I certainly won’t stand here and say that I am not affected, as I was. Two of my money making sites went from number one spots for very very good terms to number 2 and number 3. The result has been significant interns of money that they earned. I had noticed that three sites that I had and long forgotten were also gone into the wilderness. These are aged sites with decent on page content.

After getting over the initial shock and feeling of going on a murdering rampage, I spent most of Tuesday evening all the way through to Wednesday morning analysing all my and client sites. And with an estimated 35% loss in rankings over all.

Luckily this loss was mainly absorbed by my sites, though had two clients that took a sizeable hit. Ad had to send most of Thursday explaining to them that it will be ok, and all of you IT WILL BE OK.

Algorithmic penalties, or devaluations are nothing major to worry about as long as you determine what part of the algorithmic penalty you have triggered. You can be on your way to rectifying the problem. Some sites/pages I could see what was the problem, other it’s just completely ridiculous. I have a 3 year old page, hat ranked very well for a term with correct everything just dropped with no where to be seen. This blog also got a message saying it was doing unnatural linking, however I have not taken part in any such thing, and all links I have acquired are just through readers, I was ranking for all sorts of terms though. I was ranking for negative SEO, and how to do negative SEO as an example. Not intentionally mind you but hey!!

What I intend on doing on this post, is to go through a small list of what I think has caused this loss of rankings, I am sure many people would have been effected, and since last Wednesday I have received over 185 emails regarding thoughts on penguin update alone.

I am a bit sad as this blog probably won’t be ranking for many terms, but am hoping it will pass manual reviews!!

Moving Forwards

So like me I am guessing most people have been hit, and hopefully you have not suffered too badly, but what are the ways to move forward, are there any practical steps that can be taken?

I am certainly no expert and will only try and report what my thoughts and findings shows. As it is too early to see any effect these variables have I have highlighted everything that the sites have in common. Before I continue, I would really like to stress, I love promoting websites, but do so cautiously. If you have a website with spun content, or auto generated content and let’s of web 2.0 type it should be no surprise that we are at this stage.

Without sounding preachy if you have an original website, with useful content that does MORE then just selling/promoting, and your link building has been more varied then just web 2.0 and building ties, then you may well have a case of genuine grip as to why you are not ranking any more.

In my short study I have found all of my sites that were hit had the following things in common:-

1. The main keyword that I aimed to rank for was in anchor text for 60% or more. I strongly suspect that the over optimisation penalty strongly figures anchor text diversity. As of now the mandate I am setting myself and my clients is that the main keyword must not exceed 40%. This single factor will now mean that link building and promotion is now exceeding, expensive. As simply out I need to acquire more quality links to rank for the same term.

2. Over Optimisation WTF????? Yeah this little nugget seems t target the traditional way SEO was done, as in place your keyword in h1 tag and also in h2 tags etc.. Now I have found that sites hat did well were ones that contained h1 tag with keyboard in and h2 and hi3 tags targeted other keywords or generic terms. In short under Optmization is now the over optimisation.

3. Keyword density, there is a lot of talk about this all I can save for sure is hat sites that did extremely well were the ones with keyword density of under 1% or just at 1%.

4. Devaluation of links, I definitely think this effect has clouded the issue, of course if an update happened on its own which just targeted spun content then it would be easier to determine what type of spun content is being targeted and if there is others relevancy issues. I happen to think google algorithms are at a stage where if a statement does not make since and link placement seems to there just for SEO then that links get devalued.

Lot of us have been guilty of the above, especially in the early days where lets face it this kind of shit worked, so we did it. But is it natural, is this how a natural website develop?.. I doubt it.

Final Thoughts

It is bad especially if you don’t have much interns of financial backup, and you need money that or lots more then 24 hours a day. Also I have to say the way google have reacted, it really leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It completely stinks of throwing SEO on its head, with simple aim of getting more money from Adwords from people who are now effected.

With this massacre (and it is a massacre) there has to be side casualties, and my advice would be to wait a while see remains once the dust settles. See if there is a roll back, indeed one of my site that was effected last Tuesday was now up and running by Sunday back to is normal self.

It’s is easy to say but soo soo difficult to implement, diversify your traffic source engage in long lasting relationship with your customers so that you are not reliant on another company to determine your livelihood.

I started full time affiliate marketing to make sure my income is not dependant on one company or man. Though I now work on my own, enjoy a reasonably successful lifestyle and am happy I am still painfully aware that I am still reliant on google. TIME TO CHANGE…

P.S. This is the first post written on my brand new iPad

The Penguin update moving forwards is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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Seo Content Nework, is a new network that I ahve signed up for it is for article marketing of sorts. The new version of this network is where you input your url and they will match it to niche specific content, and usually on a niche specifc site.

