Niche Site Building, Post Panda and the Importance of Consistent Execution!

November 23, 2011 31 Comments

This is a Guest Post from Steve Wyman.

Panda has had a dramatic effect on the ranking of many websites. In the past it was possible to place 100 related longtail keywords on a page, throw some links at it and rank for many of them. In fact I had such a page on a niche site about training a particular obscure breed of dog. That one page brought in, on average, over 15,000 visitors a month to my niche site! Post Panda (version 2+) 4 per day (120 per month) is the best I’ve seen!

Is this a bad thing? Heck no! It shows (as do many other tests) that Panda really does affect poor quality, keyword-stuffed content. If your livelihood had been based on that type of strategy you would have been heavily penalised. Whilst painful, it’s just part of the process. Personally, I believe this is one of the limiting aspects of the passive-income niche site model. If the sites are never touched after the initial ranking how are they to maintain those positions against competitors (we all have software tools to look for these opportunities) and within the ever changing rules set by Google?

As consumers we want sites that are authorative, relevant and informative. In the medium to long term as niche site owners, that’s the type of content we should be producing. There are issues however, when your primary goal is to drive traffic off-site to clickbank or Adsense, and to a lesser degree Amazon. We don’t want to fully educate the reader but provide sufficient information for them to click a link and buy a product (or click the Adsense ad). So there is a contradiction between the consumers’ requirements and our own.

As with many things, so too with niche site building, there are compromises to be made. The content needs to inform and communicate but not deliver all the answers.

Will Google Ever Actually READ Our Stuff…?

Increasingly, bounce rates and time on site will be used as matrices to establish the “quality” of our sites. One day I’m sure Google Bot will be able to “read” our pages and decide if it’s writing fit for Shakespeare or just the doodling’s of a fool, but it’s not there yet. Including video and images on the page will no doubt help to make visitors stick around for longer. Great looking layouts, fonts and header images will all contribute to the sense of it being a real website/business that’s to be trusted. The days are numbered for sites which are parked domains with Adsense only listing. Not only do they not rank but users find little or no value and don’t trust them.

Having established the increased importance of quality content post Panda, there still remains the issue of being seen when users search. The simple fact is that if you do not appear on Page 1 of Google for your search term, the probabilities of being seen are very low. Indeed less than 2% of all click troughs are from a search result outside of Page 1 for that term. I’m sure we have all seen a result which is on Page 10 that gets a click but that’s the extreme exception. It’s fair to say that if your targeted keyword phrase does not result in a top 5 serps ranking then the traffic to your page/site and the resulting income will be disappointing. The effect on traffic of an increase from position 5 to position 3 is even more dramatic. There is some evidence that this is less of an effect post Panda but none the less it’s significant.

This leads us nicely into the thorny and somewhat tiresome subject of link building. I can hear many of you groan. It’s a necessary evil. With the best will in the world the best text and images will rarely outrank a decent site with backlinks. In my view all backlink creation is grey as soon as we create a link to our own site, it’s grey.

So what are backlinks? Backlinks are links to a website or page from another website or page.

Backlinks not only bring visitors, they also help search engines measure the quality/authority of a given page on your website. This is also an important element in determining which pages of your site are displayed, and in what order, on the results page for a search query.

The number of backlinks, the anchor text used and the PR of the originating page all have a bearing on the ranking of the target page on your site.

In other words, a backlink from a high PR page is theoretically worth more than one from a low PR page. If the source site is in a related field and your targeted keyword phrase forms the anchor text of the link, then this will also increase the effect of the link.

A quick side note: Links created on pages that are not indexed or have a PR of N/A, will have no value to you in ranking. It’s not uncommon for link builders to build links to other peoples’ pages to get them indexed! Although I see that as wasted effort, just find pages that are indexed.

However, we must not miss a very important aspect of backlink creation, that of natural link diversity. If your site were to have 100 perfectly formed blog comments (exact keyword phrase for the target page in the anchor text) and all were PR6, this would be neither natural nor would it show any diversity in the type of link entering your site.

Why is this a Bad Thing?

Because they are all indicators of spamming and automation of link creation. Something neither the originating site owners nor Google Bot wants. Panda is without doubt partly targeting these types of link patterns.

For link building to be effective, it’s necessary to vary the anchor text, the PR of the page the link was placed on and also the type of links. We don’t want all links to come from WordPress blogs hosted at wordpress.com. I would also use nofollow pages as well as dofollow pages and a small percentage of deformed anchor text such as typos (e.g. dgo training), the domain name etc, Again, it’s natural and we will never know for sure what Google Bot thinks of nofollow external links.

The other factor we need to be aware of is Link Velocity, the rate at which links are attached to a target page; note this is not the same as the rate at which they are created, as links vary in how quickly they become effective, if at all. One reason is how often the page is crawled by Google.

