I Have Fallen On My Arse (Kinda) And Had A Bit Of A Wakeup Call.

[Simon Riceman]

So I have a bit of an unusual story….

I started becoming interested in SEO around 18 months ago after my catering business completely wiped me out mentally and physically. I was making alright money but there was so much work involved it simply wasn’t worth it.

I did the classic and googled “how to make money from home” and quickly stumbled upon IM, niche sites, affiliate marketing etc etc.

The concept was exactly what I was looking for so I decided to build my own niche site using the Amazon Associate Program. I followed the teachings of Brain Dean and Spencer from Niche Pursuits.

Starting out was obviously difficult, I think everyone here can vouch for the that. I managed to get a handle on the on-page stuff but I never quite grasped link building.

I got pissed off and stopped putting any effort into my site. Bored one day after a couple of months I opened my Amazon Associate account, I was shocked because my site had made a few hundred bucks. An article was ranking for a keyword with high monthly search volume. Weirdly the page had no backlinks or internal links. I got interested again and started to analysis the page to try and figure out why this was happening so that I could replica the process.

Well I did, I managed to slowly put together a process that allowed me to rank pages (not all) without any backlinks. I used a fairly unique keyword research method coupled with strong on page SEO.

Things escalated quickly and I mean that, In 2016 my monthly earnings mean increase was 20%, and in December I hit the 5 figure mark. This is all from one site. I know it's not big boy money like what some of you killers out there are earning, but it was decent.

I quit my job and left the UK to travel the world while working. I outsourced most of the grunt work to Filipino VA's and had an efficient writer producing the content. Things were great I was quite pleased with myself. If am gonna be honest I thought I crack the system. I started to take my eye off the ball. I neglecting to stay plugged into what was going on with SEO and also never really become part of the community.

Then 3 things happened over a relatively short period of time that brought me back to earth. First, some sneaky fucker hit me with a negative SEO attacked, spamming my site with 10000 shitty links. I disavowed them fairly quickly, so its all good, but I am not gonna lie they wounded me.

Then Amazon stuck 2 fingers up to everyone in their affiliate program by reducing their commission percent. Shots where fired and to me the message was loud and clear, the value Amazon sees in their is affiliates is diminishing.

Finally FRED rocks up to put the icing on the cake, since that 90% of my articles where affiliate “X Best” reviews, you can imagine this didn't go down well. Rankings dropped, traffic dropped, earnings dropped, FUCKED.

So I had a wake up call and realised I had to diversify my skill set. I am hear join the community, learn and fill my gaps in knowledge. I also wanna get my hands a bit dirty and dabble in the dark arts of Black Hat, which was something I never considered before, but fuck it I don’t want to get left behind.

 

[Inhibition]

It's actually super weird you were ranking for some crazy profitable terms with no backlinks.

I don't know if black hat is exactly what you want to get into if you don't want to constantly deal with Google slaps.

I've always believed providing the best value you can is the best way to grow an established site that will become a legitimate brand and business.

Good luck though! And welcome.

 

[Simon Riceman]

It's actually super weird you were ranking for some crazy profitable terms with no backlinks.

I don't know if black hat is exactly what you want to get into if you don't want to constantly deal with Google slaps.

I've always believed providing the best value you can is the best way to grow an established site that will become a legitimate brand and business.

Good luck though! And welcome.

Hey man thanks! I agree with you but I was just thinking black hat might be useful with certain sites. Having knowledge of it will hopefully give me more options in the future.

 

[Darth]

If you want to create a sustainable business (and it sounds like you do) then Black Hat is not the way. Cool story though, it's something in the back of my mind always too.

 

[dsoul]

Great story, and sorry to hear changes have hit you. Changes hit us all, I've been there plenty.

You need to learn from this, take what worked for you and next property/project use the traffic in various ways so you're not relying on one source of revenue (think email lists, think paid advertising, think pay-per-call), same goes for your sources of traffic.

Now that Amazon dropped their percentages, maybe it's time everyone explored the thousands of other affiliate programs out there that pay much higher rates. Cj.com and Shareasale are two places to begin.

 

[Simon Riceman]

Great story, and sorry to hear changes have hit you. Changes hit us all, I've been there plenty.