They are advocates of traffic, and say that by joing the network your traffic will be increased. I have an advanced package with them, which allocated me 500 links a day. I intend on using the network for rankings

In my test I will be pointing these links to my supprt URL’s I will monior both traffic on these urls as well as ranking benefits of the url and/or of the arget money page.

The measurable metrics will be that of, page authority and traffic of the links. Ofcourse for me rankings will be the swaying factor.

Link Wheel Bandit This tool i have been using for just under a year. It is FANASTIC I have alredy seen frst hands the devistating effects it has on rankings, making piddly pages leap into first page, for many keywords.

So I know the efectveness here but I would like i formaly documented, as I have not done that yet. Approach is going to be the same as SEO content nework, I know that using this even on support pages will increase the rankings of he support pages and rankings of my main sites.

For both tests I will be using approximately 30 urls maybe more and 30 keywords EACH. In th end the effectiveness of the target page as a link source, and effectiveness of the page interms of rankings will be determined. The study may well last for 3 months.

I hope like me you all are looking forward to the results

Up Comming Reviews is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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With soooo many updates happening, what has been the biggest change? Well the way I see it the biggest change has been devaluing most mass linking options, in search for quality links Google has been coming after these options like a spurned ex lover with an axe to grind. Anyway here is is simple list of what is hot/will be hot and what is not.

What works in 2012

• Variety of anchor text, more so then before. I firmly believe if you are targeting term “blue widget” for a given page, then that term should only be used as anchor text for just under 40% of the total links. My trails has shown that 30% of your links should be or other supporting or misspelled variations. The remaining 30% should be for terms link click here, find our more and some root domain type links.
• Long pages of content, 1000 words+ pages are always ranking higher and that is a fact
• Absolutely unique content, yes its the same old. But I don’t even bookmark my pages on software which auto grab titles etc. I create them manually or have them spun. Uniqueness and relevance is Key
• We all know relevant keywords are important, however I think Google has expanded on that yet again. If your site is about blue widgets and that is how your site seo is done, or at least that is how your site is see by google. Then if you link to a site about purple shoes then that automatically creates a warning filter. Do it enough times and that site will be flagged. Domain relevance is the key, also perhaps more so when anyone does things like blog post submission etc. The fundamentals of it are ignored like, H1 tags pictures with correct alt tags and and On page SEO yes each blog if it contains your keyword in the title page correct meta information etc then links contained thereunder will be considered more relevant right? Well in my case studies If I published and article privately gave it the basic seo treatment then point link from that to another RELEVANT site, my sites ALWAYS increased in ranking.
• Private networks are always harder to detect (specially if big enough)
• Article marketing, yes so many people are frowning upon it but if done correctly it does still pose a valuable resource. Though I find its rarely for mass linking these days, just possibly another tier.
• Press Releases, especially if you get them from reputable places they are a wonderful and legitimate ways of actually increasing your visibility (aulthough there are now reports that major Press Release organization are also being effected)
• Tiers work wonderfully, and the more tiers you have the better. To that end I would like to recommend Link wheel Bandit this litle program is a BEAST. Builds mini nets for you and self heals them as well. If you have Proxies, and Captach balance, then run his program. In one night it created over 16K links to my Level 1 support. The result is a GREAT infrastrucur that leverages authority and links. For all of you woderful readers there is a reoccuring discount for Life if you just type my name in mansoor.

Things to Avoid in SEO and link building in 2012..

• Blog commenting (take it with a pinch of salt) as this can still work however most people will point it to a tier 2, I move it further down the pecking order, tier 5 or 6 even.
• Blog Farms, yes its obvious. Lots of people advertising will say stuff like Panda Proof. No such things if you make a farm public it is NOT google proof there will be  a footprint. There are ways of mimimizing footprint, but most or should i say all will never bother as they will entail lot of work and lot ofmoney being spent.
• Wikis, it was great whilst it lasted eh.. I used to have a killer list of wikkis and my own custom software to post to.. Did it for the last two years and in January some douch started to sell this as a service, and knew this was going down the pan. Now Wikis can be useful for some ip divercification however not for anything else. SHAME
• Putting you Keyword at the start of your title. We all know that carries the most weight, however under optmization is now the new optmization. Move you keyword a bit more inside and see you rankings increased.
• Xrummer (No I am joking this bad boy is still the king, and people who think al it does is forum profiles all i have to say is.. )

There is going to be a lot of talk abot poor webmasters suffering becuase of the updates. Sure the bar is higher, and people will now find it (Internet Marketing) harder to get into.

I have been tracking big money keywords, for better part of 2 years now, keywords that if google did what they say they are doing would have dropped like a stone, but they are still there.

