If you’ve been keeping up with my posts lately, you’ve noticed a strong anti-Google sentiment, fear over being a full-time affiliate marketer in this wonderful new year, and overall gloom over what appears to be Google’s all-out tirade against affiliate marketing as we know it.

Anyway, one of my websites which predictably pulled in about $3,000 per month for years through eBay Partner Network has been almost entirely de-indexed, has lost 70% of its traffic and is earning somewhere around $200/month. This was due to the site being completely pulled from four distinct keyword terms, of which I ranked #1 for. As for my site itself, it has a little over 500 pages — each of which has around 200 words of personally-written copy that wasn’t spun, nor keyword saturated. Page titles are clear and concise, and not spammy.

Google Page 1, Position 1…For EVERYTHING.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing SERPs for the keywords I’ve lost, and am trying to make sense of why Google decided to give several of my competitors ‘top of page 1′ status after cutting my head off. It was right around that time when I noticed a disturbing trend. One company dominated about 10 different major converting keywords, ranging from premium to long-tail. Page 1, #1 organic for every single one, even the insanely competitive one-word keywords.

How is this possible? It can’t be possible that this just happened without something scummy. And boy, was I right.

Let me just explain this niche to you: say that we’re in a niche called “widgets,” where widgets is a very big, expensive item that sells constantly and is a huge part of industry. My competitor is achieving Google page 1, #1 for “widget, widgets, widgets for sale, widget sale, buy widgets, sell widgets, cheap widgets, best widgets, used widgets, new widgets” etc. etc. etc., even though they hadn’t had those results a month ago. When I say the list goes on and on, I mean, it goes on and ON and ON for the amount of #1 organic SERPs they have achieved. I’ve even noticed that they rank #1 AdWords as well as #1 and #2 Google page 1 organic for some of these terms, dominating the entire fold of the page.

Scamming Backlinks & Getting Away With Murder

I went to one of my favorite old websites from yesteryear — BacklinkWatch.com — and did a little research on this company’s domain name. It turns out they now have a little under *13,500 QUALITY BACKLINKS* with exact keyword anchor text pointing from tens of thousands of relevant, quality websites in our niche. However, almost every single one has the same anchor text – the same one-keyword term. HMM.

I visited about two dozen of the backlinking sites that BacklinkWatch displayed, and looked to find the link. It was at that point where I saw the scheme in its full glory.

This competitor set up a web hosting service where small, local businesses in our niche around the US could host their website with them. One of the requirements a line of forced text like “Hosted by {keywordterm}” where {keywordterm} was the big one that we all wanted to rank for in our industry. That term, of course, pointed back to their site. What a total bloody sham. I was floored that they weren’t banned from almighty Google, the almighty champion of truth and justice in the search world.

Google Thinks This Is Helpful, Quality Material?

Before I continue further, I spent a good 10 minutes going through this competitor’s website. They’re a simple classifieds website using a VERY old content management system, 1997-ish graphic design, no search engine friendly URLs, and **NOT A SINGLE SENTENCE** of text on any of their pages. Actually, the website has no text whatsoever, and search engines must be working entirely off of backlinks to even figure out what the hell this site is about.

Regardless, the company has a Facebook page with 150,000+ fans, their Facebook ad pops up on my Facebook wall almost every damn time I log in, they’re AdWords #1 for every keyword under the sun at all times of the day (in other words, they are most certainly a big business) and due to the scummy gray-hat tactic they’ve pulled, they’ve made it impossible for me to ever achieve Google page 1, #1 as I have had for the past four years. When you take my hard work, my money, and my livelihood through cheating, I’m not going to sit back and let it go.

Immediately, I visited Google’s spam report form. I reported the site for running a “web ring” of farmed links through the ruse of a web hosting service, which vaulted the company to page 1, position 1 for over 12 major industry keyword terms (and I sent Google the list of keywords).

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever done this — years ago, I once noticed another scummy site in this same industry who achieved tens of thousands of backlinks by creating his own iframe-based web ring. He owned over 25 domain names  in the industry with garbage doorway pages and inter-linked them all to one website, which in turn hit the top of Google page 1 and got cemented there. I reported it, and about three of four months later, noticed the site fell back around page 10 for the keywords it previously had page 1, position 1 rankings for.

While I like the fact that Google is most likely reading these spam reports and doing something about it, the major issue is that they have to be sent in the first place. Google obviously had no problem torching my affiliate site, which continues to have a bounce rate under 28%, an average 4-5 minute length of stay and a large number of return visitors AND visitors who search the internet for my exact domain name (which I’d assume is a major determinant of BEING A BRAND NAME).

