October earnings were disappointing due to the latest “Panda” update by Google. I must admit I was pretty surprised by this “kick”, since I sailed through previous Panda updates seeing little impact at all on my sites.
And I must admit I was pretty smug, thinking that I was “Panda proof” since my focus has long been on producing quality site content, avoiding duplicate content and similar. But what I’ve learned from this update is that you are never “safe” with Google – it doesn’t matter how stellar your content is, you can still get hit. One only needs to visit many of the Webmaster forums and check out the SERP results, to see the impact on quality websites and how messed up this last Panda update really is. For me, while only a few of my sites were impacted, the ones that did get hit were older, had more published content and more authority type and natural backlinks. They also tended to be my bigger earners.
But regardless, there is little time to whine. Christmas is coming up, and my focus on the past few weeks has been on recovering my rankings. And I think I’ve come up with a pretty good strategy, which I’ll go into more detail below. But first, here is the summary of my earnings for this month:
Earnings For October
AdSense: $793.82 (Last month = $997.25) -$203.43
ClickBank: $472.63 (Last month = $715.02) -$242.39
Amazon: $230.86 (Last month = $229.52) +$1.34
Other Affiliate Programs:$75.01 (Last month =$178.39) -$103.38
Gross Earnings: $1,572.32 (Last month = $2,120.18) -$547.86
Overall, my earnings were down by 25% for October. My expenses were down a little bit this month as well:
Expenses for October:
Outsourcing: $50.00 (Last month=$189.49)
Backlinking Tools and Subscriptions (Sick submitter, proxies, decaptcher): $52.96 (Last month=$158.06)
Other (domain purchases and renewals, hosting, Aweber, WordPress theme purchases, private forum membership): $433.52 (Last month=$254.11)
Total Expenses: $536.48 (last month=$601.66)
This month there was actually a pretty big shift in terms of how I spent my money. I had a lot of domains come up for renewal this month, plus I purchased several high PR expired domains to add to my own blog network. I then cut back on both my outsourcing expenses and recurring subscriptions.
My Panda Recovery Strategy
The October 13th Panda update hit my ClickBank and Amazon sites the hardest. The only reason my Amazon income was up slightly this month was because of some additional seasonal sales coming in from my Halloween sites (and which are now all over). This leads me to think that it may have something to do with the number of outgoing affiliate links on a page, although when I compare these sites to the Amazon sites that weren’t hit, this is not a definitive conclusion. But all in all, about a dozen of my sites were impacted (out of about 70 total) – about ten Amazon affiliate sites, and two of my big ClickBank earners (including my #1 earning ClickBank site). In general, these sites dropped from holding top spots on page #1 of the SERP results, to positions #20-30 of the SERPS.
The October 13th update actually left my AdSense sites pretty much alone, but around October 20th my main AdSense earner was also hit, probably due to some additional algo tweak done at that time. This site usually brings in close to $20 a day – but after the 20th, the earnings dropped to the $10 or so daily range. The SERP drop was not huge for this one site (my other AdSense sites seem unimpacted, including all my A100K Blueprint sites) – it dropped from holding #1 position for two well paying keywords to positions #4 and #6 for those keywords.
So my focus has been on trying to get my Amazon sites re-ranking well for the upcoming Christmas season, and also boosting the two ClickBank sites and my one AdSense site back up to where they were previously ranking. However, as a single mom who cares full time for a four year old and my elderly mother, the amount of hours I have during the day are seriously constrained, and the time I have to focus on my IM efforts needs to be well spent.
My strategy has been to get the most powerful, affordable backlinks I can to these sites, in a timely manner. It would be great if I could go on a PR6 domain buying spree to boost my site rankings, but that is not in my current budget at the moment. So, instead, there are three other strategies I have been using – and I have been seeing some pretty good results from these strategies. Two of these strategies focus on getting high-PR in-context links, while the third relies on increasing the value of “satellite sites” that link to my primary sites.