Why becuase, these networks bans deinexation etc are just public executions Designed to out fear into the general populas.

Why then do i say avoid blog networks, reason is simple sustainability. These kind of techniques allyou are doing is playing catch up ALL the time. Would it not be easier to build something once and KNOW this i will be around for the next 5 years. I never did much with adsence sites so I was never really effectd by the above fold crap..

The biggest issue that exists is SEO and Linkbuilding in general is Earning links based on its own merit, does such a thing exist? If you have asked youself this question then chances are you dont have great content anyway.

Please dont misunderstand, I have sites with amazing conetnt written by field experts, that content needs a push to get he ball rolling. so I dont agree with he G ideology “build it and they will come”. I do belive that great sites are more defendable.

As an example, my SEO Clients know this my actual cost per link is about $130, this is a singular link mind you and I reckon 10+ superchanged relevant links will get most sites/keywords moving. This is unfrotunately where we are at this stage of SEO, and I would also say that I think cost of acquization of good links isnly going to increase as time passes by.

Google Updates its impact on SEO and Link building in 2012 is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

Related posts:

1. Google +1 Metric and its impact on SEO

Seo Link Monster What it does

There is a whole history about who created this service, which personally I don’t give a crap about. If you want to read about that there are plenty of people who will talk about this. The service is an article syndication service (that is the best word that comes to mind). It is designed to place you spun content on various blogs. These blogs unlike other networks, are actually owned by the network outright. The network of blogs are supposedly huge, although there is no true way of finding this information.

The other hyped quality about this network is that the domains contained there in are aged and has trust associated with it from Google’s point of view. This review will be basing on where Seo Link Monster Actual delivers and what can be found about from the service.

First impressions are:-

• Cost is $147 a month, and is the most expensive article syndication type system out there.
• There is poor editorial control about what content actually gets published.  There by allowing weak and badly spun articles to be published. Great news for some marketeers and not so good as with enough bad content on a given site. It will be going down regardless of age.
• Very poor link reporting tool. YES you do end up with the url of your link, however you get the entire link report in one list. There is no way to distinguish which article was published?
• Each Article is supposedly published/syndicated 14 times a day.
• Each article can have up to 3 links.
• There fore Each article has a potential to get (14*3*29) 1218 links a month
• It is unclear whether the article continues to be syndicated after the month or stops.
• The spinning function given in house and supported is a poor one. No mention about how to place image links or other media links to make your post more unique. Yet alone ways to actually spin media and image links
• Some support for html spinning

######## Review on 16th March 2012#####################################################

I have done some extensive test on the network, really the crux of the matter is that I have stopped the subscription and filed to get my money back. Something which I have managed.  The whole selling point of this network was that it was supposedly 100% privately owned, and each domains was aged and was trusted with lots of links. Hence acquiring a link from that network would be deemed useful. The fact is that though my articles were syndicated, and were indexed they posed little actual value. The domains they were on were poorly designed, crap newly bought domains.

They offered no seo value to me that would justify the cost of $140+ a month. That is the end of that, this network in my opinion is pure hype and bull shit. If you are looking for low power network that provides in content type links then just use Unique article Wizard. There are other networks with really good value however, as they are extremely expensive I am not mentioning them here. There I do (and happily) spend $990 a month on one network to syndicate content on. I will try and do a review for them sometime soon.

########  Review on 7th Febuary 2012 ####################################################

This is a quick post and will be expanding on this, I have been trying out Seo link monster, and after its general release today. I am sure most of you would have got a number of e-mails on this. Having looked at this set up I would honestly say avoid this service. So many people are bumping this I am sure because they offer a reoccurring commission. However, I have serious doubts about the sustainability of this network and they fact that its not all that good to begin with..I will do a detailed review shortly but remember you have been WARNED  seolinkmonster

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Seo Link Monster Review Avoid at all cost is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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The biggest news for me in 2011 was the passing of my father in 13th March 2011. It was the single most horrible experience of my life and it changes so many things for me. It really made me evaluate my life and where I wanted to “end up”. Having had time now to think and reflect, if I had a choice of the type of death then I would choose something similar to how my father passed. Regular readers know that I/we had no idea he had cancer, and only found out about the cancer 2 days before he passed. Doctors were amazed that he showed no sign of ill health and was running around shopping a week before his death. That was my father self reliant and selfless to the end.

Obviously many people have varying degree’s of relation ships with their parents. I am far more closer to my mum then I was to my dad, but his passing left a profound impact and really made me realize what kind of man do i want my son to remember. I promised my dad lots of things whilst i was burying him like looking after mum, but I also promised him that I will try and always become the kind of man he wanted me to become.