To Add Insult to Injury

After this entire fiasco today, I couldn’t help but notice something else in SERPs, at the bottom of Google page 1 for a very competitive term. Another guy had registered something to the effect of “widgetsforsale.org” (where “widgets for sale” is in fact a very highly converting, highly valuable term to rank for) and the site was nothing but a one-page doorway pointing to another site. I reported that one, too :)

Algorithms like Google Panda were supposed to stop scum. Instead, they stop honest, hard working affiliates and let scum go through the cracks. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s stance, consider the monumental Google AdWords expenditures that this competitor has, and factor that in to the “how the hell is Google letting them cheat organics in such a blatant manner?” There are a lot of conspiracies over how Google gives behind-the-scenes “support” to big AdWords spenders, but I’ll let you chew on that one with a Google search. Actually, make it a Yahoo or Bing one.

Recently, I’ve completed a new website advertising my local-area internet marketing & design services, and plan to make 90% of my promotions be offline and hyper-local. The days of counting on search results are truly over. I have no faith in Google – it is a money hungry organization that is about as capable of doing a proper job as your local DMV or tax collector’s office. I can’t have faith in Yahoo or Bing — even though I find it to still be far more simple to rank in both, I don’t have much certainty as to their futures as search engines (especially Yahoo).

Even though the majority of my websites are still going strong, this massive blow I’ve recenetly suffered was more than enough of a warning to me. Affiliate storefronts had a good run — we’ll talk to our grandchildren about them, one day.

1. Say goodbye to comfort. Some of those cemented rankings you’ve been enjoying for years are probably now gone. If so, you’re scrambling to figure out how to get them back and make up for the loss of hundreds of dollars per month. The reality of it is that you can’t use any of the SEO tactics you knew and loved anymore, and it will probably take a long period of time to get those rankings back.
2. Google screwed up. Google Panda certainly was not without flaw. Type in some search queries that your sites rank for (especially ones you no longer rank for), and you’ll see that pages 1 & 2 still are peppered with garbage websites that have two dashes in the domain name and are full of spun content. Like everyone else, you’ll probably think about why your site, which is so much more worthy, is now on page 7. So much for the algorithmic upgrade punishing the same old scumbags who have been annoying both users and fellow marketers for years.
3. The rich get richer. More than ever, big brands dominate page 1, 1-5 for generic 2 and 3-keyword terms. Why? It’s because the new algorithm favors social sharing, and these days, most big companies hire advertising agencies for thousands of dollars a month to manage and analyze social campaigns. These services also engage in heavy link building both online and offline. I know, because I project managed one at my last job. Your personal Twitter, Facebook Page and bookmarking efforts pale in comparison, and they always will. And, who will get more +1 button clicks on Google? A famous brand name site, or some newcomer with a freshly built website who’s trying to work it up?
4. SERPs differ depending on where you are. Strangely enough, your site might be ranking at the top of page 1 of Google for a certain term when you search for it at home, but not in your neighboring area. Or across the country. Call your friends, ask them to search for a term and then have them tell you where your site is ranking over there – you’ll see. This has made life very hard on those who need to know their SERP position status. The old notion of “awesome, I’m ranking on page 1 #2 for “best used cars” in my country!” is out the window.
5. The way your site ranks is correlated to how it performs. Several years ago, webmasters wondered if Google was beginning to rank sites based on the sort of thing we see in Google Analytics: bounce rate per keyword, average time spent, etc. We can now pretty much confirm that this is happening in the current day.
6. Be paranoid, be very paranoid. By tomorrow, you can lose that wonderful ranking you currently have, and it will come without warning and without reason. You’ll notice when you log into Analytics and see that dreaded red percentage, followed up by a trough in your dashboard chart. The worst part of all is that there’s no textbook quick fix like there used to be. You can shuffle around your page titles and keyword densities all day, but it will be in vain.
7. Oh yeah, there’s Yahoo and Bing, too. Remember those? They’ve changed algorithms as well – I’ve noticed some sharp decreases in rankings to the two other giants who never seem to grace the headlines of SEO news sites. “Well, at least I’m still ranking #1 on Yahoo” – NOT!

The What & Why of What Happened to SEO

What I personally see happening is a shift toward websites that are just truly awesome and have a LOT of constant work put into them. Kind of like the upper 5% of every niche getting its rightful place on page 1 for their intended term. However, in order to get there, you’re going to need a lot of help from tens of thousands of strangers sharing and +1′ing your stuff.

If you’ve spent all of these years running 20 sites that run themselves, you’re one foot in the grave.

We’ve moved away from bookmarking our own sites on Digg and Delicious to begging others to share our stuff on Facebook and Google+. Our level of personal control in link building is mortally wounded. Google knows where you are, what you’re doing and how you’re attempting to manipulate your own sites. So, unless you have 5 dozen friends around the country who will help you promote your site naturally on a fairly regular basis, you’re going to just have to make awesome sites that people will want to share.

It seems like a natural progression. The internet has so many websites. For too long, people like us have been gaming them (i.e. personal link building). Now, it’s really up to the general public and the way they naturally interact with your site. For that, I have to say, I’m pretty happy.

