Off-site SEO: Reputation vs. Quantity

There is a divide in the SEO world and that divide can often separate one webmaster from the other. Two major SEO strategies each revolve around similar principles — the same principle, in fact — but go about their execution in completely different ways. After you have optimized your website for optimum keyword placement and frequency, meta tags and image relevancy, you start building backlinks. This is where the divide hits — some webmasters value frequency and quantity highly, and allow link reputation and quality to take a hit in order to boost quantity. Others look at the equation differently, and value a small amount of high quality links much higher than a large amount of low quality links.

Which strategy is the best? It ultimately depends on your product, service or opportunity. With such a wide variety on offer online, it is incredibly difficult to pinpoint an SEO strategy that will work for every business. That said, it is not impossible to explain which of the two strategies will work more effectively for you.

What type of business are you running? Is it a service business, such as web design, legal consultancy or online advertising? The service business runs on referrals, particularly from long-term clients, and affiliation with low quality websites probably is not the way you want to run your business. If you need repeat customers, constant support and a continual stream of business, it is best to go with the high quality, low frequency approach. Rather than targeting thousands of websites and blogs, take your time and actively approach each blog or website with a quality offer.

The best way to generate these high quality links is through word of mouth and organic relationships. The big blogs and aggregation websites don’t focus on how much you are willing to pay or how ready you are to spam your content — they focus on quality and insight. If you want these high quality links, you need to fine tune your focus and work hard to get them.

Things are different for many online marketers. When you are less focused on repeat business, client satisfaction and ultimate relevancy, you can use a range of effective SEO options to minimize the commitment you need to each individual link. Start by spreading your links wide and relatively thin — with single links on a wide range of websites. Your goal here should not be the depth and tailored content of a high quality link, but a catch-all content type that allows you to link from as many different sources as possible. Cast your net wide, attract anything inside and ensure you use any linking opportunity.

These two tactics may seem like polar opposites, but they really both work on the same algorithms and principles. Google (along with other search engines) can assign value based on a small amount of quality links or a wide net of average links, so either strategy can work effectively when performed properly. Survey your market, study each method effectively, and decide which one is best for you.

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I’ve found that adding a single new post to a blog that hasn’t been updated for some time (at least a month) can “upset the balance”, causing a change in the keywords it ranks for - not always for the best.

As you probably know one of Google’s ranking factors is how new the content is. Generally a blog that is updated daily will be given slightly higher rankings for all their posts, simply because they are keeping up with the times and so are more likely to be relevant to what people are searching for. Adding one new post is not enough to gain this “freshness bonus”; all it serves is to alter the keyword ratios (retro!) on the Homepage by pushing a previous post off the Homepage.

This theory only applies to small niche blogs that are seemingly “dead” but where the owner knows differently. There’s no way adding a new post to a continuously updated site like Mashable would decrease its rankings

Don’t capsize your blog with a badly timed paddle stroke!

How Can An Old Niche Blog Be Updated Without Damage?

1. Don’t leave the blog without new content for that long in the first place. Keep it being seen as a fresh up to date blog. This may seem like the most sensible option but often the whole point of having a small niche blog is so you don’t have to keep updating them.

2. Add several posts. This is something well worth experimenting with. For example would it be better to add 5 new posts at once or to write 5 posts and stagger them, publishing one per week? With a flagship blog with loyal readers its obvious to stagger them, but that’s not necessarily the best way with a small niche blog. Both give different impressions to Google, but adding 5 or more posts to a blog that only has 5 posts in the first place gives a good chance that something will make it though to getting rankings that bring more traffic than before.

3. Don’t update the niche blog at all and just build a brand new one instead!

Blog Rhythms

Every blog has its own SEO Rhythm, which the owner needs to understand. I once sold a blog that had been doing great as long as it was updated every week. I had experimented myself and found if it wasn’t updated weekly it would lose its main rankings and traffic would plummet. I told the new owner this but I was ignored and I watched the site drop right down the SERPS.