The other big news was obviously my sons cochlear implant operation, and the fact that now is is able to hear. This amazing hearing restoration operation was just the kind of life we needed, and I now see him progressing through his mappings (his cochlear implants are gradually becoming louder giving his brain time to adjust to new sounds). Simple things like him telling us he is hearing the sound of hammers when my builders were working downstairs are now a source of joy for me.

That is the personally life out of the way..:).. what happened in my affiliate marketing career?. I started the year aiming to make 5 figures a month, and it was the aim that I managed to achieve. My publish disclosure of the money that I earned brought me some negative attention, but over all the sentiment was that of support. One thing that I would advice any budding blogger etc is before disclosing your income, isolate you main money sites so they can not be traced back. I was not able to do that, and some people in the industry know/knew my tech sites. Which brought forward incidents like the Friday feeling.

I can honestly say I have learned more about penalty recovery this year that my entire affiliate career combined. Once this gap in my knowledge was filled, i now try and keep abreast of the latest reason why a site might be facing a penalty. One of the biggest disappointment is the growth, this year I have created maybe two sites of note, and majority of my time being spent of consolidation and protection of my current sites. I have also spend a very large amount of money and resources to create a new level of infrastructure to help me go after even more difficult terms.

It has been a slow and very arduous progress to be honest.  Though I have achieved my targets my expenditure and experiment list has now grow to an extent where I have to now cut down on them dramatically, which is a change from direction of 2011. I feel that I now have an idea of what is needed for ranking in Google, not just short term but long terms and its not very complicated. However to achieve a truly lasting site I have had to reposition lots of things especially links and content.

I will summarize what I have noticed in 2011. Though on each topic i guess entire posts and pages can be written and I am happy to do that if needed.

1) Duplicate content. Every one talks about it but personally I have found this to be very much a sticking point. I have done extensive research on this. If you have any given article I have empirical data that shows after how many ”syndications”  does a give article starts to loose its umph (spun or not!!). There is also a very rough guide that I have noticed where if the syndication exceeds that amount (and you have the original article published on your site) that it starts to hurt the rankings of that page. If you do it enough times then hurts the rankings of the site itself. Bold claims I know but these are trends that I have observed.

2) I have found that Google still gives slight SEO boost to EMD domains. I am sure they will continue to do this for the next year atleast.

3) Age of the domains is an important factor, and there is just no way around that. If you have a brand new domain and even though it may offer more relevant and better content and half decent seo’ed page with reasonable links will still outrank you. The only exception here will be the link quality and domain authority, the higher both of the quality the more chances you have to rank.

4) High Pr Home Page Link Networks. These were/are the craze right?? There is no changing this fact as long as Google will publish a pages PR then people will use these kind of networks. I experiment with these networks but using about 15 different networks from 15 different vendors. From them I can honestly say about 3 are any good. At this moment Google does NOT seem to be penalizing the sites (whose links are on the home page network). They instead seem to be simply de indexing the entire homepage networks.  I think this trend will continue, simply put 99% of these networks are easily detectable. The common detectable criterion they have are the following:-

a) Same theme

b) Same links on every domain

c) Same text on every domain

d) No IP diversification (I mean GEO AND class C)

e) Most are old domains, that look wildly different from what they did in the good old days.

f) Most vendor do not take the time or care to actually sift through minor details like posting times (they will all be the same!!)  and miss basics likes privace policy sitemaps etc.

Over all homepage networks are useful but only if you come across a decent setup (which you end up paying for). I would not rely on them solely. Also I would NOT rely on them for ever, and use them only as a short term means to get an extra boost, and gauge the link strength needed to get you ranking. there are few networks that I would get permanently but they are very few and far between.

5) Link indexation, there is one thing pointing your link and another to get them seen by Google. I guess the previous statement is not entirely true, I think Google seems more links then it lest on. BUT it chooses not to give it weight, why that happens is open to debate. I personally don’t have nay number to back this up. I have found that using services like (backlinkbooster.com) help in increasing my indexation rate (I am not affiliated with them but I do have a promo code which give you reoccurring 25% off that can be found here )

The indexation rate of a given link and making sure it STAYS index is something that I have been meaning to look into for a long time, and will try and do again in lot more detail. I think answers learned here will be interesting in addressing a larger issue of what make one link better then they other. As I dont think this is a straight forward matter. I have said this a number of time BUT I still have not got a definitive answer here.