Strategy One: Submitting to my own high PR private blog posting network
Early this year I wrote about how I am in the process of setting up my own blog posting network. These blogs generally have a PR between 1-3 (most are PR2′s), and I have been picking up at least a couple each month via expired domain auctions (I can generally purchase PR2′s for around $15 each). I host these domains on different C-Class IP’s with different hosting companies (most are currently hosted with Indianets.com and aseohosting.com, two companies which have some of the cheapest SEO hosting options available and, in my experience, very good customer service and reliable up-time as well).
One thing I’ve really focused on doing since the October 13th update is producing longer articles (articles are between 600-800 words in length) for my blog network spun to over 100% uniqueness (I spin each sentence at least three times, and then I do word spinning as well for each article). And now I am also adding photos and youtube videos as well to every post (I spin these as well!). The end result are very unique articles that are completely grammatically correct and easy to read (and do not appear to be spun to a reader), that I can than easily post to my 20+ blogs in my network using Article Marketing Robot.
These posts are now consistently showing up as the most powerful backlinks I have to my sites when I check my backlinks using SEO majestic or ahrefs.com (now that the Yahoo Site Explorer is no longer updated). Since this is my own network, I can control how long the posts stay on the homepage of my blogs (the high PR page), meaning that it is often weeks before they “roll off” the blog onto a PR n/a page.
I have to say that out of all the backlinking methods I am using, I feel this is currently the most important one I am using and a major focus of my efforts over the next year will be growing this network. In terms of results, I am seeing a SERP jump every time I post an article to my blog network for a site.
For my AdSense site that had dropped to positions 4 and 6 for its main keywords, about 48 hours after I posted a well spun article to my blog network it jumped in its rankings and it now currently is at positions 1 and 3 for these keywords.
However, my blog network is still quite small, and I can only use it a couple of times per site page for the fullest effects. Although I plan to grow this network out over the next year, right now I need another immediately available option to help recover my rankings, fast.
Strategy Two: Posting To The BuildMyRank Blog Network.
Over the past couple of years I have used several private blog networks to increase my rankings as well, with mixed results. For example, I used the Blog Blueprint last year for many months, and initially saw some good results with the network. However, later I discovered that many of the blogs I had links on had been deindexed. This isn’t a problem with this specific network, per se, as all larger blog networks are targets for competitors and risk being found out by/reported to Google. But, still, when you are paying $60 a month for a service, it can be disappointing to lose these links – especially since most networks won’t issue a refund when this happens (although I should say that I believe BB has now replaced all those blogs and I have heard the network is still working well for others).
This was a reason I was pretty happy with the Authority Link Network, a similar private blog network, since initially it was free and operated as a blog “co-op” where members contributed their own blogs to the network in exchange for being able to post on other members blogs.
However, recently the format changed, the blog manager started charging people to post to the network (even though you still had to contribute your own blogs to the network to be a member!), and I also started to notice quite a bit of spammy content on my own blogs that were in the network. So I removed my blogs from the system and went my own way with this blog network as well.
I have heard a lot of good things over the past year about BuildMyRank as well, and even did a trial membership about a year ago – posting ten article “snippets” to their blog network. In all honesty, I didn’t see much movement from those ten snippets, and given the time and energy involved in posting to BMR, I decided not to join at that time.
You see, unlike many other private blog networks, BuildMyRanks has pretty strict editorial guidelines. They allow no spun content. Everything that is posted to the network is human reviewed, and they will reject a post that isn’t grammatically correct without hesitation. You have to write a unique 150 word article to get one link – and many suggest the articles be even longer in length.
On the plus side, BMR is a huge network – over 2500 blogs in their system. And they also take the added step to check and make sure your links are indexed by Google. This is actually a huge plus, since if your links are not indexed, they simply don’t count and I have found low indexing rates to be a huge problem with similar services (including Unique Article Wizard) in the past. BMR builds links to your articles, to make sure they get indexed, and I have found their indexing rate to be 100% thanks to this process.
Other details: A standard monthly membership to BMR is $59. This allows you to post up to 10 links a day for five domains. Actually, the highest posting velocity is 7-10 link a day, so you are more likely going to get around 8 or 9 links a day per domain, for probably more like 40-45 links total. Some may argue that this velocity is a bit much, so if you want to drip them out at a slower 4-6 post a day or 1-3 posts a day per domain, those options are available as well.
