Lessons Learned From A Google-Slapped Niche Blog
By Matt Jones on Oct 1, 2007 in Blog Marketing
When I wrote about niche blogging way back at the very beginning of the life of Blogging Fingers I mentioned I would be setting up a number of highly specific niche blogs to make multiple streams of AdSense income, Garry Conn style.
Generally things have been going well. I set up a number of niche blogs as planned. The one that has been sandboxed is Cheap-Ass Airsoft Guns. You will see the site has a custom header, a few posts as well as AdSense and a blogroll, so what happened?
I had the All in One SEO Pack installed, which I am sure helped with the rankings at first.
What Went Well
As soon as I had published the first 3 posts I started link building. I conducting a few exchanges and the site quickly rose up the Google SEPRS. If it were a ‘flagship’ blog I normally recommended publishing at least 10 solid posts before bothering start marketing, but I took a chance with what was meant to be a very small but focused niche blog.
- It was ranked No. 1 for “Cheap ass airsoft guns” (not surprising really)
- No.1 for “Cheap CYMA Airsoft Guns”
- On page 1 for “cheap airsoft guns”
- On page 3 for “airsoft guns”
I was earning upwards of $1 per day for the couple of weeks it was alive. So that is over $1 per day, from a site that was only 2 weeks old and ended up with only 4 posts on it. Not bad at all.
The links I had gained counter acted against the ‘newness factor’ of the domain.
What Went Wrong
It isn’t hard to work out why the site suddenly disappeared from the SERPS and doesn’t even rank in top place for “cheapassairsoftguns.com”.
- I stopped posting after gaining the decent rankings. I did this because I have not followed airsoft for some time and it can barely be called a hobby of mine. I.e. I had nothing else to write.
- The posts I had written were low quality and repetitive. They were designed to only get the side spidered by Google while being optimized for the right keywords and so did not continue to attract links when I stopped posting
- I stopped link building altogether. I had conducted all the link exchanges I could and it is very hard to gain new links when there is only a small amount of low quality content.
Lessons Learned
The lesson is quite simple. What would have kept the site highly ranked in its niche would have been to continue posting and to post good content. It doesn’t take a seth godin to know it is nearly impossible to market something that is crap.
Conclusion
The simple solution is one of the most basic blogginng concepts, that you should only start a blog on a topic that have a very strong interest in. I had hoped that because I was only trying to rank for fairly uncompetitive phrases updating the blog regularly would not be necessary. Clearly I was mistaken. However, in a few months time the site will probably be taken out of the sandboxed like state it is currently in and will start earning me $1 a day again without me even doing anything. For a new site that is not trusted by Google, frequent updates and fresh inbound links are essential.
Has anyone had a similar experience?
Technorati Tags: niche, AdSense, sandboxed, link building, SERPS, blogginng
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Matt,
I have never gone live with this before…
But in my experience, I believe that there is a pre-sandbox period that a site is in before it hits the sandbox. This pre-sandbox period gives you a quick dose of what to expect once your site gets out of the sandbox.
Whether people agree with this or not, its up to them, I am here to tell you that this is what I personally witness. I have a site, you are actually linking to it, where about two and a half months ago… it was doing well in the SEPRS (keep in mind, new site) and about a month later, it seemed to have totally dropped from the index. About a month later, its back and going very strong. Sept. was a huge month for the site and it had a growth of over 600%.
Your Cheap Airsoft guns is a site that will work well for you. Keep doing what you are doing and remember that you need to be in the business of building pages. The more pages you have the more chance people will find them.
Very interesting Garry, thanks for sharing that info. I will add more posts to it.
I’d second what matt says.
i think there is sometimes a “new site” boost where google looks at you, sends you some good visitors, see what they do, and then decide to kick you in the sandbox or let you stay and keep playing.
I’ve had a few new sites rank well for 2-3 months then have google traffic almost die for almost a year.
Agreed. I had the same experience when I switched domains. Great rankings (top 10 for AGLOCO) and then you disappear.
My theory is that when a new site appears, there is a whole lot of new content being sent to Google in a short period of time. That makes it look like the site is being updated 100 times a day so it gives it a great ranking. Then Google realizes that the updates actually aren’t that regular and that it is a new domain so it sandboxes it. Just a theory though.
CQ
That may be true as well. Although the airsoft gun site only had 4 posts on it so it probably isn’t what is going on there.
Very interesting article Matt, the best you’ve written in a while imo. Cheap ass airsoft guns is a good case study and I hope you revisit it at a later date to let us know what’s happening. I think with very little work (perhaps one well researched article a week) it could soon be making you money again.
very interesting post, I like learning from other peoples mistakes
[…] Lessons Learned From A Google-Slapped Niche Blog reports: “… you should only start a blog on a topic that have a very strong interest […]
Fresh content boost has worked for sites for years. But for brand new sites, rarely lasts. Keep with the development, though - Google dislikes websites with short-term business plans.
[…] my post called Lessons Learned From A Google-Slapped Niche Blog hitting Sphinn page1 and receiving more stumbles than Marketing Choices To Be Made When Reacting To […]
I have a similar story, i launched a niche affiliate site about a month ago. I started building some decent links in and then had a friend lob a few links around the internet as he went on his merry way.
Turns out he was blog spamming with my domain and his domain at the same time, probably only 50 links or so but since then i have dropped right out of Google for exact title terms and also rank 9th for the domain.
The only other thing i could think of is that i have a h1 image replacement going on with CSS.
The worrying thing is that some data centres show 8 page indexed, but the majority show 240 pages indexed. I just cant get my head round what exactly is going on since Google never actually tell you in webmaster central.
I know its my own fault for trying to get easy links and having a friend do it, but its a highly relevant site in a niche with well structured urls, titles etc so i would love to actually know what the hell Google thinks is wrong with it. I have Geocities pages above me for god sake.
I don’t agree with your statement that one should only blog about a topic one likes and follows all the time. Your example with only 4 posts is a bit extreme. When you blog like 50 articles in lets say three month and stop blogging after that time your rankings should not suffer.
[…] Lessons Learned From A Google-Slapped Niche Blog […]