6) Contextual links. They do matter, we all knew that but my personal research has given me an optimal number of words that should surround either side of your link. It is not a straight forward matter as, link placement and making it look natural is now more and more important. On the side this is where every single homepage network also fails they all say contextual links and surround your text in two or three links of text. But that simply is not enough because they spin that text AND 90% of the time the text forms part of a larger big paragraph with umpteen number of links

7) How many links per page can you put? Yes there is an answer here as well. This particular study is ongoing but early results show that you can increase the “quota” of the maximum number of links you can place on a page but doing certain things on the page.

8.  Footer and sidebar links don’t work. That is absolute bollocks, they do work whether Google admit it or not but how long will they continue to do so is another matter. For now they work and sometime do devastating effects.

9) On Page SEO. I feel not much has progressed in terms of On page SEO. Sure the number of characters read by robots has changed along with emphasis on meta tags etc. There has also been a shift in importance placed in comments in your code!! but over all if you stick to known ratios in you title and body text then you wont be too far off with SEO. I ma not sure here to be honest what do you guys think?

The other changes to hits the search engine side has been link analysis, especially with yahoo switching off their API’s what options are available? I did promise to write a review on this, though Market samurai has come back up interms of Pr analysis (if you are into this kind of thing) but other good link analysis tools exists. The obvious ones are Majestic but there are two more that offer at least same if not more information about your links. More on that shortly.

Looking forward

I have a new plan set up for the coming year and having expanded my consultancy arm of the business. I now have positions available to take up to 5 more clients. Bring my total number of clients to 30. I am please with that number and to be honest its happened relatively rapidly considering the announcement was only made very recently. I have not yet decided whether 30 will be the number I will stick to for a while, or I will continue to expand and go more into SEO consultancy. For anyone wishing to hire me they can use the page here. What I can say is that in the space of few month My team and I have delivered everything that we  promised, that is something that I am extremly proud off.

I think this year personally I will develop very few sites, and those that I do will now get more of a focused attention, though i have now thought about doing this for a few months I am not yet clear in how to do this and what projects to choose. I am also very close to becoming a vendor for one of my sites, that will bring an interesting challenge, one i am not relishing and may well establish the site and business and then sell this.

2011 End of an Epic year is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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If that was not enough, I decided on starting home repairs and decided to redo large portions of the house..For anyone thinking of doing the same, I would not recommend this especially in Nov/Dec lol.. No lines of text can adequately explain the carnage and dirt that has befallen my house, my son walks on the floor and his socks are laced in dirt.. we had entire front/porch made. We ripped up the living room and are in prorocess of redoing that. As well as re-tiling the entire kitchen and maybe the bathroom.

When I started the work I had an estimate of 10K to spend, but the minute I saw the wall paper and curtain prices (http://www.harlequin.uk.com/ )  I knew my estimates are going to be shot to hell. I moan because as a guy one wall paper looks the same as the other, and really don’t give a monkeys if the the wall paper pattern do not match the curtains??? WTF??? Builders tension aside there has been lot going on in my personal life that I may or may not choose to blog about in months to come. Suffice to say when i reference this post you will be able to see why my head has not been in Affiliate marketing for last few months.

Couple of other “interesting” things happened. My builders who were placing lead flashing on my new proch managed to grind through the BT cable that was behind the plaster. This of course meant that I was without internet for 1 week lol and got charged £130 for the privlidge.

If this was not enough I was also involved in a fairly serious car accident pictures of which are attached.

As you all can see the Car was totalled, It left me feeling sad of all things as this lovely OLD Honda was my FIRST car, bought it brand new with money I made from the stock market exploits, and now it was gone. It served me faithfully without EVER breaking down for just under 10 years!! (I bought it when I was 21!!!).

The accident was my fault atleast according to the insurance company, as I drove into another guys line of traffic. Though my light was green and he was coming very fast. Thankfully though no one was hurt and my 7 am run to get tiles for my builder ended not so well. To rub salt on an open wound I was offered a measly £1500 for my car, by Esure.

It is a sad end, and now I am left think shall i actually buy a new car? Up until this point my car buying thought were hypothetical, and I always knew I would need a bigger smarter car someday but not really need one this or the next year.

Shall i buy a new or second had car? What shall I spend? I am in a fortunate position if I am being honest to go out a buy a new Jag XJ, right now. Which is the car I really want that or a new BMW 5 series, but actually spending 40K+ on something that is going to drop 10K in the first year is not sitting well with me.

I just cant bring myself to do that, especially (and this now nicely bring to affiliate marketing ) 3 of my sites dropped in rankings. One that most people know is my travel domain, not too bothered about that as I had not worked on link building on that for the last year. But the other two technology sites, they dropped 3 position to number 4, and drop in traffic and revenue is extremely plain.

This drop is a combination of link building a small negative seo attack and a bit of Google algorithm change. Combined together its become a bit of a handful to figure out what changes impact what permutation. However having sat down for a whole day in my office first time in about 2 months, I think I have now managed to figure out the road map to recovery, though it will be a slow recovery and might take 2-3 months to do.

