days, whilst its held its rank, my site has sold 4 items (at least 1 each day). Now, I always believed that if I could just get traffic to the site, it would convert. I had glimpses of this here but these last few days have absolutely cemented my belief that this will be a nice little site when it manages to capture its page 1 rankings permanently.

But now for the bollocks. There’s always bollocks involved! Tonight when I did my checks, the site had dropped from #5 to #58….

But I think this is a positive thing! I know I should never take day to day rankings too seriously because Google is in a constant state of flux but in the past, when my site has appeared in page 1 results, it has only ever lasted approximately 24 hours before being removed completely (at least from the first 10 pages of results) but this time, I’ve only dropped to position #58 on page 6….and it’s the same page that was ranking at #5 earlier today.

This to me feels like a good sign. It hasn’t been banished completely and this gives me great hope for the site. If I try and imagine how the inner workings of the SERPs go in relation to my recent work, I think this is the appropriate behaviour.

Imagine I outsource some backlink building. My virtual assistant manages to get some key links on profile pages, comments and forums. These links all get some form of highlighting on their respective homepages which adds to my total link popularity in quick time. Google likes this and after a month, it starts to ‘believe’ in me. It then ranks me at #5.

A few days later, some of the profiles get banned, some of the blog posts get deleted and all of the home page links to recent content fall off the homepage and ‘move location’…Google now takes a second look. ‘Whaooo,’ it says, ‘what’s going on here like?’ and a huge question mark over the integrity of my site is raised and subsequently, I lose my ranking – but not all the way…it likes some of my links because I haven’t been completely banished.

The solution to my dilemma here HAS to be to, quite simply, build more links. But not spammy ones. I need solid, longlasting, trustworthy links. So…

1. I could buy some links for a year to get guaranteed placement (I have some cash in the warchest now from previous months so I could afford this investment – especially if it’s going to result in one sale per day for the site!)
2. I could write some articles with unique content and get them on sites that will pretty much guarantee placement. Afterall, once the article has been aproved, it’s pretty much going to stay there, right?

I believe either method will contribute towards solving my ranking issue, the only question is, how many links will it take? I’m also one for the easy way out of any situation and I have to admit, buying links for a year sounds like a great option…

Do the experts out there agree with my analysis? Maybe even noobs like me have a better idea, let me know if I’m finally on the right track with this one!

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With this being such a momentous (perhaps temporary) moment, I though it an apt time to go through my top 5 reasons to keep going:

I hate to gloat, but I told you I’d manage to get back in the rankings at the end of last month by following some key SEO guidelines. Of course, at the time I was guessing and running with gut instincts rather than proof but maybe (just perhaps) I was actually right.

Anyway, I want you all to share in this moment with me as you look at the screenshot….

(10 second pause to bask in the moment……)

There, wasn’t that worth it?

Now Onto Some Real Stuff and Why This is Good News

So what? What’s the big deal with being a lowly #5 in google? Well, here’s the thing; historically, when my site has ranked for this term in the past (although admittedly I’ve never ever been this high), it signals the removal of some kind of sitewide penalty and the site starts to rank for a whole host of extremely targeted keywords (actual bar stool names and shit). Now, this isn’t me just sitting at home at 2am picking a bar stool name from my site and googling it, no, this is real searchers looking for actual product names.

Most of you will know that this kind of search is normally a search by a buyer who is pretty close to making a buying decision and that means good news for my commissions (a buyer searching for ‘john lewis flower bar stool’ is much more ready to buy than a buyer looking for ‘chrome bar stools’ because they have a clear idea of the product that they want and chances are they’re just looking for the best deal from here on in).

Still Not Convinced it’s THAT Big of a Deal?

So, you’ll get a few more visits from longtail keywords, where’s the money in that? The great thing about this site that so far, I’ve only had glimpses of due to it’s position in the SERPs, is that it actually converts really, really well. When the site has sent visitors to my merchants, it turns one of those visits into a sale 16% of the time! That means for every 100 people who click on one of my site’s products and land on my merchants’ site, 16 of them buy! Maybe some of the other guys who are in the game can verify this but 16% is pretty awesome.

So this all means that when my site sheds the penalty, like it has done at the moment, I get more visits (actually, I get visits!) and this means that I make more money. I’m still in the baby leagues of money making but this is a huge step forward for this site, trust me.