What’s alarming is that there is no immediate solution to fixing a ‘sandbox’ or lost ranking situation. It’s just devastating. This is why you can no longer mass produce websites. Yet, at the same time, you can no longer just rely on one niche. Hopefully you have a lot of time on your hands.

This really is the age of branding – it’s the age of “Hotels.com,” not of “BestCheapHotels.info.” Become well known, and people will associate your site with your niche, bypassing much of the heartache known as SEO.

This is also the age of paranoia in internet marketing. You should feel paranoid about that site you never update anymore, which is miraculously still ranking pretty highly. You should feel paranoid about your sites not having social campaigns, or no +1′s. You should feel paranoid about those old affiliate sites you’ve been running – because affiliate storefronts are harder than ever to rank…especially if they fall within topics where article writing and social sharing is nearly impossible.

It seems like the best way to survive is to choose the most successful sites out of your entire portfolio and put your heart and soul into them. Unless you truly have time or assistance, bid the rest farewell. Make it a daily obligation to socially market these one or two sites, write articles and encourage activity. It’s called survival…

What Got Hit the Most

1. Affiliate storefronts (especially eBay & Amazon): Wow, did these get massacred. Some of them, which were enjoying top-of-page-one visibility for certain two-word keywords for years are now on page 2 or 3 of Google and getting no traffic at all for those terms. The fallout from this was pretty evident on my EPN dashboard. Overall, I suffered a 55% loss of earnings in June. Yeah, 55%. To me, that is thousands of dollars lost per month, overnight.
   Considering that I’m a full time affiliate marketer and this money is a major part of what goes toward earning my living (like food, utilities, etc.), I’m sweating hard right now. It didn’t ease my pain to read about yet another state — California — making headline news when they signed the nexus law last week. 

   EPN recently posted about Google Panda on its blog, and the comments from fellow EPN affiliates were very mixed. Across the board, I’d say that all of my affiliate storefront sites have gotten a 15-20% drop in visits and many of have lost the 2-word keyword top-of-page ranks that they’ve had for years.

2. Parked domains: Thanks to Google Panda, I’ve noticed that my domains over at Parked.com are literally earning a solid $0.00 on a daily basis, as the views are dropping like a rock. Since my domains aren’t monetizing themselves, I am now being very loose with my “cut list” and have trimmed down my domain portfolio significantly.
   At this point, I see no value in “exact match keyword domains” that have 3 words in them, so those are being trimmed. It all comes down to cutting expenses at this point, and holding on to domain names that are “hit or miss” isn’t in my strategy.
3. Many of my one-page resources that earned through CJ.com links have suffered severely, including Squidoo and Hubpages.
4. Any site that had a high ranking for a short-tail keyword were instantly butchered and are no longer ranking for those terms. They were all taken over by big-name websites in the SERPs. Many of them are big brand name sites. Here’s an example…one of my most successful Squidoo lenses of all time, “How to Create A Facebook Page,” was Google Page 1 #1 for about two years for the two word term “facebook page.” I even beat Facebook.com in ranking for that term. Now that Panda came along, my page is now Google Page 1 #9, completely unseen at the bottom of the page, even nailed down further thanks to a Google Image strip. My page is now outranked by Peter Jackson’s Facebook page and the British Monarchy’s Facebook page for the term “facebook page.” Seriously? This is a Google flaw.
5. Sites that I’ve neglected, including mini-sites. We all have them: the “well, it’s better than a parked page” websites that have 5 pages of personally-written content and AdSense ads, that have been cemented at the top of Google for an intended keyword. Those got knocked down to the bottom of the page. I didn’t expect any less out of these, so it’s not a shock.

What Got the Most Benefit

1. Content sites: And by “content sites,” I mean article sites with regular contextual additions, like this one. Pixelrage.net got a 40% jump in visits.
2. Sites with lots of backlinks: My oldest affiliate sites with the most backlinks are still staying alive and enjoying the same rankings, if not, even higher rankings for short-tail keyword terms, while the others with few backlinks suffered horribly.
3. Sites that got a lot of Facebook Likes & Tweets: Anything that has had a lot of social activity continued to prosper after Google Panda, and that especially went for my top Squidoo lenses like my HDTV lens. I’m expecting positive effects for that new Google+ button.

So?

Err, I guess, Google is favoring sites that get regular content. That’s all well and good for bloggers and magazine sites, but it sucks for anyone running a storefront. Especially an affiliate storefront. There’s only so much you can write about watches, barbecue grills or whatever else your niche EPN or Amazon store is about. Well, guess what – you’re now obliged to find a way. You’re also obliged to get those sites “social” on Facebook and Twitter. Like, right now. Good luck with that.