Every blog is different, work with your experience and try new things out, keeping in mind that a new post doesn’t always mean more traffic.

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A craftily timed experiment.

Having started University and finding myself with no Internet for a matter of weeks I needed a solution, and this experiment is it.

Posting Frequency and Blog Popularity

Posting frequency and traffic levels often go hand in hand, but not all the time. Generally as a rule, more blog posts equals more traffic because more pages get indexed in Google sending more search traffic. Also readers become accustomed to visiting back more often to check for more content and more sites will reference you the more content you have. Therefore you would expect a 30 day dry spell to result in horrific drops in traffic and subscribers, but this has not been the case:

As you can see throughout the last 30 days traffic levels have stayed relativity stable.

Why No Drop In Traffic?

• 36% of Blogging Fingers traffic is from search engines, a very high percentage compared to most similar blogs. Search engines are the slowest to react (out of return visitors and referring sites) and so as a result this large chunk of traffic has not been affected.
• The posting frequency had been “eased down”, with just 3 posts in September and 4 in August. This helps return visitors get used to fewer posts and less likely to assume a a blog is never going to update again. For Blogging Fingers return visitors, 1 month is evidently not enough to cause a significant decrease in return visits, although obviously I am not planning on pushing that barrier again!
• RSS Subscriber numbers stayed stable also (they actually increased). A reasonable explanation for this is that subscribers tend to unsubscribe when a post they don’t like appears in their RSS reader. No posts means no one is looking but no one is unsubscribing either. I would imagine this wouldn’t last much longer than 1 month as subscribers realize they are not receiving any new content.

Conclusion

Every blog will react differently to a month without any new posts. The factors involved include traffic sources, topic of the blog, past posting frequency as well as the quality of the content. Blogging Fingers had the right combination to survive.

If you are going to have to leave your blog alone for a month (and for whatever reason are not finding a replacement blogger), I suggest gradually lowering how often you post beforehand, keeping each post as high quality as you can because the last ones will stay on the blogs Homepage for however long you leave them there!

P.S. Don’t try this at home unless you have to!

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What Does Scalability Mean For Blogs?

Scalability is about expanding without increasing the workload on any individual, or as Wikipedia puts it “handling growth gracefully”. Blogging is harder to scale than many businesses because it requires fresh content to be churned out, without that your blogs traffic will decrease down to a certain low plateau and stay like that.

Ways To Scale

4. Keep building new niche blogs while not updating your other niche blogs.
The other niche blogs earnings will decrease, but still exist and eventually you will have a network of many seeming dead blogs (that earn a very little each day) and a few “living” ones, earning round the clock.

Advantages:

• You can do it all yourself, no need to spend resources finding bloggers to run it all for you.
• Once you are bored with a niche you can move on to the next one. You niche abuser.
• You end up with a very large number of sites, which means stability.
• If you took time off your earnings would only decrease slightly

Disadvantages:

• You are potentially wasting money that could be earned if you kept updating all the blogs.
• Your earnings will only increase if you keep starting new blogs
• Repeatedly starting new blogs and installing the same plugins and going through the same routines all the time is boring!

3. Build new blogs at a slower rate while maintaining them all

Your earnings keep increasing as your group of blogs becomes more and more popular. Once your time is filled you continue to blog on the same group of blogs (rather than starting new ones).

Advantages:

• You can keep the select few blogs on topics you enjoy blogging about. With a larger number more of the blogs will be forced over to be based on keywords rather than your hobbies.
• You can do it all yourself.
• A few well groomed blogs means a community can build up around the most successful ones, making it much more fun and satisfying.

Disadvantages:

• You have a less diverse portfolio of blogs. If one suffered an SEO penalty in some way it would make a large impact.
• Taking time off results in a dramatic decrease in earnings (not passive income)

2. Hire bloggers to run the blogs and pay them per post

You are hiring free-lance writers who are (hopefully) specialists on your topic.