These last two months have also been significant interms of internet marketing, with me trying out lots of new services and resources. One of the main reason for which was to find a reliable cheap bulk link checker tool. Since Yahoo decided to stop offering themselves. Until bing offers something tangable, we have to reply on third part resources.

I have access to some premium private services, however I need something that I could use on a daily basis for smaller sites. The premium services the cost is extremely high to run 400 reports for every single small niche that takes my fancy. So I have tried of few of these, and there will be a post on this I promise. There have also been a swift move by Google for de indexation of High Pr blog networks, especially the obvious ones. The good news is that sites that they linked out to seem largely unaffected. Bad news is that Google is now aware of this explicitly and I believe will target anything that fits the bill with extreme prejudice. Time of buying aged domains and sticking similar sites on it is gone I think!

Challenges and Looking Ahead.

Its clear to my simple self that lots has happened in terms of algorithm in the last two months, though the basic principles remain the same. The just starting out affiliate is going to find it harder and harder to actually earn a reasonable coin. And this is not because its difficult to do its because there is soooooooooooooo much bullshit advice, panda recovery crap and $5 dollar magic bullet type posts/people around that getting any real information is going to be very difficult.

My advice to new and old affiliates, is to learn to analyse and really dig deep into your successes, figure out what you did and why be methodical and meticulous with your planning. What worked for you is a great knowledge to have rather then just “throwing shit at the fan and hoping something will stick approach “!! Dont get me wrong its an approach but its well suited when you have the time and luxury to throw money away. If you are starting off from the bottom try something once, analyse it in detail and then if it did not work move on. But there is no point in doing something over and over again expecting different answers each time??

Enough of the preachy shit, what am I going to do? I am going to fix my three domains! I will build two new big ones, one is a joint project and the other is my solo. I have set myself a traget of earning certain amount every month. If by June I am there or there abouts you will be seeing my cheesy grin next to a nice mortar. If not I will go out and buy a crappy 2nd hand car and that will be a reminder to me every time i look at it or to drive it to work harder !!.

A Mixed Bag of Updates is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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This is part of the work life balance that I find it most difficult to work through. All of my sites generally kick through after January, So Christmas historically been slow for all my sites except one which does exceptionally well during this period (fingers crossed!) Generally I have found developing sites for Christmas to be a pain, so attempting it for a few years and Have now resigned to owning just one Christmas site.

I mentioned in my facebook page that I suspected there is going to be a Panda update, and I still believe that is going to happen. It does feel like I am pissing in the wind to be honest, but every minor registrable algorithm change that google has done seems to suggest that it will combine to become an algorithm change during Christmas or New years. To be honest I hope I am wrong here, but every indication seems to that there is subtle restructure of priorities going on at Google especially with regards to link building.

With the frequent PR updates earlier in the year. There has been none, I have now seen pages with low quantity and Pr rise above the pages with higher number of links and greater Pr. With examples I have studied, I believe that google does seem to have another parameter whihc is similar to link IMPORTANCE. This is not new, however the emphasis on it, is as well as the downstream affect is also profound.

This is the main reason why I feel that Homepage back link networks will suffer heavily in the future. Because google is looking for certain factors from a page that contains links to your site. These factors (again my theory only here..) are numerous but most important ones are the OTHER outbound links. So if Page A connects to your site, does Page A also connect to related relevant sites? In case of homepage networks that is definitely Not going to happen.

The number of Outbound links are now increasingly important. I have my own theory but wont disclose this, what I will say is that there is a LIMIT to the outbound links on a page, BUT that limit is flexible depending on content, architecture, age and link popularity (from RELEVANT sources). Though I am less certain when the Page speed parameter will kick in, but it is definitely one of my concerns and one of the reasons why I am still trying to move all sites to reasonable servers.

What does this mean for the little guy?

To be honest not much, I still believe that money can be made on-line (if I did not I wont be here). I think people that suffer and complain the most are the ones that dont do anything different and rely on other people to tell them what is working or not. I almost decided to write a post which was title “building your online empire from $200 a month” when I had some time to think it over this is really what I think is needed $200 a month investment and 3-4 hours of work a day to have a self sustaining business (by that I mean investing say $200 for 4-5 months and having that business give you about $300 a month continuously)

I have been a silent reader on many many forums in the past few weeks. One thing that I am beginning to get absolutely clear is that the services and advice offered are usually a few month behind and most wont do you any good now. Its not really the fault of the service providers, but the general lack of awareness of the consumers. Most people will expect to pay 40-50 for a service and expect their site to jump to number one which is never going to happen.

How was your month?

Update and Predictions is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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The activation is set for mid November, and until then we have a hard time as he wont be hearing anything at all. I have been reading up on people after implants, and they all report things like hearing the car indicator and birds chirping, all things we take for granted! So I am even more excited to see what the reaction of my son will be like. I might try and video this,  but no promises and dont want my first video on the blog to be that of me crying!

On a slightly sour note, when we returned home from hospital last night  we discovered that our house was broken into and they took some small stuff, but mainly thrashed the ground floor. Thankfully the study was locked so my computer etc escaped the devastation. There is not much that can be done now, except just to take stock and say in the grand scheme of things this kind of thing does not really matter.

From Affiliate Marketing point of view the business pretty much took a month long sabbatical. Most of the month I stopped to do anything meaningful and spent time entertaining my son, I effectively grounded him just to make sure he did not get any infections etc. It also meant that I spend most of my time  doing silly acts around the home to keep him amused. I did manage to work on some other stuff, and have some results and analysis on impact of social media with rankings into two search engines, GOOGLE and BING.

These results will also be published shortly. Some aspects of results are somwhat surprising, and is conforming my belief to get ranking in both set of engines, you really need two sets of sites!!

I have let my two joint projects slide as a result as well so this month is hopefully going to be heavy work to make up for some lost time. Thankfully the SEO Consultancy work was ongoing and there are no issue there.

How was your month?

A small update is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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I dont have to do any SEO on the sites, and very little link building infact the link building that we do need to do now can be automated somewhat, and I am left with dealing with shit stuff like working out sick days for writers and balancing work. This is not enjoyable, and more importantly I am not developing my portfolio.

So I went and hired two website managers for two sectors of my business. In theory they will be responsible for day to day management of my employees and my main sites. I will just need to determine keywords and areas where I want the content to be tragetted, I have got them on a fixed salary as i dont do rev share deals with employees. This also meant that I have new found freedom that I dont really know what do with. I went through the stage 2 month ago of culling my portfolio with a lot of domains that I saw little value in. Some of those domains were sold and other were just left to expire never to be renewed.

I have now decided to start few smaller sites, each site with the aim of making £200 a month, each by the end of the year and £1000 each by End of 2012, I am hoping to have 20 of these sites made and ranking by the end of the year. These sites will not be very longtail, but will be medium length and keywords that dont require huge setups to rank.

Its almost as if I am starting all over again, but this time with the patience and tools that I need to rank for medium terms, no more thinking that x domain is going to be great. The way I figure it is that irrespective of what the sector is If I spend 4 days in developing new site (about $150 per site for content) and then that sites goes on to make £200 a month every month then that is a worth while thing to do. To be perfectly honest £200 is an ideal figure I would be happy with 20 sites making £100 a month by the end of the year.

The key here is to pick sites with potential to make more money, with products that are constantly in demand and have the ability to diversify the site. Ofcourse here the keyword research is really important and that is something that I am hoping that I will improve on, and identification of low competition sites with great traffic potential is an ability that I was very good at few months ago, but have not practised it at all recently. I am not really fussed about emd domains.

My biggest fear is that I am at this moment reaping the benefits of the work that I did 1.5 years ago that hard work has played out with consistent work and belief in my approach. However even though I am working harder and longer these days but  I feel I am not laying new grounds, just constantly cleaning up the shit that comes with having a few people on your team.

On a personal note I will finally be joining/starting my gym from tomorrow. I have redone my schedule and now on all afternoons 6 days a week 3 hours every day are free for gym. This time also includes time for me to go from home to Bethnal Green (via underground) I have dusted off my routines from Uni days, this has also give me a renewed interest in getting into health sector !!

What are the changes you have planed for the forth coming month?

Revising My Approach is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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1. What should you expect from Article Marketing

2. Making Your Distributed Articles Go further

3. Avoiding the pitfalls and dispensing some myths.

4. Recommended Service.

What should you expect from Article Marketing

The above is all I expect from half decent Article marketing service. I dont go in thinking that article marketing is going to be the solution to my backlink building needs I dont think that it will help me rank for the tough keywords, but it is a part of the puzzle and depending on how you use it it can be an important player in your backlink profile.

Making Your Distributed Articles Go further

That is the trick really is’nt it? A distributed article on an given domain is basically a new url. Once indexed it carries a certain amount of weight, and the trick is to add more weight to the url. Making that url more powerful by pointing more links towards that. In theory this sounds perfect but HOW do you actually do it?

The method is use an article distribution service of your choice (or use my recommended ones). Where allowed spin the body, and there are various different methods and school of though on what is an effective spin, however I will leave that alone for now and say aim towards 80% uniqueness from your spun article. That is to say that each article will be ATLEAST 80% different from its predecessor.