What this has taught me: many of us have been fools for a long time. Yeah, in 2007, I knew the whole strategy of mass-producing “Build A Niche Store” sites was destined for failure, but at the same time, I was making a LOT of money off of that strategy. While I didn’t join the fray of webmasters who had content-less sites, I was running a good 15 of them, many of them were “set it and forget it” sites with personally written content that was made for consumers that simply weren’t updated or added to for years. However, that’s no longer acceptable by Google’s standards, even though the sites themselves are helpful and still obviously effective for customers.

Now, it’s a mad dash to “make good” and figure out what to do to get my regularly predictable earnings back. This is scary.

It seems like this update wasn’t only there to combat content scrapers, but to hit not only thin affiliate sites but affiliate storefronts in general. Yes, some of my affiliate storefronts are still doing well. One finally hit the top of page 1 for a major converting term and is getting a lot of traffic from it. However, it is also kicking ass in terms of user behavior. So, it seems like whatever you’re looking at on your Google Analytics page is an indicator as to what Google already knows in its algorithm, and you’re being judged for it.

I feel that this is a catch-22 for affiliate storefront owners. You’re getting penalized because your site is what it is. However, you’re also supposed to add content to it regularly so that it is seen as providing “good content.” But if your content isn’t about “X for sale” or something related to the term you really want to rank for, then you’re going to rank for other broad terms about your product category that are non-converting. Being an affiliate marketer is endless frustration, between this aspect and the hours of your life wasted on chasing good backlinks. On top of that, you have to figure out how to make these storefronts go “social” when it just simply isn’t in their nature to be. It’s madness.

I’ve truly learned one important lesson – stick to a minority of topics and really build them up. Brand them, build a community around them and keep adding stuff that community finds useful. When you have a branded site, you don’t have to care about an algorithm or whatever you’re ranking for. There’s a ton of sites out there that don’t rely on SEO rankings. I’m seeing the value in becoming a “household name” or just flat out “share-able” to the community you’re targeting.

I’ve begun taking down smaller affiliate sites. I already track what every site is making on a month-by-month basis and compare it to previous years, and if it’s not up to par – it’s gone.  I’m only one human being, and we’re in a day of age where one person can’t babysit multiple sites anymore. Time for a totally renewed strategy, even if that means putting more of your eggs in just one basket.

As for affiliate marketing, I see it being in choppy waters these days. One thing I hate is unpredictability. When I can look at my monthly earnings and know I’m going to make “at least $x,xxx,” I’m fine. When an algorithm comes out and clips that number dramatically, I start to consider going back to freelance work, rather than churning out content and new websites whose fates are uncertain.

If you hadn’t heard of it already, “Google Panda,” yet another wacky code name for a new algorithmic update, has blessed/cursed our presence in mid June 2011. The premise of it sounds welcoming – its motive was to punish scrapers (read: lazy SEOs who rip off other people’s content or make elaborate RSS feed-driven websites about niche topics) in search listings.

The good news: cheaters like Mahalo.com got hit hard. The bad news: so did some of your websites. I hope you’ve been paying attention to your Google Analytics account.

The truth of the matter is that Google officially stated that the algorithm targeted “low quality websites.” But, the exact definition of what that term means is totally subjective to Google.

Maybe CNN.com didn’t get affected, but perhaps your gas grill eBay affiliate store did. Maybe that “one paragraph of original content per page” strategy you’ve had since 2007 is now defunct. Then again, ranking #3 in Google for “best gas grills” vs. ranking #7 for it could mean the loss of hundreds of dollars per month for any at-home affiliate marketer. Uh oh.

Fear Of Pandas

Here are my two biggest concerns about Google Panda:

1. Is Google penalizing the right sites? Quite awhile back, I wrote about some scumbag who stole my image and ranked on Google Image Search page 1 for it (and yes, he’s still up there), even though mine was up for months but no longer appeared whatsoever after it was copied. How often do this happen with your content? Do you know? What if your plagiarizer is being seen as the “original” and you as the “copy?” So, what’s the probability of some really top-notch scraper taking and “claiming” your content before your web page matures enough to be seen as the original source, and how does it fit with Google Panda?
2. What does “low quality” mean? Does it mean anyone who is running an affiliate store? So, if this were true, then how is any affiliate store supposed to rank from scratch if its natural lack of content is already dooming it from the start? We all know how hard it is to rank affiliate stores through natural link building. Unless you’re getting REAL links (not crappy ones from Delicious.com), you’re basically up the creek these days.

Google Panda vs. Affiliate Sites?