Advantages:

• Your blogging business can run and grow independent of you
• If you have the budget you can ensure quality content by paying for more expensive writers

Disadvantages:

• Very high expenses!
• Your writers are not incentivized to promote the blog. They are very much writers and only writers. Part of their pay could go towards marketing, but their value there is hard to measure because one blogger could really make an effort but fail to bring much traffic and another could get lucky, how do you price that?
• You are risking much more money than in previous scenarios, which is unnecessary
• Most people can’t afford to start a blog business this way in the first place

1. Find bloggers to blog on a revenue split.

One way to do this is by inserting their adsense ID into the adsense units on the posts they write.

Advantages:

• Money is not risked
• Your bloggers are incentivized to do their best
• Runs and expands independently of you (passive income)
• You can keep expanding endlessly like this while risking very little money
• Your bloggers earnings should increase over time, which is satisfying for them

Disadvantages:

• Harder to find bloggers willing to work like this and they may be less experienced
• If the site isn’t earning enough they will leave

Conclusion

If you want to get into blogging and have a big budget, but are inexperienced I suggest trying to run a profitable blog yourself with a small budget, in order to gain experience in marketing and growing the blog; rather than simply spending lots on freelance writers wondering why traffic isn’t coming and then spending more on advertising (which is also unnecessary for the vast majority of blogs).

For most bloggers on a small budget, the best option is to go with option 3 until your time is filled and your blogs are earning enough for it to be attractive for other bloggers to blog on a revenue split arrangement there. Then you can gradually make the shift to to finding bloggers to blog on a revenue split while you get new blogs started and eventually hand them over to a revenue split system as well. Rinse and repeat.

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From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

I’ve found this out from starting several niche blogs some of which have kept the good initial rankings, some have been sandboxed and some have had their rankings lowered after the ‘trial period’. I have experienced every scenario and want to share what I believe the reasons Google treated my niche blogs differently.

Race Analogy For Google Ranking New Blogs

It is like you are running a race with a head start but also a heavy weight is tied to your ankle for being a newcomer. You have to run extra hard to stay ahead. If you cannot stay ahead of the other runners for x amount of time you are disqualified for the rest of that season but if you can stay ahead for long enough your weight is removed and you become one of the other normal runners.

How To Stay Ahead

• Churn out much more content. I’m not saying you should compromise quality for quantity but as a new site you have to teach the Googlebot who is boss by training it to visit your blog often. I would actually say this is more important than large scale link building because Google are more strict about gaining links to fast, but they lap up all the content gladly.
• Get a few quality links. You need this for Google to index you. Otherwise you could be waiting months if all you do is submit your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Obviously relevancy helps but to get that initial indexing a link from an off-topic site will do the trick. There’s no need to pay for links when there are plenty of free links available.
• Don’t go overboard on affiliate links. It is easy to ignore this because we want to, but I have experienced entire blogs being de-indexed after adding to many (un-cloaked) affiliate links. Google doesn’t trust your domain yet so take it slow.
• Spread the link building out. You want the Google bot to see an increase in links each time it arrives but you will have a limited number of ways to easily get links. It works well to build some links, wait for indexing, build some more, wait to be crawled again, build more links etc.

I know these are things you would be doing normally anyway, but with a new blog if you get lazy the consequences will be far worse.

Do you have any other tricks to avoid early de-indexing and getting a new blog off to the best start?

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I previously wrote about using Google Webmaster Tools to increase search engine ranking. The idea is to find the pages that have made it to page 1 of the search results but not quite hit the top spot, and give them a little push to make it there.

This method has its merits, but what was missed is that the higher up the SERPS (search engine results pages) your page reaches the harder it is to climb further. Just like a real mountain.

