Since my MFA outrage (which by the way is still booming) people have been asking me how i got that many indexed pages and how they can achieve the same, so here i am, releasing aFree SEO Book that will give you all the info you need to be a successful webmasters and do much better on your sites, the tips i discuss in the ebook are completely ethical and nothing but pure white hat.
This can be considered a webmaster startup guide, every webmaster/marketer is a SEO in their own way and as a matter of fact SEO is used in every step of being a webmaster.
It was bound to happen to Aviva Directory, directories that don’t have a specific niche as i said before in my Google Approved Directory guide get banned by google, completely, no exceptions.
A site without a specific niche (general/web directories) are considered spam, and directories have 3 goals to mantain for their buyers:
Relevant Traffic
Strong Backlink
Proper promotion of the directory.
Well strength and traffic comes from google and proving that isn’t that hard really, without traffic and strength what do you have left really?
Thats what webmasters do these days, they make tons of blogs sucking in tons of relevant traffic and running up their directory’s status the minute they are de-ranked by google, its all down the drain (traffic) the graph on the right is proof of that, the majority of the traffic to Aviva Directory was from Google, after it was de-ranked it started plummeting.
I was querying google for my last post on Ways to find .Gov/.Edu blogs to get links on and i ran into this post on seomoz, so i ran a few queries at yahoo as well to see if they have some good stuff coming up or not and obviously they did have something to offer..
Consider this the extended version of finding the .edu/.gov blogs to get links on
This is the easiest and by far the cheapest way i can think of to find .gov and .edu domains where i can post a comment with my link on it, it helps link building gets you some authority as well.
I would’ve thought that this mfa idea would’ve been way less effective by now, but i guess not, the same ol’ indexation trick used and around 600k pages indexed…
Backlinks
Blogposts
Stumbles
..Bigger server..
Boom!
Below is a screen shot of the indexed pages, yea i blocked out the domain name.
Here is a adsense shot, see how the revenue blows up on november 9th?
Yep, thats because of the bigger server, apparently your server maybe the issue in some cases (like mine) it may be holding you back.
And the traffic stats too, once again ..new server..boom!
All this is to prove a point, its not always google or smm that gets you traffic sometimes its your server thats holding you back, take a quick look at your server logs or have your host tell you if the server can keep up with your site or not, if not then try out a bigger server, you’ll be surprised at the results
It makes you wonder doesn’t? why everyone else who was selling links get penalized and not yahoo’s dir?
Well for one they are linked from one killer strong domain (yahoo.com) what more is that their directory does not revolve around their database of links, its more like a blog with a side order of links, so who ever is visiting the directory or that page that they call a “directory” home page, they aren’t there just for the links they are there for the news and the latest posts from their blog.
Its pretty simple actually with a few edits to phpLD and Wordpress you can have your very own Yahoo! Dir Template/Setup, so that the traffic you get is relevant as well as pleases Google. Simple yet effective makes me laugh actually it was just this simple to be border line approved by Google.
Your directory should revolve around news and latest review or anything that you update on a daily basis which is in fact unique, and people WANT to read or get to know better. Its all about user satisfaction, and whenever a user bounces of your site to another page Google gives the landing page more authority then you.
If all you have to contribute is tons and tons of links and you are getting backlinks to them then you won’t get squat out of Google.
Backlinks will only help your current situation, think of it like a booster shot, for example : my blog has the proper tags and proper content and relevant information for the term “SEO Blog” so i targetted that term actively and within a week im in the top 30’s of that term at google:
Now, heres Yahoo’s dir page, unique content covers the page by 80%, the categories to the directory are on the left so the home page is safe, and passes the proper PR, the difference here is that the content is actually hosted on the same domain and is shown FULLY no excerpts on the front page, most dir owners use feeds to publish news on their directories (thats a serp killer too, in a bad way).
So in conclusion, here are the things you have to keep in mind while making a directory.
Links should only be like a second feature to the site and the front page.
NEVER make general or web directories, they are irrelevant, choose a niche and run with it. (Specifics help you get better rankings)
News or any other kind of info should be the whole idea of your directory.
All news/info used should be unique and hosted on the same domain.
No RSS feeds under categories (this has only a few down sides, better safe then sorry)
Resources for regular users not just webmasters, the kind of traffic you get is a key factor in authority at google.
Backlinks should be your last priority here, you are not selling PR now you have to sell relevant traffic.
You CAN use category links in blogposts to get more backlinks and relevance as well.
The more you from within the domain the better, those links count as backlinks at google as well.
It was bound to happen, news papers are more resourceful,fresh,unique but only to a certain extend there are people with over 100 feeds in their feed readers that gives them 20 times the information on a daily basis then newspapers can ever provide, plus its good for the envoirnment the less news papers the less paper trashing neighborhoods and other places because lets face it, no one recycles or even wants to recycle.
TechCrunch reported this news that was originally posted by NY.Times about this trend, and to prove this point more, im sure you alike alot more readers noted the RSS competition between Shoemoney and JohnChow going on, now the amount of subscribers they managed to pull in doing that was amazing i know there are alot of readers online but attracting more on a daily basis at a slow rate is possible but this much was quite a shock.
The picture posted to the right is a graph showing the change in readers, categorized by newspapers and the amount of change in their readers from 2006 till 2007, this change could be a bad turn for the offline marketing field but for us webmasters and online marketers this is just great, because while reading all this about newspapers loosing readers all i’m getting is “More users online” so that means it increases the chance for any website to get more traffic online by atleast 10%, new startups can use this as a green signal to launch new sites for news sites.
Now while we are on the subject, this effects the webmasters in alot of ways because now we can expand more in the news and news delivery niche, like feedburner or bloglines or sites like techcrunch,doshdosh,engadget and alot more.
News is in now, 2.0 is still around but news and content is #1 and back on top like always user interactivity can only go so far, i would say this time can webmasters should focus more on news / article based sites, i know i will.