The last aspect of link building I want to cover is the rate at which you build links. A number of authority figures have tested very rapid link building to brand new domains, with no ill side effects. However, those case studies cannot remain current and it would appear, based on reports, that as of today rapid link building may make you vulnerable to some type of penalty. This is not the sandbox L which I still believe doesn’t exist, but a manual, human audited penalty. Spencer Haws at Niche Pursuits may well have had such an event occur on an authority site he was using as a case study.

A word of caution, in post Panda: you should be wary of hitting your money site with blasts of spammy links such as xrumer. It’s dangerous to the longevity of the site. It’s too easy to spend a fiver and get 1000’s of links. “Watch out the Panda’s about” would be a valid warning. I recently tested this and my site was fine and in fact is ranking keywords in the top 5 for high traffic terms with just 3000 xrumer profiles from a fiver provider. However a colleague’s site has been hit hard and is languishing down on page 90 L for the same keywords.

It’s also becoming clear that overly optimised SEO on page tactics are becoming less effective. The standard formula of top, middle and bottom for the keywords, bolding, italic, underline and perfect keyword density are having less of an effect with time. Interlinking pages and reasonable page length still however remain relevant.

Post Panda… What Should we be doing?

1) As Mr Cutts has said many times: write and create content for people not bots. This will make the people read the site, decrease bounce rates and increase the time on site.

2) Create links between pages within the site as this shows relevancy and is in the core concepts of the web being a series of interlinked pages.

3) Make the site visually appealing and even potentially a MicroBrand. This will also reduce bounce rates, increase on site and more importantly increase the feeling that it’s an authority to be trusted; a place to return to again and again.

4) Create backlinks that are diverse, meaning:

  • Blogs, forum profiles, web 2.0 properties etc.
  • Have varying PR (a lot of PR 0 and 1 is fine, its quite natural).
  • Include nofollow links.
  • Vary the anchor text to each page your building links to. For example 60% exact targeted phrase and 40% related (this is not a rule just an idea).
  • Do not build vast numbers of one or two types of links.
  • Be wary of high link velocity. Rather than build a vast number of one or two types of link in one week, build links over a period of time, 3 to 6 months (yes that long) is much more natural.

Link building is a never ending task. Indeed for most sites I never stop link building. You never know when the next competitor is going to see your niche and jump in. After all you did it to somebody else!

So, in summary, consistent, low velocity and diverse link building will become the norm together with relevant, well-written, informative content including text, images and video. This will become the new standard for any niche website designed to rank highly in Google.

To find out more of Steve’s mindset on all this stuff be sure to check him at at his blog, and tell him that the VBL Tribe sent you!

Do you have a niche site? How did Panda effect you? Negatively, positively? Share your thoughts on this highly debatable topics below!

Filed Under: Business Growth, Business Start-Up, Entrepreneurship, Guest Posts, Niche Site Project, Passive Income Tagged With: , , ,

Comments

  1. steve says:
    November 23, 2011 at 10:11 pm  (Quote)

    Hi Chris

    Thanks for publishing my ramblings. I hope it proves to be of interest to the tribe.

    Regards

    Steve

    Reply
  2. Miggy says:
    November 23, 2011 at 10:17 pm  (Quote)

    Makes sense. Thanks for this timely post. I recently ventured into niche site building, thanks to Spencer Haws at nichepursuits.com. And I like the idea of low key link building, which works IF done with proper keyword and niche research beforehand. This confirms, I think, that I’m on the right track.

    Reply
  3. Richard Scott says:
    November 24, 2011 at 12:21 am  (Quote)

    Great article. Full of useful tidbits. I read every word. :)

    I’m still experimenting with backlinks. My first niche site (5 years ago) I never did anything except write great content (yes, I actually wrote every single article myself) for over 5 years. That site gets nearly 100,000 visitors a month and ranks #1 for tons of huge keywords.

    Just recently, in the past 6 months I have began other new niche sites (thanks to your great team Chris) and have also hired a VA to backlink. It will be interesting for me to see how this compares to just letting Google handle things naturally over an extended period of time. It’s too early to tell, but it could be an eye opener, or it could make me go back to my old ways. We’ll see… :)

    Reply
    • stevewyman says:
      November 24, 2011 at 8:57 pm  (Quote)

      Hi Richard

      Thanks for stopping by and the feedback.

      That is an epic amount of pages/post you created. With longterm vision that really is the very best way to build authority and a following. 100,000 visitors is very sweet I hope you have a mailing list!

      Link building will potentially get you traffic more quickly but if you can also build lots of high quality relevant content to you new site you’ll be set.

      great work

      steve

      Reply
  4. Joe Magnotti says:
    November 24, 2011 at 8:40 am  (Quote)

    Good post Steve, I love the way you backup your points too. The link factors like velocity and varied anchor text are especially appealing to me. I think ignoring these factors, especially to micro niche sites can result in the dreaded -50 penalty. Beware everyone and listen up!

