Well we’re halfway through the first month of the new QCP program, so I figure I would go ahead and give an update on my 100 site challenge, and some additional thoughts on QCP.
First off, you may have noticed that this is my second post today – the first, discussed the basic principals of the Google Sandbox. The reason why I decided to touch on that topic was partially to preface this post. I’ve gone through my statistics and found that about 80% of my EPN sniper sites have been sandboxed. This isn’t too serious of a problem, and I was expecting to face it on some level, although I didn’t expect to see 80% get sandboxed.
Here’s what happened…
My old formula for creating EPN niche sites was a lot different than my current formula. I would:
- