Well this sure has been a crazy month for SEOs and affiliates.

The “unnatural link” warnings that we talked about on our webinar last month have been affecting folks left and right, and as a result, it’s one of the few times where Google makes an algorithm update and we say, “Ok, yep… we need to change some things up”. This post is about those things.

It’s been an even crazier than usual time because of the disagreement between marketers on what this actually means, and what action steps are required in light of it.

In one camp, you’ve got the purist old school guys who say that “This is just another algo update”; “What works to rank in Google is the same thing that always worked”; “Don’t get caught up in this”; “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

And another camp – usually in sync with the first. Not even the usual doomsdayers – that is saying “Google is out to get link builders!”; “We have to fundamentally change how we’re link building”; “We can no longer rely on the search engines for traffic”; and so on.

I’m writing this post because I don’t particularly agree with either of them and I want to guide our readers along what I think is a more intelligent path. Here’s the situation…

What Happened Exactly?

In the industry mainstream, it started with the deindexing of BuildMyRank – a blog network link building service that even we in Unstoppable Affiliate recommended last year. After that, lots of SEOs in forums around the web started noticing other blog networks go down. Then it became a blanket thing. Blog networks are going down.

Why Did They Go Down? And How Were They Detected?

Those are important questions to ask.

It turns out that for the most part, Google was picking up networks of blogs that were all publishing spun content. So where there were 10 blogs, all of a similar age, that all published variations of the same article, with similar anchor text links, Google said NO. And proceeded to deindex.

There may have been other footprints that helped such blogs get detected too – like if they were all linked together, shared IPs, had a common footer watermark – but it seems that the primary cause, is spun content.

This is backed up by the fact that so far, it doesn’t seem like blog network owners (us, and others I’ve asked about this) who didn’t use spun content, and always mixed up anchor texts haven’t seen their networks or their links affected. But time will tell on that one.

Did you use blog network services where you spun articles and submitted them to multiple blogs owned by the same people? If you haven’t already, it’s possible you’ll be affected by this.

Us here? We did. And upon further examination, they were certainly the cause of the unnatural link warnings that we received from Google. When the above became clear to me, I canceled our accounts at sites like Linxboss, BacklinksNinja, and some other networks too. In short, it’s time for some changes. More on that in a moment.

Now…

Why’s This Different To Other Updates?

Remember Panda? There were months of ongoing analysis, trying to determine what things we’re causing a slapping at the hands of that Chinese mountain bear. And even in the end, there was no ultimate consensus. On the question: “What caused my site to get slapped recently?”, the only answer that ever came forth was the equivalent to “Well… it’s complicated”.

This update is NOT like that. Here there’s a very clear cause for a penalty, and there are very clear action steps for SEOs moving forward from here.

One singular thing was penalized. A pretty specific thing at that. This isn’t a time to “keep doing what you’ve been doing – create good content and hope for the best” unless you want to lose all your sites and all your money.

So what do you do?

Action Steps For Right Now

Here’s what you do:

1. Cancel your accounts at blog network services where you were using spun content to submit the same article to many blogs. Even if they haven’t been penalized yet, that’s not a bet I want to make.

2. If you were using any kind of technique for submitting very similar (spun or otherwise) content to multiple blogs for backlinks… stop. It’s not that big a deal: there are many ways to build links.

3. Calm down. There’s no need to stop link building, stop doing SEO, change your business model, or go and get a real job. Besides this one reasonably insignificant thing, SEO is still the same, and link building is still the same.

4. Watch the video below:

Feel better? A little bit? I do

One Last Noteworthy Point

This is the final thing I consider worth mentioning regarding this update.

Having all these sites receive warnings about “unnatural links”, ans subsequent penalties in the search engines has laid to rest the debate about whether something a competitor can do to your site, can harm your rankings. It can.

Just so that’s clear: A competitor CAN build crappy backlinks to your website, and hurt your rankings. And Google now admits this.

The following hilarity was pointed out to me through a post on Dan & Marc’s blog. From that post:

“Well, to understand this, let’s take a look in their support area back towards the end of last year, where they said was part of their “guidelines”:

“Can competitors harm ranking?

There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Then, in November, it got “slightly” modified… just a TINY fraction too:

“Can competitors harm ranking?

There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

Wow, what a difference one word can make! So hang on, saying “almost nothing” means “can”, no matter which way you spin it.

Then on March 14th, they caved.

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.” -http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

In case you missed it, the key difference is in that first line:

From “nothing” to “almost nothing” to “perfect political answer”

Amazing, right?

So that’s something we have to deal with openly in our SEO too. Your options are basically:

a) Monitor your link profile closely and report any strange links you see to Google (via Webmaster Tools) and hope they can sort it out. Aka trust Google to make it right (fat chance in my books)

b) If you see it happening, fight fire with fire (not a recommendation and not something we’ve ever done, but something for you to make your own moral decisions on)

Rock and a hard place? Yep, I think so too.

So it’s definitely a time to be aware of what’s happening at Google and make some minor adjustments to your strategy. Other than that, it’s a time to keep doing the big picture things you’ve always done, and keep growing your business one income stream at a time.

Remember: The only thing that doesn’t change, is that everything changes.

Thoughts/comments/deep seated emotions below.

If you’re reading this post, I’m going to assume you know the importance of link building when it comes to getting search rankings, and making affiliate income.

As I’ve said before, link building (or “off page SEO”) is the great equalizer in the search traffic affiliate game. Anyone can find a niche, build a site, create some content and monetize the heck out of it… but when push comes to shove, the ones who make money are the ones who can link build effectively enough and consistently enough to push those rankings and drive that traffic. This can not be disputed.

So what stops people from doing their link building effectively enough and consistently enough? There are a few things, but in this post, I’m going to talk about one. The biggest one.

Content (Ohh Content!)

I want to say it’s “time”, and explain how most people don’t spend enough “time” consistently link building to see results in their chosen markets. But the only reason it takes “time” is because of this other thing called “content”.

Many forms of link building (generally the most effective ones) require content. And content takes time to create. Too much time for most people. Whether it’s content for blog comments, blog posts on networks, for article submissions, or guest posts, it’s still content and at some point, you, or some one you’re paying, has to write it.

If you’ve followed our methods in the past, you’ve probably noticed this. In Unstoppable Affiliate we talked about submitting posts to blog/article networks. A very effective link building strategy. But even when you only need to submit short posts, you still have to write them.

Personally, I often found it faster and easier to write these little link building articles than even to use a spinner. I can write quickly and the hassle of using a spinning software, going through and selecting your synonyms one at a time, and inserting the little “spintax” code… Ugghh, it gets old very quickly.

And they’re even more annoying because these kinds of articles don’t even have to “be” anything really. Just unique, mildly relevant (depending on their destination) and containing your link with the right anchor texts. If you’re ever writing these, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that… you shouldn’t be. (Because your time should be focused on something more profitable).

Anyway, two things on this subject caught my attention recently. And they point to a cool solution to this little problem and a way to ramp up your link building exponentially, increasing your rankings and your traffic with minimal added effort.

Link Building With Unique Vs Duplicate Content

The first one is this post at Jon Leger’s blog. To save you reading it, he basically ran a little test which clearly uncovered that submitting the same article to a number of directories (or blogs, domains, whatever) is vastly INFERIOR in it’s effect on your rankings, to submitting different pieces of content to different directories.

It’s something many of us knew, but that few of us implement.

It means that submitting an article to 10 directories is ok, but that taking the added effort to instead submit variations of it to 10 directories is much much better.

After reading that, I started looking for ways to integrate this back into our own systems. We’ve tried outsourcing article spinning before, with some success, but hadn’t found a way to do it affordably or efficiently enough to warrant continuing.

Then this thing came across my inbox…

A long time marketer mate of mine, and trusted web ally in the fight against “marketer ridiculousness”, Ben Shaffer, just released a product called Instant Content Robot. It works like this…

As a member, you get to choose 50 unique articles every month in a niche that’s relevant to you. These articles have versions that are PRE-LOADED, with “spintax” – that’s the code containing all the synonyms and brackets that you normally have to spend hours inserting yourself.

You take these articles and you slot them into the Content Robot feature, and it spins them, creating a number of variations that you choose.

“So you’ve got potentially hundreds of unique, spun articles that… really… you didn’t have to spin. You did a copy paste job and clicked “spin” and it was done.”

Actually you got hundreds of unique articles for link building that you didn’t have to write yourself… OR spin yourself.

With these articles, you can go STRAIGHT to article directories, straight to blog/link networks (like the ones we mentioned in UA and more) and post them for backlinks.

I estimate that it would save you 3-6 hours per week, depending on how much time you’re spending doing article submissions/blog posts at the moment. And if you’re not doing any of those (you should be) it will speed up the amount of links you can build by 500% or more. Oh, and it will decrease the amount of time it takes you to make money by about half.

All THAT got me interested, but it was only one part of this service.

For a low monthly price (for which there’s currently a $4.97, 10 day trial) you also get access to:

- An enormous PLR database of around 100, 000 articles (enough for ya?)

- You get a tool to help you find and grab Ezine Articles to spin as well

- And you get a solid set of training to maximize the use of these tools and turn them into traffic and income as quickly as possible.

The more I looked at this, the more I wanted to tell you about it.

For those of you are committed to build your Unstoppable Authority Sites, or following our “0-$100 a day in 2012″ post, this is an invaluable resource that will speed up your progress beyond measure.

The $4.97 trial gives you 10 articles to play with, that you can use to spin potentially hundreds of unique link building pieces of content. To be honest, even if you don’t have the budget for the full service, grab the trial right now, use it for 10 days, and get yourself enough link building content to last you the next few months, for a few measly bucks!

Check Out Instant Content Robot And Learn More About The Trial Offer Here

I can’t recommend this one highly enough, and I hope you get a chance to check it out.

P.S. Like I said, Ben’s a stand up guy who sells with integrity. There’s no hardcore upsell to this, only the option to buy a bigger set of articles with the spintax included. As you’ll see in the trial area, everything you need to make money with this is included for the one price.

There are few things more frustrating than working hard on your affiliate site for a couple of months only to see it suddenly disappear in the search engines seemingly overnight. Maybe telemarketing calls during dinner are more frustrating. But it’s up for debate.

I wrote a post last year trying to educate people on what exactly is going on when your site gets (or seemingly gets) a penalty in the search engines and what you can do about it. But with changes in the search engines even since then, and new results coming to light, it’s become necessary for me to expand on that.

I’m going to touch on how to avoid ever getting such a penalty in the first place (stuff we ALL need to know) and then how to come back from a slapping if you’ve had one.

But first we need to be reminded of the basics…

Google And New Websites

If you’re trying to make money by having your website rank in the search engines, you need to know this:

New websites are at a disadvantage in the search engines relative to older ones. Period.

Keep in mind that when I say old, I’m referring to how long the domain has been indexed in Google for. That’s it’s real age. Not how long you’ve owned the domain.

Further to that, new websites do weird things in the search engines. They’re indexed one day, gone the next. They’re in one position one day, 10 pages back the next day. Back and forth like this, sometimes for a month or more.

I know a lot of you know this. So why am I repeating it here?

Identifying A Google “Slap”

I repeat it because slaps mostly happen to new websites. And when your website is jumping around in the SEs anyway, it can be very hard to identify when your site has ACTUALLY been slapped, and when it’s just doing it’s normal thing before establishing a more consistent ranking.

Want to know the first thing to do when you think you’ve been slapped?

WAIT!

Don’t do anything crazy. Don’t panic.

Just as easily as it could be something, it could be nothing. Continue your daily work on the site and see what happens over the preceding couple of weeks.

Too quickly I see people questioning their entire SEO strategy, wondering which particular thing they did caused their site to get penalized. They’ll change up effective link building techniques that were working, lose faith in otherwise powerful techniques, or stop adding content to their site until they see what happens. No no’s.

If your site stops fluctuating in the search engines and stays permanently at a ranking of page 10 or more for a couple of weeks despite your ongoing link building and when it WAS previously ranking page 1 for your target keywords… chances are you’re in the “sandbox”.

But let’s back up for a second…

What we really want to do is avoid this ever happening. How do we do that?

I’m going to give you the 5 best ways.

The 5 Best Ways To Avoid A Slapping, Sandboxing, or Delisting

These are serious things, because losing months of your work is a serious problem. Let’s take it from the top:

1. Sacrifice a Keyword Targeted Domain In Favor Of An Aged One

Fact is that with a new domain name, you’re at significantly greater risk of getting penalized in the search engines. Old domains are safer.

I know we want to use keyword targeted domains to get quicker rankings – and there’s nothing wrong with that as a strategy – but if you’re talking about being in this game for the long term, and lowering your risk of a penalty while pursuing intelligently fast profits, old domains are your safest bet.

How old is old? I say 2 years at the minimum. And the older the better. I won’t go into strategies for buying old domains, but anyone who bought our Unstoppable Affiliate should be well versed in them.

You won’t get an exact match domain but as long as you end up with something mildly relevant to your broad niche, you’ll be doing great. Oh, AND you’ll have the opportunity to build out an authority site on it that promotes multiple products. Bonus!

If you CAN’T get an old domain for some reason, it doesn’t mean you’re asking for a slapping. There are still plenty of things you can do to keep on Google’s good side.

2. Speed Of Your Link Building

This has been a factor for new sites for years now and it’s still in effect. It’s the main exception to the rule that your site can’t incur a “penalty” for a backlink that’s built to it.

Put simply: If you’re building too many links too quickly, to your new site, it looks suspicious. Google sucks at being able to tell the quality of backlinks, but they’re perfectly well versed at telling the quantity of your backlinks and the velocity at which they’re growing.

9 times out of 10, if someone contacts me to say that their affiliate site seems to have been slapped, aggressive link building is the cause.

What’s aggressive? I’ve come to think that aggression relates to both quantity and quality (really meaning PR) of your links. I couldn’t prove that to you scientifically, but let’s call it an educated hunch.

Google thinks it’s weird when your site that’s been indexed for a week starts pulling all kinds of backlinks from all kinds of websites that are much older and more authoritative than it. Why wouldn’t that look weird?

That’s particularly the case when your new website isn’t adding much new content. Google: “What is so interesting about this site when it’s number of pages in the index isn’t growing and it’s only 2 weeks old?”

You can see where they’re coming from.

So what’s too aggressive. I used to go with less, but SEO expert and friend Matt Carter convinced me of the strategy of 10 links per day at MAXIMUM when your site is just starting out. That’s for the whole first month.

And easy on the high PR links too. If 10 of your 10 are high PR links, I’m going to be concerned for you. Sprinkle 1 or 2 high pr page links in there per day at the most.

You can boost that number from 10 to 15 or more in the second month, but you may find you don’t even need to. 10 links a day if you’re doing it EVERY day is plenty to rank for a whole lot of low competition keywords.

Besides that, as long as you’re keeping the backlinks to your money site as “quality” as possible, you should (not will… it is Google after all) avoid a slapping in those critical first few months.

3. Be Careful Of People Duplicating Your Content

This is a big one that’s only gotten bigger.

Sometimes, particularly with new websites, it’s hard for Google to tell where any given piece of content originated. As I’ve written before, Google will often judge the most authoritative website carrying a piece of content as the originator (that is the oldest with the most backlinks) of it.

And when your website is young, some crappy 2 year old spam blog that’s managed to stay in the index can scrape your content and suddenly YOU look like the thief to Google. Ridiculous, I know.

In light of this, here’s a simple thing you can do for each of your websites.

Let’s say once every two weeks, you go to your website, copy a paragraph from one of your articles (your most important money ones perhaps) and go paste it in the Google search bar and hit enter.

Do any other sites but yours appear in the results? If so, there could be trouble.

What you should do, is go back and rewrite that piece of content. Make edits, add bits in. It needn’t be a full rewrite, just enough to make that piece of content “unique” again. I know that’s a pain in the face, but it might just save your website from search engine destruction.

If you don’t find any pesky scrapers here, that’s great. Do the check again in two weeks. It might take an hour every two weeks to do this check (or you could outsource it for probably a few dollars… or write a piece of software to do it, if you’re so inclined!) but it will be an hour well invested in the safety of your income and your affiliate business.

This hasn’t happened to us, but I’ve heard from other marketers that they’ve noticed one of their sites take a hit in the engines, done as I’ve described here and changed up that piece of content, and had it successfully return to it’s original position in the search listings. This unique content stuff matters!

4. Watch Out For What’s “Above The Fold”

This one’s new as of… like a week ago. If you haven’t heard yet, take note!

Even in our UA course, we recommended using a sidebar banner for your affiliate offer, and getting one banner high up on your piece of content so it sits “above the fold”. We’re officially revising this in the wake of a change at Google this past week, where they’re aggressively downgrading sites with too much advertising “above the fold”.

In reality, I don’t think having the sidebar banner plus a small banner high on the content is going to trip the filter but… I also don’t want to test that out. We’re keeping our sidebar banner placement (at the very top of the sidebar) and removing that high banner in the content, in favor of the call to action at the bottom of the post, and possibly another banner in the middle of the piece of content (below the fold).

Anyhow, point being… if you want to avoid a Google slap this year, don’t throw too many ads in that space at the top of your website. Easy. Shouldn’t even cost you many click throughs.

5. Add Content Regularly

This is something we talked at length about in UA so I’ll sum it up quickly:

When your site is new, and you’re building your backlinks but not building content, that looks weird to Google. When your links are coming in somewhere relative to the amount of new content Google in indexing, that makes sense. You’re adding new content, doing more stuff, and it’s attracting more links. No red flags raised there.

Building a tonne of links to a “static” site is bad news to Google.

How much content should you add? Given that each new piece of content is an opportunity to get traffic from more keywords and make more money, the answer is: as much as you can! One a week is great, two a week is better, three a week is fantastic.

This is the second most popular reason I see people getting slapped with their new sites. Remember it, work on it.

6. Be !#$%@#$& Patient!

Ok so there’s one more.

This probably should have been number one, even though it’s a mental and not a technical point.

The underlying reason why anyone gets slapped in the search engines is because they’re being impatient with their SEO.

I’ve never heard about a real webmaster talk about getting slapped. I’ve never heard a serious blogger talk about it. Or a big ecommerce store. They probably don’t even know the word.

Getting slapped is a “make money online” problem. It’s for people like us.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing you. We all need money and we need it now. We just need to surpress that need a tiiiiny bit if we want lasting success in the search engines and in online business.

Coming Back From A Slap

Once you’ve had a good slapping and you’re sure of it, deciding what to do next can be tricky.

A site can sit in the sandbox for months, and considering that a new site (that you do properly according to what we’ve discussed above) can rank quickly, it’s always a trade off of whether to keep fighting to try and get this site out, or just start a new site in that same niche (or a new one) and use the old sandboxed site for backlinks.

If the site you had slapped had big potential and you’d worked on it a LOT for multiple months and when it was ranking it was really making money… it’s worth sticking with it and reviving it. Revivals happen, they just take time.

What you do here is:

First, check all the points above and make adjustments where needed.

Second, continue your link building AS NORMAL. A site that’s trying to game the search engines will stop working and building links when it’s suddenly dropped from it’s position in the SERPS. A site that’s in it for the long term will continue as before. Google knows this and it’s watching.

Keep building links, keep adding content. Only adjust your link building if you deemed based on the above that you were being too aggressive.

IF you decide that the site isn’t worth rescuing, move on, register another domain and start again. Use the old website to link to your new one for a little extra juice in the beginning.

Frustrating but… lesson learned. Mistake that you won’t make again.

Bottom Line

Slaps are a fact of life for affiliate marketers. But they’re made to be avoided.

By doing things right and having a little patience, none of us should run into them.

Follow the instructions here and I wish you a slap free 2012!

Ever since Panda, most good SEOs have been drawing people’s attention to a few factors that according to the new algorithm changes, have greater importance as ranking factors now. Two of those are bounce rates, and time on site.

If you missed all that talk, we’ve basically said that now, Google is looking more and more at how people interact with your website in order to determine it’s quality or lack thereof. So Google wants to see how long visitors are spending on your site (longer indicating greater quality than shorter) and at what rate people “bounce” from your site, leaving it for an outbound link or hitting *back* on their browser to return to the search results.

Google cares more about that stuff now. But how much do they really  care? An accidental case study we did recently gave us an insight…

Really what I’m about describe is remarkable. Even if you’re an experienced SEO, this should surprise you. Here goes:

Our Accidental Experiment

We set up an example website for our Unstoppable Affiliate training course. It was one we set up just for people in the course, just to show them exactly how we created our sites. It wasn’t supposed to be a site we had that was already making money, just an example of exactly what we do in a real scenario.

We set it up targeting a real affiliate offer and with our real aff links in there, real (quality) content & monetization… the works.

But we didn’t start SEO on the site. It wasn’t meant as an example of our SEO campaign, just of the site layout & structure. I’m not aware of any backlink we built to it at all.

This was a NEW domain name too.

Fast forward about a month…

We noticed the site had made a couple of sales.

It didn’t surprise us much. We knew the market it was in well (we’d been in it before) so we knew the offer converted. We figured we’d somehow picked up rankings for a long tail keyword and had pulled a couple of high converting visitors just with our quality content and by having the keyword in the domain name.

But then things started to get weird…

Sales kept coming.

In one month the site made something like $300. We still hadn’t built a single backlink.

In November so far, the site’s up to $583 earnings, it’s bringing about a sale a day, and there’s still a week to go in the month.

We’re ranking on page 1 for the main keyword, plus a host of others, and bringing in a great volume of traffic. We’re outranking sites with hundreds of backlinks that have been around for much longer than ours.

Oh, and we still haven’t built a single backlink.

Question: How the HECK is this possible?

Now, I can’t confirm this, but here’s our hypothesis… (keep in mind it’s easier to analyze what’s had an effect here because we’ve done so little on this site… there’s not much to choose from!)

We know that Google takes data from web surfers. Not just data about your Google searches but about your browsing habits in general if you have Google toolbar or you use Chrome. Probably in other ways too.

And we know that data about how people interact with your site is an increasingly large part of the judgment of quality of your site.

When we listed the site in UA, it got a lot of traffic. People from the course went to our site and checked it out. Google saw that.

What’s more, they didn’t bounce, and they stayed on the site for an average of 2 minutes 30. A pretty long time for a site like this (and in this market given it’s nature). People were checking out the site to see what we did with it. Of course they stayed a long time!

That’s the only thing that’s happened to the site (including it’s solid content, on page optimization and a keyword in the domain) that could warrant a ranking. A site with JUST solid content, on page optimization and a keyword in the domain is not ranking in this market after a couple of months. We’ve tried it.

So you make up your own mind…

NOW…

What Does This Tell Us?

Before you go out trying to recreate this scenario: don’t. I’m going to assume that this is an overcompensation towards these new ranking factors that’s a part of the algorithm now, and as more people game it, it’ll get leveled out. If in fact it is a real thing, (our humble one case study doesn’t prove much) it won’t last long.

But this does tell us something very important. Google is VERY serious about this bounce rate/time on site/user experience stuff.

There aren’t many factors that can compete with backlinks when it comes to determining your rankings, but this case study tells me that – at least right now – those experience factors can and are approaching that level of “weight” in the algorithm. Remember, our 3 month old site with no backlinks outranked sites that had all other factors equal (content, keyword in domain, on page optimization) AND were older and more established. That is a BIG deal.

What do you take from it?

Where you can improve your content, lower bounce rate, and keep people on your site for longer while still having them click your affiliate links… do it.

There’s a fine line there for affiliates. The longer people stay on your sites the longer they’re NOT clicking your affiliate links. So it’s a very fine balance to strike. But it’s possible.

We’re going to do more and more testing with regard to this and we’ll be sharing the results with you in the coming months.

In the meantime, I hope this provides you some food for thought

Talking to our Unstoppable Affiliate customers this past month or so there’s a situation that seems to have been commonly experienced.

A Google penalty on one of your sites.

A lot of people have asked me what happened, what they did wrong, why their sites got punished. So I wanted to write something for everyone to clear the air a little bit regarding Google penalties, what you might have done wrong, and what you can do to avoid this next time.

First, let’s talk about the types of Google penalties. Really there are 2.

1 is a sandboxing, the other is a “slap” and they are actually quite different in mechanics despite having similar effects.

Sandboxing

Put simply, Sandboxing is what happens when you build links too aggressively to a new website.

When you have been sandboxed, you’ll notice that where your site was ranking on page X for a given term, now it’s at position 100, and it’s jumping back and forth between those two. One week/month it’s page X, the next week/month it’s page X-10. This is more than just the typical Google dance where you just notice your site changing position frequently. This is a signal you’ve done something wrong.

How do you know if you’re sandboxed or just dancing? If you’ve been building more than 10 links per day (averaged) to your brand new domain name and you notice this dramatic jumping, it’s likely you’re sandboxed. If you haven’t been building many links and you’re moving around, it’s likely just a dance and nothing to get discouraged by.

Note that this penalty has little to do with the content of your site, and is mostly to do with your linking. So if this happens, there’s no reason to say “I guess Google is not happy with my content or my on page optimization”. This one is about links, with this minor exception.

We have experienced that if you are adding more content to your site when it’s new, you can get more leeway with the aggression on your link building. So we’ve had experiences where we build more than 10 links a day, and we’re publishing say 3 new posts per week. We kept up the frequency of link building but at one point we stopped adding content, and the link building continued past it. After that, we saw a sandbox effect, after a couple of months, after we thought we’d beaten it. So that’s something to keep in mind too.

How do you avoid this penalty?

Easy. Don’t build more than 10 backlinks per day to your new domain name. How new is new? Younger than 1 year.

How else? Add more content. Make your content grow as your links grow. That makes you look a whole lot more legitimate.

If you are Sandboxed, the best thing to do is:

If it’s your first site and you need fast income, it can be better to just start a new site. It could take you 6 months of consistent work to get out of the sandboxed, and you can get rankings on a new site more quickly than that, so it’s a trade off.

If you want to keep the same site going, you just keep doing what you’re doing. Keep adding content, and keep building links, and when Google sees that the sandboxing hasn’t changed the way you’re doing things they’re likely to boost you out of there.

Slapping

Slapping is what happened this year with Farmer/Panda. And before that with Caffeine, and before that with… whatever.

A slap occurs when Google changes something in their algorithm that causes your site to be looked upon in a different way.

The main big difference between it and a sandboxing, is that this penalty is NOTHING to do with your backlinks, and EVERYTHING to do with the quality of your site/layout/content.

The effect is different too. With a slap you will have had an established ranking for a longer period, maybe months. You’re sitting there, getting traffic then you drop. And you don’t rise back. You don’t dance around with this penalty, you get hit and mostly stay hit. If you see that happen (which is still happening to certain people even months after the new algorithm changes have been implemented) then you’ve probably been slapped.

How do you avoid a slap? That’s more tricky because it’s different each time. But we have some guidelines.

The first guideline is a cliche but it’s unceasingly true: Produce quality content.

That means unique content, content that your readers love, content that is exactly what your readers are looking for. Stuff they’d WANT to find in the search engines. Stuff that meets their needs.

This doesn’t mean if you do that, you’ll never get slapped. Google is an imperfect being and some great sites still got hit. It’s just a game of improving/decreasing your chances.

What we particularly learned in the last update is that Google cares a lot more now about bounce rates, and time spent on site. They think the site with the lowest bounce rate, that a reader is staying on the longest, is the highest quality, and mostly, they’re right.

Use Google analytics to track these metrics first of all. If a site has a high bounce rate or people aren’t spending much time there (about 60 seconds is average) then you need to look at why. Are you showing your readers that this page has exactly what they want? Do you even know EXACTLY what they want?

Nother simple step you can take? Longer content. No more 300 word articles on your site, ok? The longer your (quality) article, the longer your reader spends there and the more information they get. We do 700 word articles on average and it works great.

If you’re slapped?

Look at your content and try to make changes. Adjust stuff that’s not unique. Improve your quality, start adding new high quality stuff. On this one, you might come back and you might not so it’s also hard to decide on the best path forward.

Conclusion

Now hopefully if you see your site get “penalized” in some way, you’ll know exactly what’s happening, why, and what you need to do about it.

Don’t apply the wrong strategy to the wrong kind of penalty. Know what’s happened, and react accordingly.

I hope this helps!

So many people have asked me about this recently that I was forced to make a half decent presentation for you on at least one high value method of link building.

Really, the presentation below says the rest. By the end of it you should be completely clear about the kind of backlinks you need to build (the best ones… and actually about 15000 of them) and have a technique right in front of you for doing so very quickly and easily.

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This one closes tomorrow too

Unfortunately I got onto this one way too late. This tool has just been released and the launch special pricing ends at the end of this day, Friday June 3rd. It’s half price for the first month, which is part of why I think it’s such a good deal.

Like I say in the video, this is a method of link building that costs money (like most of the best ones do) but that represents probably the highest possible value/actual link juice for the money you’ll spend, of any similar link building method. It’s literally 15 300 backlinks for you, to as many sites as you choose, all your own anchor texts, for that same price.

Finally, don’t think of it as a service you need to use forever necessarily (especially if the price is high for you) – think of it as something you can use as long as you need to, and cancel when you’ve gotten big results from it. People don’t like me saying so, but there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Bonus From Me

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Final word: This is a way to get a lot of QUALITY backlinks with a small investment and almost no work. That is rare. I’m a member of probably 5 services like this but I’ve never mentioned them to you because they aren’t as high value for money as this one. Click the link below to check out FreeTGen now.

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So I’m doing a little spying on a search engine competitor for a particular keyword today. The site I’m looking up is one I’ve seen just ahead of me, fluctuating between position 1 & 2 (I’m at 3-4) for some time. I figure it’s got a pretty well established position.

I go to Yahoo Site Explorer, and check out their backlinks. There are tools to do this, but I don’t mind this free tool for checking backlinks – a good tip for those of you looking to do the same.

My goal is of  course to see if they have any backlinks that I could replicate. Maybe a blog they commented on where I can comment too… a forum or a profile site where I can get a link as well.

This particular site owner, despite ranking above me for a significant period of time, didn’t have any links worth replicating. In fact, I couldn’t believe what I saw. This site, ranking above me for a mid level competition keyword, had about 170 backlinks, I estimate about 160 of which were… directory submissions. Yeah, I mean like website directory submissions. Remember that ancient form of back link building? And they weren’t even good directories… sites like (fictional) seobacklinksdirectory.net – directories obviously created for SEO function (ie “manipulation” of search engine rankings through backlinks).

THAT guy, with THOSE links, is ranking above me. I don’t mean to brag, but I have some pretty rad links. So much higher quality than these links it’s not even a discussion. But it gets more weird…

I do a search in Google for their links… good old “link:” search. Google shows ZERO links. I’ve heard it said for a long time (but not had it confirmed more recently) that Google only shows backlinks from sites above a certain age or PR… so that isn’t so surprising. What’s surprising is that despite that… the site is RANKING in Google.

So let me be clear:

Google doesn’t show any of their links, but they’re ranking the website. That means they’re obviously counting the links, even though they don’t appear in a link: search (important to note, for those of you who check your own backlinks regularly). They’re ranking this website when all they have is crappy, low quality website directory links!

[On a side note, it was interesting to see that this site owner had so many of these directory listings indexed... I suspect they fed their list of submitted URLS that contained their link, through some kind of pinger to send extra spider activity in their direction, causing all the directory listing URLs to actually be indexed and "count" as backlinks - more on that another time]

What does this tell us? Here’s what it tells me:

For all their talk… for all the fear mongering… for all the algorithm changes…

Google still just isn’t THAT good at judging the “quality” of a link. And for the most part, they’re still running on the same old algorithm rules they always have done. They rave on and on about all these different kinds of links they think are bad, and they will devalue, and tell us to focus on “natural” link building methods but it’s all BS.

Not just Google either. People in forums everywhere run around scared about a “penalty” they might get for some link they built… Nope. Don’t think so.

Like take this video that one of our readers pointed out last week (thanks DK!) – It’s Matt Cutts talking about how he expects that in the future, links from Article Marketing will be devalued…

Oooooh, I’m so scared!

I’m sure that when Matt looks at a republished article, he can tell it’s from a “low quality” site… Pity the Google algorithm can’t. His own company’s algorithm can’t even tell that a link from a spam web directory with a domain as blatant as “seolinksforyou.info” is low quality! Yeah, I’m sure article marketing links will get devalued… If spam web directory links haven’t even been devalued yet, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Bottom line: This doesn’t mean you should go out and build a bunch of crappy links. What it does mean is that, when trying to determine what works and what doesn’t when it comes to SEO, don’t listen to Google reps, don’t listen to (most) SEO teachers… listen to the algorithm! Watch, and experiment for yourself to see what works and what doesn’t.

The algorithm can change, but it never lies.

Before I even start, I have to say that while I’ve known about the following principle for some time, it was only this last few weeks since reading about it in Mark’s Dominating Google course, and then doing some tests that I learned how deep this really goes.

And what I learned shocked me.

Even in the first version of Firepow, we included a feature so users could add a set of “page templates” like About Us, Contact Us, and Privacy Policy to their blogs, based on the principle that Google looks for the presence of pages like these on your site to judge your legitimacy as a content provider. In other words, having those pages is an advantage. I first heard it a couple of years back from a guy who mainly did Adwords marketing but it’s equally relevant to anyone who’s hoping Google to view and rank their site well in the paid or organic listings.

However it turns out that what the big G is looking for is much more than these 3 pages.