    Reply
  5. stevewyman says:
    November 24, 2011 at 9:04 pm  (Quote)

    Hey Jo

    Good of you to stop by and comment.

    I’ve experimented and i know other are as well with rapid link building. It has its place but it’s certainly a risky strategy. I’ve got sites that now if i try to build links to just google dance instantly. these were built with rapid link building strategies.

    I’m personally moving toward 5-6 month backlink strategies on medium to authority sites easing out the links. Were all in such a rush that if we don’t rank in 20 days we start to panic.

    I do agree with you on the micro sites as well. Whatever’s changed in the algo small sites don’t seem to be able to hold onto links as well. I know a lot of folks are dropping links as fast as they build them when being aggressive

    Regards

    Reply
  6. Rob Cubbon says:
    November 25, 2011 at 1:51 am  (Quote)

    A great read, Steve. Always good to hear your thoughts on this most difficult and challenging subject – well, I find it difficult and challenging!

    I will endeavour to build the links with varied anchor text, from varied sources and not all to the same/home page! Above all, make it look natural!

    Reply
  7. Joseph Archibald says:
    November 26, 2011 at 6:05 pm  (Quote)

    Hey Steve, how is it whenever you email me or comment on my blog that your spelling is verging on pathetic, where in the guest post on Chris’ site is (near) perfection? :-)

    The image you (or Chris) implemented for the article is EXCELLENT – a Panda playing the flute (up its nose ;-) ) much in the way that the Pied Piper of Google plays the flute with the folks who are trying to follow their spell-binding tune – aka – we all wanna make money from ranking in Google, thus we all ko-tow to the Google algorithm changes and follow along much like the proverbial sheep would do.

    To quote you – “One day I’m sure Google Bot will be able to “read” our pages and decide if it’s writing fit for Shakespeare or just the doodling’s of a fool, but it’s not there yet”.
    I could never get around Shakespeare. I’m sure he was an (English) dude in the day, but fact is, he bores me to ‘tears’, so I much prefer the “doodling of a fool”, LOL! Check out Robert Burns – much more attractive poetry for those who take pleasure in “English” verse.

    Let’s get to the crux of your post, however…

    I fully agree that all link building is grey/black hat. Fact is, that those who build up backlinks to their websites are gaming the system. Thus, how can it not be considered as “blackhat”? Everyone involved in SEO is a blackhat game player, simple as that. There is no grey/white hat backlink building.

    I don’t entirely agree with what you say, my friend Steve, with regards to a Google PR of n/a is of no value. It does have value, and often it has as much (or perhaps more) value as a Google PR6 or 7 backlink to your site, where there are a ton of OBL’s on the same page as your own link – OBL’s being ‘out-bound links’ for those not in-the-know. Most PR4 + webpages have a lot of OBL’s which in my mind means that they are bleeding a whole lot of juice to “places” other than to your own webpage. Furthermore, a Goog PR of n/a – if utilized over and over from a different IP address, and from a different SEO perspective, can offer a fantastic value to the ranking of a webpage in Google.

    Your points about link velocity and anchor text variation is/are incredibly important! There is no doubting the fact that these days more than ever before – Goog are paying attention to backlink velocity and to anchor text variation. Thus its very important to vary up everything in a backlinking campaign these days, unless you are comfortable merely ranking in Yahoo Search and Bing (which is an entirely different matter).

    And also – your point about making a “passive income online” via SEO and ranking in Google – I would like to bring that up too, if I may. At one time, SEO was a somewhat passive affair – you build your html website and you add your keywords as meta tags, and then it ranks highly in Google search accordingly (“build it and they WILL come!”). You make a whole lot of money on a fairly passive basis. These days however, you have to get yourself a “branded” domain in Google before you can make a somewhat ‘passive’ income from Google rankings. Until the Goog determine that domain as a ‘branded’ domain, its hard work to – firstly, achieve the hi end rankings, and then – to maintain the hi end rankings. There is no getting around the fact that if you want to rank and make good money in a fairly hi end niche these days, you have to have knowledge about Google and SEO, you have to have cash flow, and you have to have perseverance and belief in what you are doing. Without those ingredients, you are bound to fail.

    Steve W, great article and a whole lot of very fine insights you have made here – thanks for sharing your knowledge!

    Joseph

    Reply
    • steve says:
      November 27, 2011 at 12:36 am  (Quote)

      Hey Jo

      Thanks for stopping by.. Ouch that hurt but sadly it is true .. Must do better, I think my English teacher said that about my writing once or thrice. If you’re interested it’s the typing that’s rubbish and I tend to shoot before rereading what I typed, something I’m trying to change. So for the article I tried to get my writing to a point where it did not distract from the observations.