In terms of the PR breakdown, they claim to have blogs ranging from PR1-PR6 in their network. For my 10 post trial, I had seven PR2 links and three PR1 links, which was a bit disappointing. But given what I have read from other forums, PR3′s and PR4′s are to be expected regularly as well, with the (very) occasional PR5 and PR6 link happening as well.
The thing that really sold me on BMR, however, has been the enthusiastic support it gets from The Pond – a private internet marketing forum I belong to and highly recommend (the monthly membership is jumping from $10 to $20 next week, BTW, if you are thinking about joining). People have been reporting some amazing results using BMR there – so I decided that I would finally bite the bullet and see what BMR can really do.
What I did was outsource 150 BMR posts for one of my Amazon sites that got hit on the 13th. This site deals with a fairly high-ticket item ($200-$400 range) people really only purchase during winter months – so recovering the site soon is really important if I am going to make money with it this year.
Prior to October 13th, it was ranking 3rd for its targeted keyword and I was getting pretty reliable sales from it at that position (the site earned nearly $200 during September). After October 13th, however, it dropped to low on page two in the SERPs (ranging between positions #18-22). Starting November the 2nd, I started sending 4-6 BMR posts a day to the site. Here is a graph of the results:
Right now it is back at position #4 for it’s main keyword (and #9 for it’s secondary keyword). This is due only to BuildMyRank posts – I haven’t done any other backlinking during this period.
I’m definitely sold on the BuildMyRank network for now. Although I still have some doubts about the long-term viability of the network, for the short term it is definitely going to be an important strategy for me! The main downside will finding the time to write the posts, however, as I don’t think I can afford to pay to outsource them all. For those who are considering signing up for the service, you might want to try out their 15 day free trial (10 links) to see what it looks like and learn what they require, and then spend a couple of weeks “building up” your posts before your full membership kicks in. I’m finding it takes only a few minutes to write a BMR posts, but in all honesty I can only do about twenty a day maximum, so I will probably do a combination of writing myself and outsourcing via MTurks or other BMR writing service providers to get my full 40-50 posts done each day.
Strategy #3: Satellite Building And Blasting
My third strategy is building up satellite properties that I can use for backlinking my main sites. Dave, at Zen Duck, has written a great post on using web 2.0′s for this, and I’ll refer you to him if you are unsure what these are and how to build them. But for satellites, you can also use articles from article directories like EzineArticles or even expired domains for this process as well.
Basically, what I do is create a load of similar sites (or articles) on a topic in a niche (10-12 at least), and then use these sites to both funnel traffic and link juice to my main sites. I also will “blast” many of these sites with lower quality links (such as mass article directory submissions, profile links and such) to help with this process, since this mitigates the “dancing” of my main site, while still passing link juice towards them. I might add that using satellite sites in this way is a tried and true method used by many internet marketers, including people like Patt Flynn and Joseph Archibald (and many others).
More Results
I have been using a combination of all these methods on my two ClickBank sites and I’m seeing some good results on this front as well.
Look at my most recent ClickBank screenshot to the left. As you can see, after October 13th my weekly CB earnings took a dramatic dive. I went from averaging close to $200 a week right before the update, to less than $40 for the week of October 19-25.
But now, just this past week, my earnings have nearly recovered. I should say that these two sites are still jumping around a bit in the rankings, and are not stable yet. Still, I’m very happy and impressed with the results so far.
My Conclusions
So there you have it – my three part strategy for recovering from the latest Panda-mess:
- My private blog network,
- A paid private blog network (BuildMyRank), and
- Building and blasting satellite sites.
Oh, and I should add that it wasn’t all bad news recently either. The latest “PR” update was kind to many of my sites (including this one, which jumped to a PR3). In all honesty, I don’t really pay that much attention to pagerank for my money sites, since their position in SERPS is much more important to me. But for my backlinking blog network, PR does matters, and, in general, they fared quite well. 
And now, back to work….but I’d also love to hear in the comments below how your sites fare the latest update and, if you have been hit, what have you been doing to recover?