You need to learn from this, take what worked for you and next property/project use the traffic in various ways so you're not relying on one source of revenue (think email lists, think paid advertising, think pay-per-call), same goes for your sources of traffic.

Now that Amazon dropped their percentages, maybe it's time everyone explored the thousands of other affiliate programs out there that pay much higher rates. Cj.com and Shareasale are two places to begin.

Thanks man, I hear what you are saying. Luckily I am still making enough money from this site to invest in new ideas and projects. I know people say it all the time but you are asking for trouble if you relying on one traffic stream and revenue stream. Things can crumble very quickly. Lesson learnt.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Simon, great story. It's similar to another person here who managed to score some serious rankings with no backlinking. If I recall, they suffered the same fate though... Google Fred ain't having it.

It sucks because it's not spam links. And good sites become civilian casualties in that war. And some are going to have backdoor preferential treatment, and others will have started early enough to gain enough authority or trust to survive.

My recommendation would be to continue your course but dial down the amount of {Best|Reviews} posts. That seems to be the real target, besides the sites cramming in too many ads around 200 words of content. And honestly, most of that stuff deserves to tank and make room for me!

I've said this before elsewhere, but my giant authority site exists as a wrapper to hide the fact that it's really an affiliate site. We're talking like... for every 1 review post I have 13 other giant posts and a ton of other casual blog posts.

It sucks but I think in our heart of hearts we saw it coming... BestRandomProduct.net & RandomNicheReviews.info are the new EMD sites. "Diversify yo bonds" and have tons of content types with tons of monetization methods so you can't be pinned as any one thing. And when that happens there's only one label for you as you continue to survive the updates... Authority Site. After a while you'll fly over any possible threshold they throw at low quality sites. It's all about on-page and off-page and misdirection.

 

[SeoReborn]

Simon, great story. It's similar to another person here who managed to score some serious rankings with no backlinking. If I recall, they suffered the same fate though... Google Fred ain't having it.

It sucks because it's not spam links. And good sites become civilian casualties in that war. And some are going to have backdoor preferential treatment, and others will have started early enough to gain enough authority or trust to survive.

My recommendation would be to continue your course but dial down the amount of {Best|Reviews} posts. That seems to be the real target, besides the sites cramming in too many ads around 200 words of content. And honestly, most of that stuff deserves to tank and make room for me!

I've said this before elsewhere, but my giant authority site exists as a wrapper to hide the fact that it's really an affiliate site. We're talking like... for every 1 review post I have 13 other giant posts and a ton of other casual blog posts.

It sucks but I think in our heart of hearts we saw it coming... BestRandomProduct.net & RandomNicheReviews.info are the new EMD sites. "Diversify yo bonds" and have tons of content types with tons of monetization methods so you can't be pinned as any one thing. And when that happens there's only one label for you as you continue to survive the updates... Authority Site. After a while you'll fly over any possible threshold they throw at low quality sites. It's all about on-page and off-page and misdirection.

We are on the same page. This is what I am doing. Build an authority but it's really just an affiliate site with review pages sprinkled around. If someone came to visit my site, they just see strong shareable content, the affiliate pages are hidden deep.

 

[Simon Riceman]

Simon, great story. It's similar to another person here who managed to score some serious rankings with no backlinking. If I recall, they suffered the same fate though... Google Fred ain't having it.

It sucks because it's not spam links. And good sites become civilian casualties in that war. And some are going to have backdoor preferential treatment, and others will have started early enough to gain enough authority or trust to survive.

My recommendation would be to continue your course but dial down the amount of {Best|Reviews} posts. That seems to be the real target, besides the sites cramming in too many ads around 200 words of content. And honestly, most of that stuff deserves to tank and make room for me!

I've said this before elsewhere, but my giant authority site exists as a wrapper to hide the fact that it's really an affiliate site. We're talking like... for every 1 review post I have 13 other giant posts and a ton of other casual blog posts.

It sucks but I think in our heart of hearts we saw it coming... BestRandomProduct.net & RandomNicheReviews.info are the new EMD sites. "Diversify yo bonds" and have tons of content types with tons of monetization methods so you can't be pinned as any one thing. And when that happens there's only one label for you as you continue to survive the updates... Authority Site. After a while you'll fly over any possible threshold they throw at low quality sites. It's all about on-page and off-page and misdirection.

