I have a question for some of the old school SEO-ers here who survived Penguin 1. On Jan 10th 2 of my sites were badly hit (now recovering) , strangely I noticed that my 1st website made a remarkable comeback on that date - even though I stopped doing any SEO for it months ago. It was almost as if Google rolled back everything I'd done to 9 months ago, for those 2 sites affected anyway. I've seen some other people on SEO forums mention this too, and it's apparently the same thing that happened when Penguin 1 (and some mention Panda) came out.
Anyway, does this mean that with the next update I'll see my 2 slapped sites make a remarkable comeback?
Also for those of us in the UK if you google 'Payday loans' now it appears Google has stopped manually banning sites and there are some interesting results again re-appearing. However for those doing C&B do be aware I can't see any of the top 10 sites using anything higher than 4% KW density. A few hacked sites too, eg https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.deaf-history.org.uk
@spunko2010, the way which these sites rank such as the one you linked to is extremely interesting. Now I don't have access to the whole backlink profile of this domain, so I wouldn't know whether or not they're using some very powerful links. But a guy on bhw replied to me in a thread on bhw that these sites ranks solely because of the time they've been indexed in google. On page seo is not needed at all to rank though I'm not sure how to exactly do this. I wouldn't know whether or not you're supposed to keep the original content or if it's fine to add new and relevant content with on page seo done. But the trick is to redirect everyone but google's crawlers and to have a been indexed in google for a long time.
I recently bought an expired domain which still had tons of pages indexed in google and had been there for lots of years. I'm going to try one theory I've got and see if the time of being indexed really can mean that much. I believe you're also supposed to just blast the domain to hell with rather high keyword anchors. Would love some healthy discussion on this subject! I'd be awesome to replicate, even if it isn't for such ambitious keywords as payday loans.
I had it at a normal setting before but when you know these sites are going to die within 3 months or way less, I had like less than 1% anchors with 5K links and so I would never rank for my keywords
I took a screenshot of the SERPS when I last replied 3 days ago to this thread for "payday loans". Of the 6 C&B, 2 are gone (and nowhere to be seen). Is there really that much money in this niche to rank for 2 days?
payday loans has to be the worst niche to even bother with. not saying it cant be done, but it is literally THE worst niche in google's eyes, i would say even higher than viagra and that jazz.
I'm going to give the payday loans market a crack just for fun I'm in the financial niche anyway and it's not as bad as many people think. Admittedly the keywords I'm focusing on aren't payday ones but they are very difficult but I do surprisingly well anyway.
My PDL site is virtually up and running, found a good affiliate, just need to add my special content
...it hasn't really taken 3 months to do, more like 3 hours, just haven't had time. Will update with any rankings...might as well this thread's gone dead.
I have around 50 keywords all loosely belonging to same niches . Say red widgets / blue widgets / green widgets Silos. With a combined monthly searches of 85K
Would it be a great idea to do this C&B in a single website or do only red widgets Sub silo at a single time .
what would be more value for money ?
I was thinking if I did all these keywords together it would split the juice and make it more difficult to rank .
First loan in the PDL market RevShare. 1 loan from 11 iFrame applications, not bad, gives me an idea of how many people drop off or fail the requirements for the loan. Traffic is trickling in slowly, still very very early days. Glad the site is good enough.
And another came in last night. Two loans out of 15 applications. Not bad, the other clicks might turn into loans I dunno, maybe they are being held/need phone calls to check will ask the acc manager.
Very happy about it as it's only been running for a few weeks. I personally think the site looks crap but maybe it's less hype than others and a bit more serious so people trust it more.
@Thunderman yep brand new domain (partial EMD). Maybe it's a honeymoon period I dunno, maybe it'll drop, get penalised, but I have other domains waiting in the wings if that happens. I think I've cracked it with new domains, but I'd never do what I do on client or sites I care about. This is C&B all over. At the moment, there's no crashing or burning. Lots of people are talking about a G update today but I haven't seen it across 30 odd sites and 1000 keywords - maybe that's why my loan site is doing well, maybe everyone else has been smashed out of the SERPs LOL.
It's fine dude, I didn't see any changes from the update across all of my sites and clients' sites.
The only thing I can see is that image comments seem to have been devalued/rejected by G - anyone else have an insight into the latest update?
No more loans over the weekend, it's been nice and sunny so maybe people spent all of their pennies on the weekend on cheap beer and suncream and will need PDL this week
@JudderMan, first off congratulations on your success!
"The only thing I can see is that image comments seem to have been devalued/rejected by G - anyone else have an insight into the latest update?"
This is sure an interesting observation. To clarify, do you believe Google is valueing image comments along side blog comments, profiles, and guestbooks or are they completely toxic?
@fakenickhal thanks man, had no more loans but a little bit of traffic, must be some long tail I am ranking for. I'll give it a few weeks and shift onto a different strategy.
Regarding the image comments, I have a few test domains and Ahrefs shows that all image comments dropped off (multiple URLs), lost 7k image comments in one day (1-2 days before everyone said there was a G update). Just my observation, not saying that was definitely what the update was about and it would be a bit childish of Goggle to go for just one type of spammy link. Unless it's all types of comment links, I'm not sure. As mentioned above, none of my main sites were hit so I didn't look too far into it.
Your conversion rate is high, I'm not in PDL but anything above 10% is good for me.
I never do image comments even for T2/T3 if that''s any use. Looking at my sites that have been downgraded in the SERPS rather than slapped, I think it's just another link devaluation from crap links. Also brand new sites don't get hit in algo updates, generally speaking, at least that's my experience. As I look now, my older sites (1+ year old) have been pushed down into Google much more than my newer sites (1-2 months old only).
I think it's any comments TBH having looked at it again. Blog comments got hit last year (the big October update) AFAIK so maybe it was a refresh. Lots of info/speculation on BHW about the update.
JudderMan how are your sites fairing now that this "payday loan algo" has apparently been rolled out?
Doesn't seem to have been that effective as I see sites on the 2nd page already, there weren't any this morning. I bet Google have just employed 1 extra guy to check the SERPS. :-SS
No more traffic or loans just yet. I wasn't sure what I'd hit, must have been a long tail. My rank checker thing isn't giving me much. Might have just been a quick honeymoon period of a kablammo of links. I'll keep on chugging away at it, wanna see if I can rank a similar site with careful(ish) backlinking. Got a few new projects and clients on the go so I'm not giving it much focus at the moment. Just letting SER do its thing
FWIW it seems having an SSL Certificate gives your site some credibility from manual reviews, I see a handful of sites in the first 3 pages that are clearly blackhat but havent been whacked (yet?). Although it might be the lack of shitty irrelevant URL too .
Comments
I'd silo and split if poss cos if you do one site and it tanks, it will tank for all your KWs
Glad to hear that the site is working out well BTW. Is it churn and burn?
I never do image comments even for T2/T3 if that''s any use. Looking at my sites that have been downgraded in the SERPS rather than slapped, I think it's just another link devaluation from crap links. Also brand new sites don't get hit in algo updates, generally speaking, at least that's my experience. As I look now, my older sites (1+ year old) have been pushed down into Google much more than my newer sites (1-2 months old only).
I'd say that there was probably some kind of spam update (maybe related to the payday update?) before they rolled out panda.
Doesn't seem to have been that effective as I see sites on the 2nd page already, there weren't any this morning. I bet Google have just employed 1 extra guy to check the SERPS. :-SS