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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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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As you know, I’ve been running an open case study on my affiliate site and since it went online in February, it has earned me maybe £5 in commission (if I take out one anomaly of £45 commission). This, I believe, is primarily down to the lack of traffic the site gets – averaging about 2 or 3 visitors per day. However, since february, the site has experienced a couple of spikey days, where traffic shoots up past the average to around 25 visitors per day. These are the days that Google ranks the site on the first page for its own name. Have a look at this screenshot from analytics:

It’s a little condensed here so you might want to click the image to view a larger version, but you can see that except from the first couple of weeks, where Google gave the site an early ranking boost, the site’s visitors dropped substantially. Every so often, a spike of traffic would come through and that is attributed directly to the early rankings boosts returning for a day only.

Up until today, these spikes had lasted a day, maybe two at most, before they dropped back to oblivion. What excites me today, is that I’m into my 3rd day now and the rankings are still there. It’s also been a smaller gap since the last spike this time round, which suggests that maybe I’m starting to pull out of some kind of filtering system.

Like I said in the title of this post, I’m not holding my breath that these rankings will stick and I’m not writing about how this could be the turning point – I’ve done all that before and it just seems to antagonise the mighty G who banish me to limbo the following day. No…this time, I wait…

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So basically, my battle is that I’m struggling to rank organically for anything at the moment – even my site name – and my google webmaster tools is showing indexed urls: 0. This would suggest Ive been totally dropped from the index for being a ‘thin affiliate site’, however there are some rankings left for other terms and I am still showing up under the site: command. This gives me a very small hope that perhaps what I am experiencing is no more than some sort of filtering process as google familiarises itself with my site, its age, its backlinks and its content.

So what can I do about it? I have no idea really but my gut is telling me to put some time into creating 1 or 2 really useful articles (I mean, really useful, not just 500 words of relevant text that sounds sort of useful) and to write a couple of original ‘news’ items for the site with some outgoing links to sites that rank in the top 5 in google for my target keywords to ‘associate’ myself with some respectable sites.

The salt in the wound with all of this is that last week, when my site enjoyed a 2 day return to page 1 of google, I sold 3 items….

Anyone else been through this? Am I overreacting? Is the indexed urls: 0 thing normal? How can I fight this?

- Edit – I’ve just been trying to read about why my indexed urls could be 0 and I’ve stumbled onto a Google Caffiene update thread….could my rankings drop have anything to do with google’s long awaited ‘caffeine’ update?

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This means I’m back at the start – albeit a few sales better off. I’m not going to write too much more in this post because there’s not much more to say other than that I am extremely frustrated but know that I should have known better when the search engines are concerend. You’re never on top of the game and every day should be another day of work that will sustain your rankings.

Now it’s back to the grind with links, content and more links.

Here’s to affiliate marketing!

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I launched the site in February 2010 and it experienced good long tail traffic throughout February (when I say good I mean it was getting 30 or so uniques per day for very targeted terms) until it vanished from all rankings in March. It’s now coming to the end of April (about 6 weeks after my site vanished) and as I sit here now and do a search for ‘bar stools uk’, I can see my site for the first time in over 6 weeks sitting pretty at position #9 on page 1 of google.co.uk. That’s great news. It could signal the start of a return to rankings and hopefully the beginning of some regular commission with this site which has so far earned £52 in two sales in almost 3 months – pretty poor you’ll agree.

This blog post is actually happening in real time as I continue to check my rankings and analytics for today and I am absolutely chuffed to say that it looks like the site is getting full credit now. Since the site blacked out, I had been lucky to get 2 or 3 visitors per day (and they were coming from yahoo) but today I’ve had 8 unique visitors from google for highly targeted keywords. This has really lifted my spirits because despite having my best month this year with my other affiliate site (my PPC-powered site), I was really entering a stage of hopelessness – again. Seriously, the life of an affiliate marketeer musketeer, at least in the early days, is one of extreme ups and downs. Actually, come to think of it, when I ran my first business (which I subsequently sold for a decent profit) it was no different. Some days I was buzzing and some days (those days where no sales come in) I was rock bottom. I’ve known since then that the life of a business-person, especially one who runs their own business, is exactly that, a rollercoaster of ups and downs and this affiliate marketing lark is no different. You just have to guts it out. I set myself a goal of getting an affiliate marketing company up and running by the end of the year and I really mean it.

Alas! With this site now back in the rankings, I feel like things are moving in the right direction and with a little bit of luck and even more graft, I am confident the site will start to make a little more money. It’ll never make me rich or sustain a full time salary but the whole process of getting it up and running and into a shape where it’s making a couple of hundred quid a month will serve as the perfect blueprint for additional sites moving forward.

To summarise, if rankings remain intact and solid (and I am trying to be prudent with my forecasts here but the excitement of actually returning to the SERPs is too much to contain), it took me 11 weeks from the time the site went live to now to get properly listed in the SERPs.

Factors that may have contributed to this:

• The domain was registered over a year ago but the site went live only 11 weeks ago. During that down time the domain had no hosting and was essentially just sitting there.
• I have written approximately 60 pages of unique content for the site.
• I have posted blog comments on related sites, written PR articles and took part in reciprocal link programs with other bar stools-related sites.
• The site is running on WordPress with a custom theme that I coded myself to have a strong SEO layout

If anyone else has a site around about the same sort as mine and about the same age, I’d love to hear from you to see where you are. I’d really like to hear from you guys who are perhaps 3 or 4 months ahead of me in terms of your ‘timescale’ compared to mine to give me a potential idea of how things could pick up in the next few months. Will I be running my own affiliate marketing company by the end of the year?

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However, now we’re 5 weeks into the site and practically all visits have gone. Google has dropped the page from its top 10 positions (even for its own domain name) so chances of making any commission from this site over the next few weeks look pretty awful. I’ve read about this problem in a number of forums and have experienced it before for a couple of my sites so I have every confidence that rankings will return in time. In the meantime, I have to keep on adding content and building links to this site though so that when they do return, they return with avengance!

Of course, this now completely hits my earnings target for March, where I had hoped to make £640 revenue from affiliate sites and now that I am one site down, chances are that this target is out of reach.

I’m not so sure that it will hit my earnings too much, however, as currently; in 4 weeks the site has only managed to make 1 sale and £49 commission.

So here’s my analytics stats for the last two weeks…

As you can see there’s a definite upward trend but that’s to be expected from a site so new. If you click on the stats, you’ll see 75% of traffic is coming from the search engines – or, rather, google. I showed you the other day a list of keywords that were hitting my site and how I was dissapointed that none of them had turned into a sale because they were highly targeted, long tail keyword searches for specific products that I (my merchants) were selling. I have absolute confidence in this website but the no commission thing was really bugging me so I set about contacting a few other affiliates via the Affiliates4U forums.

After driling down a few of my traffic results to a fellow marketeer musketeer, it was refreshing to hear the thoughts of someone else outside my head. Basically I was whinging because my site received 16 visits and only sent 2 clicks to my merchant. I showed this to my colleague who came back at me with some sound logic.

“Yeah, but if you take out the searches that were instant bounces (because you aren;t selling what they want), you’re down to 10 relelvant visitors. Then when you work it out % wise, you achieved a CTR of 20%.”

A 20% CTR sounds good but I was hoping for 70/80% due to the highly targeted traffic and relevant landing pages. But am I being over ambitious? Is a 20% CTR a good amount? I also asked of my fellow musketeers and of myself what the average clicks to conversion numbers are and there was a clear, “around 100 visitors per sale” message. This doesn’t really bode well for me at my current volume of traffic and if it remains as it is, I’d need to wait 50 days to send 100 visitors to my merchant and then hope that I get the 1% conversion…

If this is the rule of thumb moving forward then clearly I need to ramp up traffic significantly so that I am sending 100 clicks to my merchants every day. This means that my target in terms of visitor numbers should be up around 500 visitors p/day.

I now have two options to push this site forward which must be taken in order to make this all worthwhile.

1. Use PPC to increase visitor numbers
2. Improve my organic rank of 11

Now with my product paying an average 5% commission on an avge order basket of around £130, that would net me £6.50 in commission per day. To make this anywhere near worthwhile, I’d neet to cap my PPC spend at £3 per day to come out with over 100% gross profit and even then I’d only be looking at £105 a month. I mean c’mon, really, is it worth 2 hours a night for £105 a month?

The answer is, of course, no. The numbers I’m throwing about here are simply too small to get me going and I need to be much better than my little model above. I’m looking for £1000 a month in commission from this site and that means (at a rate of 5% per sale) that I need to send £20,000 of revenue to my merchant. Now the math on that means I need to refer 154 conversions a month, or, to make it easier for me to comprehend, 5 per day.

The result of all of this is that I need to dramatically improve my CTR to my merchant to give myself a chance. I also need to dramatically increase my traffic and I don’t want to spend on PPC to do it. That leaves me with no option but to get link building and writing content every day for SEO.

As to why I’m still waiting for my first commission, the answer, at this point, is simply that I’m not sending enough traffic to my merchants.

1. The default link structure is a bit cumbersome.
   eg. www.affiliatemusketeer.com/?p=3
   As you can see, this isn’t very user friendly for your user nor actually for the search engine. A more descriptive link structure works much better, for example:
   www.affiliatemusketeer.com/affiliate-marketing/550-commission-last-month-but-now-im-stuck.htmlFortunately, this is easy to implement and you do it within your WordPress admin screen under the ‘General’ tab and then subsequently under the ‘Permalinks’ settings. Then all you need to do is click the radio button that allows you to specify a custom structure and past in the following structure:
   /%category%/%postname%.html
2. Remove /category/ from wordpress urls
   There is one other additional step regarding links and that is how to remove the /category/ from your front-end urls. At this stage you probably have no idea what I’m talking about but you would see if you saved your permalink structure now (after following the instructions in 1 above) that when you read your blog, when you hover over a post that is within a specific category, the url will look something like this:
   www.affiliatemusketeer.com/category/affiliate-marketing/550-commission-last-month-but-now-im-stuck.html
   As you can see, there is an extra, useless /category/ directory in the url and your url will be much more descriptive and effective if you remove this.

   To remove /category/ from your urls, stay within your ‘permalinks’ settings page in the Wp Admin and near the bottom you will see an input field for ‘Category Base’. Set this to be ./ – yes, that’s dot forward slash. This will remove the unneccessary and useless /category/ from your wordpress urls.

3. Add the Headspace 2 plugin for unique page titles and descriptions
   Out of the box, wordpress does come with some basic unique page structure functionality. Because I like to know that every single page is doing as much as it possible can for SEO purposes, I like to have a little extra control and the plugin Headspace 2, found over at the WordPress plugin repository does just that. Simply download the plugin, unzip it to a directory on your computer and then upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder of your wordpress site. Once uploaded, go into the plugins admin section in the Wp admin and activate it.Once activated, you will see that on every page and post you now write, you have the option to add a specific page title and description. This is great for SEO and you should always have your target keywords in both the page title and page description of every page or post on your site.
4. Search engine spiders can’t crawl your site
   Im actually adding an extra problem here which I cam across today on the Affiliate Project website which highlights how, out of the box, the default setting for wordpress is to ‘Block all search engines from indexing your site’. When you install WordPress you are given this option right at the very beginning of your WordPres installation routine. Its a radio boxed option that either ‘allows search engines to index your site’ or ‘block search engines from indexing your site’. The default is to block them.

   Again, because wordpress is such an awesome piece of software, changing this (if you didn’t change it during installation), is easy. Simply log into your Wp Admin and go to settings and then to privacy. In the privacy settings page you’ll see the radio boxes again and can simply select the correct one – ‘Allow!!!!’

   This is a handy tool to have though if you don’t want google or the other search engines to come along and start indexing your site before you’re ready. For example, I customise a lot of my themes and I only ever like to let search engines onto the site when I have enough good content up there for them to chew away at.

These four SEO changes are my ‘wouldn’t do without’ changes that I make to every site for maximum SEO effect.

Take this one, for instance…

I came across a blog post today talking about how google was dead, or rather, how SEO just went all tits up. I found myself drawn in as it was an interesting read in itself but when I got to the end I couldn’t help but feel like this was the arse end of a bad ripple from somewhere up at Tier 2 (a wannabe guru) which had filtered down and now those at the very bottom were re-writing the same article they had read up at Tier 2. Its like a panic effect where some important points get lost in translation because we’re all so used to focusing on SEO and rankings and lots of the scrapers at the bottom of the line just reword what was already written above without actually thinking about what they’re writing because they’re so focused on popping out 2 posts a day to meet the next target and gurus are gospels so what they say must be right. I don’t know, you get all them cool chess pieces at the back and then them little shitty ones at the front that do all the shitty work..it was a bit like that.

Anyway, the problem with this tradition though, is that we’ve all gone mad and lost sight of what google has always been about. Providing relevant content to its users.

And this is precisely the reason why I don’t think google has gone tits up or, indeed, will ever go tits up (to the point of no return at least). At the end of the day, google makes money by providing as accurate a set of results as possible, so even though the chance of localising campaigns and geotargeting SERPS is practically set in stone for our future, we should not look at this with disdain or within an armageddonesque context. It is not the end of SEO!

How Can I Say This, I’m Not Bruce Willis!

Well, if google’s most singular goal in life (lets naively assume they’re not out just for our money just for a second and just for the sake of this article) is to deliver accurate, representative, relevant content, then surely that content spans beyond geotargeting and localisation? For example, if you have a product that gets shipped nationwide and you build a worthy, reliable, authoritative website that distributes goods and services nationwide and you optimise your site with this in mind and market it and build a big, respected brand around it, then surely google cannot ignore it? My mind wanders here to play.com, amazon.com, ebay.com…its not possible that google will filter out these websites because of geographical restraints because they have such a huge, global presence therefore my thought process goes along to think that if you are already optimising your site to be the ‘biggest in its niche’ then surely your 250 page website about chinese dwarf hamsters will be just as relevant to Dr Frank in Transylvania as it would be for the Church of Stathamology in LA?

The important factor here being the nature of the data sought, which is, let’s just remind ourselves and the Gurus of SEODOM, what search is all about. If its information, then geographical restraints won’t matter. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a specific product then surely local results are a good thing? When I search for a beauty therapist to wax my ass crack I don’t want to be presented with Ass Waxers from brunei when I live in England just because theyve got a million links and some clever way of making every page relevant to my search no matter whether I’m looking for nipple clamps or neoprene gyroscopes, nor even Ass Waxers in london if I live in Yorkshire…but if I am presented with Ass Waxers in Yorkshire…and the one that was SEO’d the best is at the top…then its a win/win, right?

For commercial products/services, the well SEO’d site will still outranks its counterparts in its region because that is the nature of search, and for information, the well written, super king authority site will still outrank localised information sites if they are more relevant to the content the user is looking for.

It doesn’t matter how it gets interpreted by the Super Gurus on Tier 1 or the wannabe wannabe wannabe wannabes at the very bottom of the pile (like me), google is just doing us all a favour and if you have a website that sells local services/products (and lets face it a good 75% of small businesses do), then you’re in a stronger position for the future than you’ve ever been. For those that sell nationally, just remember the golden rule:

Solve The User’s Problem First, Then Sell Your Products Later and You’ll be Alright.