It starts HERE, a little page in the Adwords guidelines about Quality Score (one of Google’s measures of the quality of a page or a website) where they discuss (if you scroll about half way down) a little thing called Transparency.

To quote them:

“In order to build trust with users, your site should be explicit in three primary areas: the nature of your business, how your site interacts with a visitor’s computer and how you intend to use a visitor’s personal information, if you request it.”

And more specifically, that they want to see you:

* Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
* Honour the deals and offers that you promote in your ad.
* Deliver products and services as promised.
* Only charge users for the products and services that they order and successfully receive.
* Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.

If you read between the lines, you can guess what each of these mean… An About Us page, a Privacy Policy page, and an AFFILIATE AGREEMENT.

In case it’s not perfectly clear at this juncture:

This is Google telling you exactly how they want your site to be, in order for them to consider it high quality. If you are looking for traffic from Google there’s every reason to follow these guidelines as strictly as possible!

What I learned from Mark at Dominating Google, was a full list of the templates or pages that you need to have, that are required for you to be seen as a “quality” site. They are:

About Us
Contact Us
Privacy Policy
DMCA Policy
Anti-Spam Policy
Terms Of Use
Affiliate Agreement

What I mean is, and what Google wants to see, is both the presence of these posts/pages, and links to these posts/pages in your site’s footer (or somewhere on your site) so they are visible on every page/post of your site.

Now To My Tests

In sending traffic from Adwords campaigns to various landing pages (landing websites) this past few weeks I’ve noticed some extraordinary things.

First of all, I tried putting up a landing page with a unique piece of content, not heavy on affiliate links, on a keyword targeted domain, with a highly keyword targeted ad campaign…

Quality Score = 1 – Google wouldn’t even let the ad run. They refused to send traffic to a landing page without those templates as part of their site content.

This was only meaningful when compared to my other landing pages that were exactly the same in every other way except they DID have these pages. Quality Score there = 8 – sending traffic no problems at all.

But it got even more interesting…

I had a landing page up that had just 3 of these templates up, About Us, Privacy Policy, and Contact Us.

At first, the quality score was ok, but after about a week… bang… mysteriously dropped to 1 and the ad stopped getting traffic. Again it had NOTHING different from the other site with the 8 quality score except it had less of the pages from the above list… and that was enough… it was out.

Are you starting to see how important Google considers these pages?

What makes you think they are going to treat sites differently in the organic search algorithm?

What this means is that without those pages up you might be sabotaging your success, your free traffic suffering without you even realizing it.

What To Do About It

In which ever way suits you, you need to get these pages onto your site ASAP. There are a few options:

1.You need to do some searching online and find you some templates for each of these pages that you can craft for your own sites. Find the template and add the pages (or posts) to your blog/website as quickly as you can.

2. Mark has a set of templates that he gives away as part of Dominating Google – which as I’ve mentioned this month, is a fantastic course anyway.

3. We’ve just implemented a new feature into our Firepow software, where you can add ALL of these pages to any blog you have, in ONE click. It will add the templates and replace the relevant information so they suit your site in about 10 seconds. (Patrik, if you’re reading – thanks for the suggestion!) If you’re not an FP member, you can try it out for $1 here.

Final Tip

Since I use blogs, I’ve been adding these pages of content as POSTS, and using a plugin called WP Hide Post (find in your WP admin >> Plugins >> Add New >> then search that name) to make sure they don’t appear on my blog’s home page for visitors to see. It also saves you making them as “Pages” after which they will take up valuable room in your “pages” menu usually located somewhere prominent like your blog header or sidebar.

After seeing the aforementioned results this couple of weeks I can’t stress enough how important these pages are to your chances of success with free OR paid traffic, not even just for affiliate marketers but for EVERYONE.

If you have time, do it NOW. It’s an easy way to knock over a bunch of your competitors who haven’t realized this yet and in doing so get a bunch of traffic and a stack of new income.

Imagine if you could cut your search engine optimization work in half.

I mean, what if you could get the same amount of traffic from the search engines for half as much work.

Less work, same money = good right? That’s what we’re looking at in this tutorial today.

For most of the time I’ve been doing affiliate and search marketing, I’ve followed the principle of creating one piece of content per keyword I want to rank for. So if I want to rank for 10 keywords in a market, I need at least 10 pieces of good unique content.

But you can also rank the same piece of content for multiple keywords. It’s slightly more complicated and requires a little more insight than you first think, but if you can do it, there are big benefits.

First up, let me give you an example.

The situation I’m describing is where you are trying to rank for Dog Obedience School, so you write a piece of content for Dog Obedience Training, and then later you decide that you also want to try and make this post rank for Dog Obedience Training School.

So you have one piece of content, one post, and you want it to rank for two search phrases that get people searching them. All clear?

Here are the steps:

1. Choosing The Keywords

The reason that most people get this wrong is that they select the wrong 2 (or more) keywords to rank the particular post for. In this you have to be VERY careful.

You have to undertake this with the knowledge that, as I have said so often, EVERY keyword is a group of people, and every group of people searching a different phrase… is different. They may want slightly different things, be looking for slightly different things, feel slightly different things. The problem comes when you have to present the same message (your single piece of content) to two groups of people. How do you connect with both of them?

Let’s say you want to rank one post, for two keywords: Acne Treatment, and Acne Solution. Seem like similar keywords? Probably a good idea right? Maybe not.

You realize by the words they use, “solution” vs “treatment”, that the two people see the condition they have in different ways. For one group it’s a “problem” that needs a “solution”. Maybe they have an event or something and they need acne to disappear quick. Whereas someone who calls it a “treatment” believes they need to be “treated” over a period and is willing to make a longer commitment of time to get a lasting result.

I’m just speculating in this example since I don’t know the acne market, but the point is that variations this subtle in your keywords DO make a difference to the psychology of the group searching them. And when a group has a difference in psychology, it means they need to hear something different to entice them to click on your links (or ads).