I’ve read just about every article out there about the Panda scare from major marketing sites, and they all discuss ways to “think more like Google” and dodge the big bad Panda, but all of these articles talk about article sites, not affiliate sites. In this case, I’m just going to use my own common sense as an internet marketer. Here are my suggestions as to how an affiliate site can survive Panda:

1. Have other people build links to your site for you! Can I subtitle this “Stop wasting valuable time building garbage links that won’t help you” too? If you don’t have a Facebook Page (or Twitter account) for your affiliate site, now is the time to consider one. If you’re embarrassed at the prospect of going social with something as lowly as an eBay or Amazon affiliate site, then you’ve been slacking in regard to making that site serve a dual purpose as an information/product offering site. It probably looks too “affiliatey,” too. Start treating that site like a blog with regular news about the product you’re selling. The news you put on it better be super original and meaningful…otherwise, nobody is going to care about being your “fan” or sharing your links! If you think I’m suggesting this because I consider Facebook Page links as backlinks, then we’re not on the same level. Think of it this way: Facebook Page + lots of fans = lots of exposure. Lots of exposure = higher chances of your fans linking to your site via theirs. The Facebook Page links themselves are near meaningless, though.
2. Stop keyword stuffing, start writing legibly. Most affiliate sites fail on the internet because they truly suck. I’ve laughed at so many of them through the years. I think I have more respect for people who just slap on a product RSS feed without any text at all, because some of the text I’ve read was simply amusing. Whatever text you put on an affiliate site better be very relevant and effective enough to the exact kind of person you anticipate finding that exact page on a search engine.
3. Focus more on less websites. Stop biting off more than you can chew by making a new website every week, because you’re going to be working your ass off to promote them all as the months go by. Why not stick with the ones that you know are already profitable, and really build them up and make them top-notch? It beats owning 100 affiliate sites that all rank for 5-word long-tail keywords and get a handful of visitors per day. The work you can put into 1, 2 or 3 sites will show, and they’ll beat the work you’re putting into 105, 106 or 107 websites. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have one website making $500/month, rather than having 250 websites making $2/month (just imagine the time wasted on WordPress updates…)
4. Most important tip ever…BUILD A BRAND NAME FOR YOUR SITE! Oh, how I want to stress this one above all else. Imagine a world where you don’t really have to care about search engines and their ridiculous algorithms. It’s a world where you manage a well-known brand, simply because you kick ass at what you do, you have a great domain name/logo/brand recognition, and have made a household name for yourself in your niche. It’s a place where you log in to Analytics and see that nearly half of your healthy traffic is coming from type-ins. What a great place to be.

It’s All About Bad Timing

What scares me the most about the timing of this Google Panda update is the fact that it happened in mid June. Personally speaking – of the dozen websites I’m running, practically all of them suffer in the third quarter, beginning as early as mid June. So, the panic sets in when you log in to your analytics panel to see that all of your sites’ traffic have dropped an average of 10%+ each, and you can’t attribute it to Google Panda or bad summer traffic.

In this case, it’s best to note the summer trends from June 2010 and 2009, if you’re lucky enough to have them. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can simply create a chart of all three years for a quick review. Also, take a good look at your earnings reports from these time periods, and compare them to June 2011. If things look pretty similar, it’s more than likely an issue with summer traffic. If not, then you better start reviewing individual keyword rankings, and even open up your browser to manually check and see where your sites are.

My most critical loss was losing Google page 1 #3 for “best watches.” I’m now somewhere on page 5. Talk about a traffic & earnings trough.

Earlier this Fall, Google ‘upgraded’ their keyword tool. Upon logging in, you no longer saw the classic layout that you were used to; rather, the interface looks more Google AdWords-ish. If you’re like me, the Google Keyword Tool was your #1 source of keyword research. As a daily user, I’ve become accustomed to its results for the niches I’m a part of. However, the upgrade is showing results that are drastically different than what the old tool used to show. This is where it helps to have a photographic memory.

I was further alarmed when I read this article raising the same exact concern. Looks like I wasn’t alone, here.

So, here’s a new conspiracy – is Google now suggesting keyword terms that they want to see more traffic being generated for by suggesting to the webmaster community, for the sole purpose of driving more AdWords buys of those keywords? I’m a big conspiracy theorist in general, so I don’t doubt this one.

What annoys me about the updated Google Keyword Tool: 1) I don’t believe the validity of most of the keywords appearing at the top of the list when I sort it by monthly volume, 2) the monthly trend reports are really out of whack compared to what I remember from the old Google Keyword Tool, 3) the results shown in the Google Keyword Tool don’t coincide with results found on Google Insights or even Google Instant (that drop-down box that suggests things as you type on Google.com, which many SEOs see as ‘revolutionary.’)

With all of that being said, I’m relying more on actual Google Analytics results for keyword terms, Squidoo lens keyword results (believe it or not, I’ve acquired many quality keywords from the analytics reports of individual Squidoo lenses!) and I do think there is a lot to be said about Google Instant showing a drop-down of the top 5 “suggestions” based on the first few letters you type in to the search box.

If only Google Keyword Tool behaved the way it used to, most internet marketers’ lives would be a lot easier. In the meantime, get used to having a lot of tabs open in your browser.