Thanks Ryuzaki you make some excellent points. I think I am going spend the next couple of months adding non affiliate high quality content to the site to try and balance out the ratio. This will also set me up nicely as I embark on my first proper link building campaign. Quick question about hiding the affiliate content. How deep do you place them? Do you link to them from the homepage?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Quick question about hiding the affiliate content. How deep do you place them? Do you link to them from the homepage?

I didn't mean to imply this so much, for myself. @SeoReborn might have something to say about it.

Personally, I just meant that I "hide" it by dilution. It's like putting a handful of diamonds in a 5-gallon bucket of dirt. Everyone thinks that it's dirt. I don't hide the fact that the diamonds are in there at all, I just let everyone assume it's otherwise.

Also, I've supplied so much valuable data otherwise that nobody cares that I stand to make some money and they trust my recommendations. And otherwise, it's already red hot traffic from the search engines that don't need much coercion. They know what they want and just want some guidance or someone to validate a product in their price range.

 

[SeoReborn]

Thanks Ryuzaki you make some excellent points. I think I am going spend the next couple of months adding non affiliate high quality content to the site to try and balance out the ratio. This will also set me up nicely as I embark on my first proper link building campaign. Quick question about hiding the affiliate content. How deep do you place them? Do you link to them from the homepage?

I publish these affiliate reviews as blogposts, and set them to publish as a past date. This means the blogpost will not appear at the top of my blog page. I put them at least the 2nd page of the blog.

For dilution, I am happy with 10% affiliate page vs 90% content pages.

Regarding your next step, you said you will add more content to dilute your present (possibly penalized) site. If I was in your position, I will start a new site, keep adding content. And then slowly migrate over the affiliate pages from your present site. Delete an affiliate page, let google deindex, then transfer it over to the new site. Do this to your dilution ratio.

 

[Simon Riceman]

I publish these affiliate reviews as blogposts, and set them to publish as a past date. This means the blogpost will not appear at the top of my blog page. I put them at least the 2nd page of the blog.

For dilution, I am happy with 10% affiliate page vs 90% content pages.

Regarding your next step, you said you will add more content to dilute your present (possibly penalized) site. If I was in your position, I will start a new site, keep adding content. And then slowly migrate over the affiliate pages from your present site. Delete an affiliate page, let google deindex, then transfer it over to the new site. Do this to your dilution ratio.

Thank you, this is an Interesting idea, one I hadn't considered before. I am not sure if this sounds like a silly question but can you explain what you mean by "slowly migrate over the affiliate pages from your present site."?

 

[dsoul]

I am not sure if this sounds like a silly question but can you explain what you mean by "slowly migrate over the affiliate pages from your present site."?

he kinda explained in the sentence after that.

If your current site has been hit by penalty, and you know a page will rank (IE you've done well with a page in the past, but now it's been bombed) delete it from the first site, give it a month or so, let Google deindex it, then republish on the new site, and rank it again, on a site that is less aff obvious.

 

[dgenius]

Man thats the thing we're just depending on one platform with Google but that totally sucks but what dsoul and seoreborn are mentioning is the way to go. That's also really good that you ranked well without any backlinks? Did you check that no one else naturally linked to your page?

 

[Simon Riceman]

he kinda explained in the sentence after that.

If your current site has been hit by penalty, and you know a page will rank (IE you've done well with a page in the past, but now it's been bombed) delete it from the first site, give it a month or so, let Google deindex it, then republish on the new site, and rank it again, on a site that is less aff obvious.

This was my assumption, so thank you for clearing that up for me. Definitely food for thought here.

Man thats the thing we're just depending on one platform with Google but that totally sucks but what dsoul and seoreborn are mentioning is the way to go. That's also really good that you ranked well without any backlinks? Did you check that no one else naturally linked to your page?

Relying on one traffic source is a no go for me now. One of my priority goals is to improve my knowledge and skill set in this area. I regularly checked on who was linking to my site and it was always nobody other then a few forum posts. To be honest, it is so obvious that the content is affiliate focused I would be very surprised if anybody linked to it. Moving forward I am chucking that strategy out the window as well.