You might think this is splitting hairs, but when it comes to your conversion rates… IT’S NOT.

The bottom line is that you MIGHT be able to rank the same post for both those keywords Acne Treatment, and Acne Solution, and find that when you do, one of the keywords brings you traffic that doesn’t convert. And if it doesn’t convert, getting the ranking was a waste of time.

So how do you choose the right keywords? There are really two priorities.

First, you need keywords that both get searched significantly. Pretty obvious and self explanatory. You only want to rank for terms that are  going to bring visitors.

Second, you need to pick two keywords that are VERY closely related. Remember you’re presenting the same message to two groups of people so you have to be able to write one thing that speaks exactly to both. An obvious example is:

Dog Training Collar – 27000 searches

Dog Training Collars – 18000 searches.

But a less obvious example is when your keywords are a product name and the product name has multiple elements that you combine.

One particular example I just found is the two terms:

innotek dog training collars – 5000 searches
innotek remote dog training collar – 500 searches

They both get searched individually but they are the same thing, the same product. It’s two groups of people, both looking for the same thing but happen to be searching it with a slight variation of the product name. NOTE, this will only work when there is only one dog collar and it’s the remote one. If those are two separate products, it won’t work.

Let me give one final example so everyone reading can recognize the appropriate scenario and apply it in their niche.

This one’s right on the border of appropriate but we’ll look at how to make it work in the coming steps.

Consider the phrases:

Dog training schools – 27k searches

Dog training classes – 27k searches

In this example the same single post we write could expose us to 54000 searchers per month instead of 27000, and potentially double our ROI. You can see why this strategy is important.

If it was my niche I would do a LOT of research before determining that the people searching for both these phrases are so much alike that this would be worthwhile, but let’s say for the sake of example that that’s the case.

What we have here are different keywords but meaning so very close to the same thing that you could conceivably write a single piece of content that would speak equally well and perfectly clearly to both of them. If you are promoting a dog training class, or have an Adsense site where your ads are highly targeted to dog training classes (in the readers local area perhaps), we’ll look at how to make this fly.

2. Writing The Piece Of Content

It should be clear right now that achieving this is impossible without a lot of emphasis on the one piece of content you write to rank for the multiple keywords. It has to be perfect. That’s perfectly optimized and perfectly written to convert.

Here’s how we do that:

First we have to write a title for the piece of content. Keep in mind of course that writing the title of the post/page means the post URL too.

Getting both of these keywords into the post title without keyword stuffing or just ending up with a title that sucks and no one will click on can be tough. But if you’ve picked the right keywords it’s easy enough. Let me give an example title based on all the previous examples.

1. Dog Training Collar

Here all you need to do is write a title that includes as the main part, the LONGER version of the 2 keywords. You’ll note from the image below that even when you search for the SHORTER version, the longer version that appears in the titles of the first search results is HIGHLIGHTED dark blue as though that term was searched.

So your example title is easy enough, something like: Dog Training Collars To Improve Behavior Fast!

With that in your title and your URL, and with a post written around it, you’re all set to rank for both terms AND convert traffic from both terms.

2. Innotek Dog Training Collars

Here again, we need to work with including the longer keyword into the post title and that will, by default, get the shorter keyword covered too.

The obvious title is something as simple as:

Innotek Remote Dog Training Collars For Best Results

This way, when Innotek Dog Training Collar is searched, all of the individual words of that keyword will be highlighted dark blue in my post title… and if the variation is searched, ALL individual searched words will be highlighted in my post title.

An important thing to remember in this process is that when Google goes highlighting words in your post title, it doesn’t consider the order of the words, or whether they are perfectly joined, or separated by another word. What that means is that whichever of these two keywords get searched, both Google and the user sees all the words they searched, IN your post title.

3. Dog Training Schools

This one’s pretty easy too.

Your title need only be something like:

Dog Training Schools & Classes: Which Is Best For Your Dog?

(Notice the “s’s” on the end… so you pick up the singular and plural versions of both as in example 1 )

If they searched Dog Training Schools, their keyword is right there in front. If they searched Dog Training Classes, they have it right there separated only by “Schools &” – a related word, and a single symbol – nothing to object to there.

Plus… wanna know a secret? (Confession: Even I only learned this while doing testing for this post)

Google will highlight words from your post title that are not just words the user searched, but synonyms of words the user searched! Check out the screenshot below:

This being the case, safe to say that with both words in your title so neatly you’ll be covered not just for these two phrases but many more!

The only difference with this example is because you have two different words in your title, you have to be sure to slip them evenly into your post content. It’s easy to do. Every time you go to mention the keyword, swap the ending from dog training class to dog training school. If you put “dog training schools & classes” all through the article it will surely look unnatural to the human eye.

3. Getting The Page Ranked For Both Terms

This part might be the easiest of all.

As usual, you will go through building as many links as you can to this post/page using the anchor text of your target keyword where ever possible and natural. Only difference is…

You know how people say you should mix up the anchor text of links coming in to any one particular page? You DO that. Now you’re not just doing it to remain natural, you’re doing it to actually rank for both of the keywords… how good is THAT!

To make perfectly clear, this means that for your post about “Dog Training Schools  & Classes”, you swap links around 50/50, so one link uses the anchor text Dog Training Schools, and the next uses the anchor text Dog Training Classes. You might think it will slow down the time it takes to rank for each term because you’re diversifying your anchor text but even if it takes a couple weeks (even months) extra, so what? It’s going to mean double traffic in the end!

The End

Do this and pretty soon you’ll be ranking, and CONVERTING traffic from both terms, doubling, possibly tripling your targeted traffic from that same single piece of content!

Give it a shot and let me know your results!