Dumbing Down Squidoo Page Titles

This was the most dramatic thing I saw. For many of my lenses that were on their last legs, I removed my “editorial-ish” titles and made them completely generic. So, instead of something like “A Buyer’s Guide for Totally Awesome Blue Widgets,” I renamed it to “Blue Widgets” and left it at that.

It’s an awful thing to do – everything we were taught in respect to good editorialism and SEO gets thrown out the window when we do this. We are, of course, supposed to be providing “good helpful content” and not gaming the system, since SE’s know how to rank pages based on what they’re about.

However, these lenses started picking up both within Squidoo’s internal rank, and in respect to SE visibility. Especially the ones whose URLs were actually named the same exact thing as the title (in this case, /blue-widgets).  Interesting…game on. I stopped ranking for all of those extra terms that surrounded the keyword, which were for the most part, attracting worthless long-tail searches irrelevant to what my page was truly about.

A little while ago, I read a post on SEO Book mentioning that Google Caffeine has been favoring exact word domains  – possibly more than ever before. Perhaps this is why exact titles are doing better than “editorial titles?” Or, maybe short, exact title terms do better on huge multi-topic, multi-category sites like Squidoo? I’m not sure, but I’m still experimenting with them. I was always a fan of uniformity within single-page SEO: identical title & URL + a healthy (but not blatant) dose of keyword saturation.

In-Content Keyword Saturation (Is Not Dead)

This gets me on to the next topic: keyword saturation. I went back to my old lenses, which abused the hell out of repetitive long-tail keyword terms.

I removed about 60-70% of those terms, and either replaced them with pronouns, synonyms, or alternate versions of the keyword (i.e., “time pieces” instead of “watches,” etc.) I then pinged the lens, and moved on. I did notice a few of these lenses get some new hits for relative terms. If anything else, it’s probably due to getting a pat on the head by search engines for removing keyword cram.

Diversifying Relevant Squidoo Tags

Lastly, I played around with Squidoo’s tag system. Many of my older lenses were very poorly done, and I tagged my pages with terms that were way too broad or not on target with the topic, such as tags like “best price” or “sale.”

I removed all of these, and went to Google Keyword Tool. I researched my target keyword, and added a mix of the frequent, moderate and sparsely searched for terms that best fit the term. I added these, and it gradually increased the search engine rankings of a few Squidoo lenses for long-tail terms.

Unlike your blog or website, Squidoo’s internal tag system is far more powerful than that of any of our sites because their site is so massive, and so well inter-connected. Think ‘interlinking.’ In the old days, those tags had dofollow page rank, and it was entirely possible to own a PR6 Squidoo lens (I had two). While they’re all nofollow, they still are significant for inter-Squidoo and external SEO.

My favorite aspect here is that Squidoo is like a virtual sandbox for SEO: you can really learn a lot about how search engines behave by playing around with the basic elements: title, headings, content/keyword saturation and tags. If you hadn’t given Squidoo a chance before, play around with it and report back with your discoveries!

Your content should strategically target the big picture, which is, to get visitors who are looking to buy…not looking to look.

An early mistake I’ve made with my affiliate sites was to start adding articles to them with no rhyme or reason. The topics of these articles all had to do with the product at hand, but they were random and all over the place, from talking about the history of the product, to “how to use” tutorials, how the product works on the inside, and other things. What it did was bring a whole bunch of non-converting, garbage traffic to the site.

Let’s say you’re selling bowling balls, and you’ve snagged bowlingballs.net (wishful thinking). You’ve got a site up that’s shilling 5 major brands, and you decide to start taking that old advice about adding good, helpful content. You start writing articles about bowling techniques, alleys, how the balls are crafted, etc. – basically, things related to the product at hand. Now, you’re ranking for stuff that isn’t acquisition-based or actionable. You know, things that people search for just so that they can read information and not buy anything.

So, instead of continuing your work to rank for “discount bowling balls,” you’re now ranking for “bowling techniques,” “how bowling balls are made” and other worthless things. Some will say “yeah, but, you’re getting traffic from people who are interested in this niche.” True, but is “bowling techniques” an actionable thing that customers search for while holding on to their credit card? No. Is this product an impulse buy? Once again, no.

As you can see, it all comes down to what you’re selling and what the audience’s behavior is. Small ticket items sell best on article sites because they’re impulse buys. However, you can put your heart and soul into an article-rich site about refrigerators and never sell a single one, because you had been mistakenly attracting the “already own a refrigerator, but want to read more about them” crowd.

Instead of writing articles about techniques or the industry in general, you should be writing articles about “how to buy,” “how to choose,” or “compare prices for…” topics. Ease a customer’s fears about shipping costs of buying a heavy product online. Or, make them feel reassured about buying something online that most people would normally want to touch and hold in a brick-and-mortar store. Those are smart articles.

For the love of God, stop writing beautiful, content-rich, elaborate articles and putting them on eZine Articles. eZine makes enough money from all of those other chumps putting their time and effort into great articles for the sake of a crappy backlink going to their site. I’d rather put that article itself directly ON my site, and get the search engine traffic from it, rather than hoping eZine will be a portal funneling visitors to my site.