      The image is one chosen by Chris D. And very cool it is.

      OK if there are enough of them and diverse enough even PR N/A are links and therefore have a value. I was attempting to provide clarity for a situation where you have a lowish number of links. As always in a short article we need to keep things simple.

      The OBL however is so very true, something I failed to mention. So many “SEO” back linkers dropping literally 100’s of links on a PR page diluting the link to effectively a PR0. (Somebody out there is building 10,000 of such spammy links to Ugg boots sites in Australia with over 500 links from one URL.. that’s crazy !) There was a suggestion from Matt Cutts that the max outbound links should be below 100 for a page, but then again I’ve heard him say they will all pass juice..

      So with the “passive income” thing yes that’s how I see it also. Passive income is really very rare now and short lived. Freshness or new links are going to be required to maintain serps.

      Thanks for sharing all your points, including my terrible emails  I learn a whole lots from many folks including your excellent work on your blog Jo

      Regards

      Reply
      • Joseph Archibald says:
        November 27, 2011 at 8:25 am  (Quote)

        LOL Steve – yeah I know – you use a dodgy keyboard and some of the buttons stick when you are typing ;-)

        There are some schools of thought who preach the fact that the amount of OBL’s is not important and you get the same “juice” from a webpage that has a single OBL as you would from a page with a ton of OBL’s. I personally do not subscribe to that line of thinking. The more OBL’s on a page, the less juice you gain to your own webpage that the anchor link connects to.

        Yeah – on the idea of passive income – I guess it only really becomes passive when you outsource all the grind work for SEO etc. But even then, unless you have someone to deal with the outsourcing, that can be a whole work-load in itself – not all outsourcees are equal after all, are they.

        Thanks Steeve (;-) ) for the compliments about my blog. You’re on my Christmas card list of course :-)

        Take care my friend and let me know when you’re heading on over in the direction of SE Asia and hopefully we can meet up for a beer or 3!

        Jo

        Reply
        • steve says:
          November 27, 2011 at 8:32 pm  (Quote)

          Hi Jo

          The OBL question is an interesting one. I’ve seen Matt say it doesn’t matter. But we have to take that with a pinch of salt.

          The argument that the number of links doesn’t matter could be true. If a large authority site had a page where they referenced 1000′s of relevant sites you’d expect each “vote” to count? However I would expect the Juice to be approximately = PR/number of links. So even on a PR5 page where you have spammy link building the effective PR will be close to 0

          From Mr Cutts – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

          “So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway”

          Its 2.5 years old BUT the algo is a complex evolving beast and but this still makes sense to me.

          I had a client earlier this year that had 350 outbound links from his home page. He linked to every single brand of a product he sold etc etc. Apparently good SEO.. Anyway we cut it down to 5 and at the next PR update the sites as a whole went up one PR. I believe GoogleBot saw the page as less spammy.

          Reply
          • Joseph Archibald says:
            November 28, 2011 at 5:05 pm  (Quote)

            Hi Steve, I’m not much good at maths and never will be – the UK education system failed me big time where maths is concerned, gotta tell ya :-) So for me personally, I tend to go on gut instinct more than what other folks want to be telling me. You live in the trenches, you fight from the trenches, you learn how to figure best way to survive in the trenches, if you get my meaning ;-)

            Reply
        • Chris C. Ducker says:
          November 28, 2011 at 11:51 am  (Quote)

          I think Steve is one most of the VBL Tribe’s Xmas Card List, Joe!!! :-)

          Thanks for contributing on this post, also.

          Best,
          C

          Reply
      • Chris C. Ducker says:
        November 28, 2011 at 11:50 am  (Quote)

        Actually took that image myself at the beginning of the month… whilst at San Diego Zoo!

        Cool, aint it..?!

        C

        Reply
  8. Benjamin says:
    November 27, 2011 at 8:15 am  (Quote)

    Great post Steve. I agree 100% about the Google bot one day being able to read our pages. It’s only a matter of time.

    I’ve become guilty (through naivety) of showing no backlinking variety whatsoever. I’ll have to put a stop to this in the future. I’ve one question for you, which you’re welcome to answer via email if you’d rather…

    Do you recommend submitting your sites to directories? And if so, which do you recommend? I submitted my niche site to a couple of directories two weeks back (as detailed in the most recent NSP report) and I’ve noticed approximately a 40% traffic increase since then (no kidding). I’ve no doubt you’ve an opinion on this!

    Awesome work, cheers.

    Reply
    • steve says:
      November 27, 2011 at 9:09 pm  (Quote)

      Hi Benjamin

      I do submit new sites to web directories it adds to the pool of backlinks diversity. Typically directories don’t produce strong backlinks but they may deliver traffic if they are niche specific.

      It will be interesting to see if that traffic is a surge that dies down or whether it continues.

      Regards

      Reply

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