Now for the Bad News…

The only ever times my site has managed to appear in the SERPs in the past, it has only lasted 48 hours maximum before being removed completely from the index again. I wanted to shed the penalty that was holding the site back, I’m crossing my fingers now, hoping that I’ve finally managed it. If I do, I’ll tell you all about it and how I did it but I won’t get too comfortable just yet….

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I even wonder if I’m actually learning anything or developing any truly transferrable affiliate marketing skills. For some reason I think that I should be learning my lessons quicker than what I seem to be because I’ve been working at this for almost a year now and whilst my earnings have improved since the beginning, I don’t believe I’ve crossed any great chasms or found any silver bullets yet. I mean, just take a look at these posts from different points throughout the year:

• It All Seemed Rosy in February
• Then it started to fall apart
• Finally! Some Commission
• Wohoo I’ve made it! My New Affiliate Life on a Desert Island
• Actually, that’s not quite true, this is how it really is
  

I can’t say I’ve found any secret ingredients or special tactics that make money and the only consistent thing I’ve come across is that this is hard, hard graft. The site that I started in February has made probably close to £60.00 in all that time and cost about the same in PPC. By the time I take into account hosting, domain names and labour, it’s definitely not crossed into profit yet.

It’s not like I haven’t been working my arse off to get this site moving either. I’ve built links, wrote unique content, kept the site up to date, worked hard on on page SEO, tried to make the site valid xhtml, submitted sitemaps, improved loading speed…everything that I should be doing but the site is still not ranking for it’s domain name in Google.

Why Content is Still King – Possibly

Up until this month, I’d been focussing my efforts on link building but a fellow affiliate suggested that perhaps the reason that it’s not ranking is that there is not enough unique content on the site (240 pages indexed in google – 30% unique with the remainder being copy and pastes of product descriptions). This made sense to me, I’m a [relatively] new site, with a poor quality link profile and 30% unique content. If I was google, I’d think I was spamming too. This made me think that I might actually have added too many products too soon and instead of building up a healthy, natural pattern of unique content, I blasted it when I launched with 80 products and maybe 10/15 unique posts. The first thing google saw when it found this site was, some would argue, a thin site with some recycled content, no links and a few original articles.

With this new outlook on things, I devoted more time to creating content this month – which reminds me my updates have slipped in the past week. I have been using google news to find stories that could relate back to the site and using them to give me ideas for content. This niche is not something that sparks fire in my belly so content doesn’t always come naturally to me and any forms of inspiration are welcome. Afterall, there’s only once per month I can write about ‘September’s Best Selling Items’. Throw in the fact that my products don’t really have many unique features from one to the other and finding things to ‘sell’ them can be pretty tough. Nevertheless, this is what I must do if I want to balance out the content of this site so that atleast more than 55% is unique. I chose 55% because if I was google, I’d think that I’d be looking for a site that was at least half original.

Why I Needed To Outsource

As you can imagine, with this new revelation about unique content and my site’s desperate need for it, I want to devote more time to creating good content. This means that I have less time to devote to keeping the [just as important] links coming in. Of the two aspects – building links and creating content – I feel most comfortable with outsourcing link building because this does not necessarily require good langauage skills. Good communications skills, yes, but actual written skills, the kind you’d need for content creation, aren’t as important. This means that I can look for skilled virtual workers who offer competitive hourly rates on sites like oDesk to continue building my links for me whilst I focus on creating rich, useful, unique content.

As I work hard on creating at least one unique article per day, my full time link builder will be working hard on building a healthy link profile for me which will include profile/community links, forum posts, directory links (both paid and non paid), press releases, articles, how tos, link exchanges and any other type of link building that they can think of. I am now a firm believer that a mixed bag of links is required to balance out your site’s legitimacy factor and this, I think, is playing a big role in my site’s ranking.

Why Don’t I just Give Up and Start a New Site?

Loads of people offering advice (which is greatly received by the way) have told to me to just forget this site, it’s a lost cause, move on and move up, take what you’ve learned and apply it to a new niche. This suggestion makes perfect sense and I understand where everyone is coming from when they say it. For me though, I need to understand why this site isn’t ranking and I need to fix it before I move onto the next one to prevent me from making the same mistakes all over again. The problem I’m finding though, is that I’m not sure if I’m conciously banking the things I’m ‘learning’ – but maybe I am. I guess one way to find out is by asking myself one simple question; if I did start another site today, would I do anything different? The answer, undoubtedly, is yes…

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This week I have been putting the pedal to the metal by just writing lots and lots of content. I have done this by buying PLR Articles and then re-writing them quickly using simple ‘Find and Replace’ in Notepad. For example, I bought the bar stools PLR pack for my bar stools site and have managed to come up with a great technique for quickly re-writing articles.