The next time you struggle over the notion of adding articles to your affiliate site, consider how actionable they are, and how they contribute to the main keyword you’re trying to target. Perhaps you might want to spice up your product descriptions themselves, rather than sitting down and writing an article from scratch. Whatever you do, don’t write randomly, or your affiliate site will be getting a lot of worthless traffic for long-tail keywords being searched by people who have no intention of buying anything!

Monitor your Google Analytics account. If you see your site ranking for garbage terms, go back into the article that’s triggering them and remove the keywords from that page’s content. Then, gear it more toward actionable terms, ping it, and continue working hard at your on-site SEO strategy.

It’s important for any SEO in the USA to keep one thing in mind – it may be the beginning of our summer, but it’s not the case elsewhere in the world. I’m keeping a close eye on forum posts from Europe, Asia & elsewhere – it seems like everyone has a general complaint about Caffeine in one way or another. Especially affiliates. There goes the summer traffic hypothesis.

As for me? I was hit hard – I’m running over a dozen sites, and nearly every one of them has gotten a severe hit in traffic – even my 10 year old video site. Take a look at just a few sites. Yeah, ouch:

In taking a closer look at Caffeine, it appears to have been refined greatly (check out this article from Mashable on the subject). Reliance on old SEO practices have less weight and bow down to relevancy, which comes from assumptions due to social networking trends; accuracy, which comes from keywords (that includes synonyms!) and newness – think “late breaking news,” the Associated Press will probably get serious love from that aspect. There are even speculations that exact-name domains mean more with the new update (i.e., Cars.com ranking for “cars”).

Does Google Caffeine Hate Affiliate Marketers?

The biggest complaint amongst affiliate marketers is that the new system favors big brands rather than small affiliates. Whether that’s true or not, I really don’t know and reserve judgment…however, if you’re running a “thin affiliate” site, then you’re more than likely going to feel a lot of pain. Affiliate sites with little or no content are getting hit worse than ever – just visit any internet marketing forum and read the hysteria to see what I mean.

Things will only get worse for affiliate marketers on Google, especially if it puts a heavier weight on social networking activity. How the hell are you supposed to advertise your eBay affiliate store on social networks? It’s going to be a nearly wasted effort, because nobody is going to want to bookmark or suggest your used carburetor affiliate site to anyone else. The rules of advertising article, video, blog and service sites do not apply to affiliate stores. If your affiliate store is mostly hand-written content as its focus, that may be a different story.

Continued Worries with Google’s Algorithm

There’s no doubt about it, I’m worried about what’s happening to Google. Some sites simply can’t get new content on a regular basis, nor would they “fit” with social networking…so, they should be punished for it? This is still unknown. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pushing my efforts on Yahoo and Bing. The traffic is less, but it’s more predictable and neither are known to roll out indexing updates to the extremes that Google takes them.

It certainly doesn’t help to get hit with summer lag on top of this fiasco, either! It’s a good thing I don’t rely solely on affiliate marketing income to pay the bills. How has Caffeine affected your online efforts?

• Title: Strangely enough, their site’s title is set to “foursquare”. They didn’t even bother to capitalize the “F,” nor is there a single descriptor or keyword in there that helps define what the site is about. Not even a mentioning of “local check-in service,” “local business” or anything of that sort; you know, the obvious stuff that they’d probably want up there.

• Heading: There’s not even an H1, H2 or H3 on the home page of Foursquare.com (go view the source code and see for yourself!) Their heading is nothing other than a .PNG file. Subsequent pages are barely any different: some pages such as the “Foursquare for Android” page use an H1 (and a keyword-devoid one at that), whereas the “Foursquare for Palm” page doesn’t have one at all.

• META Description: It’s…empty! If you Google Foursquare, you’ll see the text found at the top of the page within the splash screen being used as the META Description. That’s all search engines have to work with, here!

• META Keywords: Also blank, but does this even matter anymore? Of course not.

If you use a SERP checker like SEM Rush, you’ll note that Foursquare.com isn’t really ranking for anything worth their while: their top 5 positioning includes “foursquare,” “apple store,” “history channel,” “blackberry” and “four square.” The only reasons they appear for those brand names are due to the branded URLs that Apple Store, History Channel and Blackberry are officially running on their domain. Foursquare is nowhere to be seen for keywords like “local business(es).” I’d seem to think that is what their focus is, after all.

This little case study shows that if your idea and brand name are strong enough, SEO is an afterthought.

It also shows that these incredibly unique ideas probably have keyword terms that are not (and may never be) solidified – what would you type in to find a site like Foursquare, anyway? “Check in services?” Who really searches for that, especially if they’re not a techie? Looking at Foursquare’s complete brush-off of SEO personally gave me a new perspective on what matters most for these new ideas.