Do not as a rule spin the title, or if you do spin the title then leave one portion of the article Say one small line completely unchanged through out. This line must be unique and only found in your article.

Once you have your spun article (or done via some system) you then set it to distribute. Then comes the following steps:-

• After distribution of your article, wait for 1 week.
• Use Scrapebox to scrape for the article title or the unchanged sentence.
• Gather the article urls, filter out any duplicate urls and duplicate domains (again in scrapebox)
• Gather the first 100 article urls, if your number is smaller than 100 then grab what you have.
• Use a bookmarking service, like bookmarking demon or IM automator to bookmark each of the urls. Where possible gather the urls of the bookmarks
• Use a general automated software, like AMROBOT and SENUKE Preferably ALL of the mentioned. And use them to point links towards the hundred Article Links. Use Senuke to build 30 profiles (30 separate accounts) Create ALL web 2.0 properties with EACH of the 30 accounts and then add 2 to 3 articles per account. They can be the same article ideally 2 different ones spun. First one should not have any links on them, once posted wait a week before adding 2nd or 3rd article with links. EACH article should contain 4 links. I will do a detailed review of the method  during my coming review of SENUKE.
• Gather ALL the urls, the reason why I picked the two software above is that you are able to quickly check and acquire live links.This number should be few hundred to low thousands in terms of urls.
• Buy an Xrummer blasting service say 100K profile links and blast them to all of the urls that you have gathered.
• The links where you pointed your Xrummer blast check after one week to see which ones are indexed, then do another Scrapebox fast poster comment blast. (varying anchor texts, not ambiguous ones but related to the topic at hand)

The method outlined above will result in most sites gaining significant ground. Each article correctly distributed should cost you between 100 to 150 dollars. Cheaper if you have the tools yourself, but will also take one person about a month to see through from end to end.  Results is an article marketing method which will yield results and it forces the perception of link authority.

Pitfalls and Myths Explained

• Dupe Content, Yes it is real but not to a level that most will think it. I would not use any of the articles used in the method above on my OWN sites, my sites must contain original articles which have not been distributed heavily just in select RELEVANT places. To future proof you links correctly spin your articles, having an article that makes sense will mean that any advancement google will make in their detection algorithm will not effect your links. Time spent now will save you lots more in the future
• Link Velocity, This is topic lots of people will harp on about. In truth it is not an issue unless you are planning on adding few million links in one go. I would not worry about this, I would however use the method described to a website/page continuously for 2-3 months. Link velocity can have an impact but only very few people know how to use link velocity to destabilize a site, and those people would know the above method anyway.
• Being too greedy, this method is not about quantity of links its about getting a reasonable number of links with a wide range of ip’s and giving them a big juice and in essence creating them as authority links.
• This will get you in sandbox. If I say it once then I will say it a thousand times, a site fluctuation does not necessarily mean sandbox. This term was really taken on by seo gurus who know jack shit about seo. Just build your links and keep doing it, nothing is going to happen. Whether you are in page 2 or 200 your wont be making any sales anyway. Dont worry about rankings until you on top 10.
• Using the same sources over and over. Say you article was distributed to 10 places and your links are pointed to you money site. Will you repeat the process? I would advice you not to. I happen to think  if one site gives out two different links to the same url then the power of the two links are not necessary equal. Use the same method but point it to a different url of the money site and that seems to be acceptable.
• Anchor text does not matter. It bloody well does, KEEP THE ANCHOR TEXT RELEVANT through out, even in XRUMMER BLAST do a relevant anchor text.

Article Marketing Summary And Recommended Services

The Two Primary services that are recommended are Unique Article Wizard and Article Ranks. They both have their advantages and disadvantages of course, you cant do proper spinning in my opinion with UAW, which I think does not help their own cause Their distribution however is fantastic and there are tips and tricks to make it better (not sure if anyone needs them here lol). And I am not convinced about Article Ranks distribution power so much so that I dont really use it (but I mention it here as its miles better then other shit that is floating around like Brad’s Seolinkvine lol). I am testing other but so far These two are the only ones striking out.

A lot of imaginative stuff can be done with article marketing, but hard work is really a key ingredient. Dedicated time and effort needs to be put in for each syndication to really get the biggest bang form your hard earned buck. Do I use article marketing today sure, I use this as a filler service. They give a 3d appearance to my link profile and add authority as well. Are they enough to rank for the TOUGH keywords no definitely not, but they do HELP. One last thing, If you like the article then do use the social buttons

Article Marketing is DEAD long live…? is a post from: Mansoor Affiliate Marketing Blog

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