I open up one of the aryicles in notepad, I use the find and replace function to replace ‘bar stool’ for my target keyword ‘bar stools uk’ and then save the article. Because the content I’m writing is not for my own site but is for article directories, guest posts and pr sites, I’m actually not that bothered on the quality of the article so I use google translate to ‘re-write’ the article.

I stick the english in, translate it to another language (any will do), copy the new translation into the translate box then translate once more from the new language to another new language then copy that version back into the translate box. I now go from the 2nd translation back to english and usually I get something 70% quality out of the other end.

I then rewrite the 1st paragraph (you don’t have to do this but I think it helps with manual approvals) into very good english and then do a quick google search for article directories, free article directories etc etc. I submit the article to one directory (maybe 2 if I’m feeling good), then go back to translate and rewrite it again using the method above.

I then submit the new article to a different article directory, each time making sure that my resources box is targeting my keywords. I have made sure that my anchor text is never exactly the same in each case.

So far this week, I have written about 15 articles this way and submitted them all to directories. I’ve yet to see my site re-appear in the SERPs but I’m sure that this new found energy will see me returning one day soon.

If I do this at the same time as outsourcing some profile links, I think the strategy will pay off for backlink building.

I am now looking into outsourcing this task to someone from oDesk for about $3 per article re-write + submission so that I can focus on adding new products to my actual site along with good quality content for conversions.

I am finding that the biggest restriction on my progress at the moment is the limited time I have to do all the things I know I need to and the logical thing to do now is spread the load to keep things moving forward.

Anyone else found a better way to achieve the same kind of thing?

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Here’s what I did:

• Submitted 2 articles to ArticlesBase.com
• Made 3 comments on ‘bar stools’ blogs (searched for ‘bar stools’ in google and then used the funky nav thing at the left hand side to sort them into blogs. All 3 comments were made on blogs where the comment needs to be moderated and will probably come out the other end of moderation (if they succeed at all) with ‘nofollow’ tags attached to the links. I’m not that bothered about this at the moment, I just need to to mix my link profile up a bit and this is suitable for my needs at the moment.
• Submitted my site to one free directory that required a reciprocal link exchange

I’m currently ranking #136 for my new target keyword in google.co.uk so I’ll be able to measure whether these methods are working are not.

This is particularly useful for me because my site has been online for 6 months now and has gained no sustainable rankings. I’ve had a few suggestions as to why this could be the case but I still remain stuck in my ways that the reason for no rankings is because the site does not have a strong enough quality profile and that includes the incoming links and the content (pages) these links link back to. With this new keyword, I have focussed on one particular niche within ‘bar stools’ and am building an SEO campaign up around that. If this works, I can move into other niches such as chrome bar stools, designer bar stools or leather bar stools for example.

Wish me luck!

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• 292 Pages indexed in Google’s index (typing the command ‘site:www.yourdomain.co.uk’ into google)
• 66 Yahoo Backlinks (See them here)
• A link profile that contained links from: ezinearticles.com, high PR profile links, A4u forum and approximately 10 small individual site reciprocal link exchanges.

I am pretty sure the bouncing SERPs are due to a lack of good quality link profiles due to a fairly restricted number of sites.

Fixing The Problem

Today I spent about 5 hours searching google for Bar Stools related sites and individually checked each site to see if they had an individual link exchange program. About 60% were listing ‘links’ or ‘resources’ on their site so in each of these cases, I added a link to their site on my own ‘extras’ page and then sent them an email asking if they’d be interested in exchanging links and showing them I’d already added their link to my site. Although many were in the same vertical, I explained how the links would be more beneficial for us than detrimental. So far I have had no responses but I am hopeful for at least 50%.

These links will add some good quality to my backlinks because they will sit on very specific, niche, related sites and I’m pretty sure that’s what google’s missing from me.

In addition, I also paid £25 for a directory listing on a home improvement site that allowed me to add in the title of my website and a link back.

When It Works

When I have good proof that this fixes the problem, I’ll write some detailed instructions down on what to do and then outsource the work to someone for about $10.

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