Much like Twitter, you simply have to know that it exists!

On the topic of “the death of SEO,” keep a few things in mind. In the past couple years, people have been frustrated with search engines’ inability to deliver breaking news results. If you really wanted to know if Michael Jackson was really dead, you probably went to Twitter.com that day and searched for it, or visited CNN.com or even MichaelJackson.com for the fan forums. Every step I’ve just described had nothing to do with search engines, because they were worthless in delivering the answer.

Is SEO Dying because Search Engines are Failing?

As an internet marketer, you can probably throw in your own two cents toward an “SEO is dying” conspiracy theory. Just use your hatred of ridiculous, ancient methods of manipulating (see: scamming, cheating) your way to the top of search engine results by gradually building tons of keyword-loaded backlinks to your site; a practice that has not lost any steam in the past 15 years. Or, how about all of those old, worthless “last updated: 2004″ sites that are glued to the top of Google page 1? You know, sites that kind of answer your question, but have needed major polishing in the past few years. These are all a result of old school search engine functionality that has lost its place in the year 2010. They’ve spawned a whole new business category: SEO “professionals,” of whom have been freelancing themselves to oblivion, manipulating search results and making false promises. Enough is enough.

New speculation says that social media and relationship marketing is going to be the new replacement of SEO. How exactly this will happen is still unknown, as it will require an entirely new search engine platform (unless it replaces search engines, outright).

I think we still have one major search engine phase to go before any major changes take place, which is that of local search. We already know that people have stopped searching for “laundromats” and have already been searching for “laundromats in brooklyn ny” or “laundromats in 11201,” but it still needs a bit more refining in actual search engines, which I am expecting will eventually become “local portals” delivering highly catered results. We’ve already seen huge pushes in geo-targeting in both search and in ads, as even AdWords ads pull information from your IP address and display the closest TGI Fridays or Meineke center in your local area. Getting your local brick-and-mortar business in the “Google 7-pack*” has been the sales pitch of the year (*it’s that local map result with pin points showing local businesses in your area, based on whatever you search for, directly in the SERP).

Google’s inception of Twitter feed results and breaking news entries directly within SERPs has shown the direction that things will be headed toward, and there’s no turning back. Even Google knows that they have to adapt, or die.

People > Machines…Still.

The most important part of social media is that it simply has more influence to people. Anything run “by the people,” including testimonials and advice/reviews given by average citizens are what really matters; not what some SEO has scammed to the top of Google page 1 through cheating the system. Certainly not some website that says “last updated: 6/2004″ on it.

We craved social networking in the early 2000s. We wanted to reach out to the author of a great article, a webmaster, or even a celebrity and just know that they saw our message and had a reaction to it. It’s finally commonplace to do this. It’s also a way to get breaking information that’s available even faster than that of a news agency updating their own front page. Unfortunately, this is also a way to release rumors and misinformation that can throw the world a curve ball if it goes viral. That’s why we look toward reputable Tweeters and influences in the field before we believe anyone else.

The Stagnant Waters of SEO

Looking at SEO industry articles, information and even seminars – there hasn’t been a hell of a lot to say about SEO in the past year or so. Not much has changed. Manipulate your rankings by building keyword-loaded links to your site. Write original content…and a lot of it. Do article marketing. Rinse, repeat. That’s pretty much it, and we’ve already known about this stuff for years. Every time a search engine like Google implemented a revision or penalty, SEOs have adapted to survive it, like a virus.

That’s all SEO has really become in my opinion – adaptation and survival, and looking for the next big manipulative tactic.

Social media, on the other hand, is adapting like crazy. Everyone needs it these days: especially big corporations of whom have missed the boat on it for the past 5 or so years. The common everyday folk you talk to on a casual basis are now able to identify what “social networking” means in their own words. Twitter is a household name; even though most lay-people don’t “get it,” they at least know what it is. Corporations have gotten over their fear of non-moderated, consumer-run content, and have been able to harness it either on their own, or through hiring one of the hundreds of creative marketing agencies that have sprouted all around the world. It’s like the social networking plane that has just taken off…just wait until it finally reaches 30,000 feet!

Social Media’s SEO Revolution

Social media also keeps companies in check. If your business or service sucks, everyone is going to call you out for it on the internet and it will appear like a big, glaring marquee sign for all to see. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to treat your customers well and listen to what they say…for your own good. Anyone who doesn’t adapt to this mentality is going to get chewed up during this decade. This is the dawning of the reputation management era, where public relations will take on a whole new importance. No SEO practice will hide bad publicity!

I’m certainly getting more involved with social media than ever in my career. It’s not just a case of being up-to-date with my field, but it’s also a matter of job security. If you think that being an SEO professional will get you places in the next ten years (let alone the next year), you’ll be in for a rude re-awakening!

Do I think SEO is dying? Yes. It’s not dead yet, but it sure has one foot in the grave.