For example, imagine you publish a blog post with some keywords in the title. It gets indexed quickly because you’ve been blogging consistently for a while and google trusts your domain. It appears in the SERPS on page 25. The page then receives a single link from another blogger and jumps up to page 5. You then start promoting the post and even link back to it yourself in another post and with these few (lets say 5) more links the post has reached the bottom of page 1 of the SERPS.

If it took 1 link to move 20 pages, and then 5 to move up 5, how many will it take to move up 1 more?

A lot.

Naturally it depends on the keyword phrase you are aiming for, but if you plotted this on a graph it would be a curve. I.e. You need a greater number of links to move up a smaller number of places the higher you go.

How To Remedy The Situation

It is likely to be harder to move up to the top of page 1 than to get on page 1 in the first place. The way to avoid getting in this situation is to plan ahead for the keywords you are aiming for and if the first few results are ones that you will never beat, such as government/important Wikipedia pages then aim for slightly different keywords.

P.S. If you want to win a T-shirt that has one of the coolest blogging logos on it, check out the Health Bloggers Unleashed Contest.

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I previously wrote about how Google Images loves H2 Tags and Directory Links. This is becoming more and more true for me every day as my AdSense earnings from niche blogs increase after making just a couple of tweaks to a couple of posts on a couple of blogs and using Submit Comfort to attain blog directory links. The majority of traffic to these niche blogs of mine comes from Google images, which means lots of happy AdSense clickers.

Optimizing Images For Google Image Search

Example of a well optimized image:

<img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/insert_your_keywords_here.png” class=”centered” alt=”keywords_go_here_again” height=”250″ width=”400″ />

Points To Include:

• Name the image using the keywords you are aiming it to rank for. I use underscores to separate the words just to ensure Google can read them.
• Include it in a post optimized for the same keywords
• Use the keywords again in the alt text
• define the height and width of the image even if it is the right size for your page already

Some people also recommend adding the “title” attribute, but I did not do this for any of my images and they all rank very well. The links to the post the image is contained in (from my experience) helps the images gain good rankings in the Image search. It does not take many links to gain good rankings in image search because the vast majority of images online are not properly optimized to help Google know what the image is of.

How much traffic does Google Images send you?

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For example, adding Google Adsense in a sidebar is probably less useful to your readers than linking to the other good sources of related content, which you found manually yourself, but that would undermine the function of the blog.

Not monetizing at at all flops you onto being charitable, which also undermines the function of the blog, unless its function is not to make money from advertising.

Photo by Mini OzzY

Core Principles

Function First.
The function determines the layout, which determines then the user experience. The function or purpose of the blog needs to be decided before anything else. If the function of the blog changes, the layout and usability needs to change too. Some common functions include 1 or more of these:

• Making money from advertising
• Building a readership to make money from later
• Building a readership to launch a start-up from
• Forming a reputation as an authority or entertainer
• Having fun
• Learning about a topic of interest
• Expressing yourself
• A motivational tool to achieve a goal (such as loosing weight by chronicling progress)

A Niche blogs‘ function is usually to make money from advertising, whereas flagship blogs often have many functions and as a result need more careful thought and planning

Making the most of the space you have means minimalism.
With all the free blog widgets its tempting to think, “It’s free, I might as well put it up to make use of the space“. This line if thought is very badly flawed for 2 main reasons.

1. Visitors to the blog have a very short attention span. Having too many options for them dilutes the attention away from what is important, the content and the monetization. It’s not just the the ad spots that loose value if you create more of them, every link on the blog looses value when an alternative is displayed.

2. It can result in readers not clicking anything at all because they dare not start scanning down a long list of links. People like choice, but not too much choice. This is why I have the option on Blogging Fingers for readers to add me as a friend on only Stumbleupon and Digg, because it just isn’t worth putting links to other profiles because they don’t bring such big benefits and each link added lowers the chances of being added on another.

Summing Up

With physiclal products, there isn’t usually the option to ‘throw another feature in’ for free, but with blogs there is. Define the function and build the blog to carry only that function.

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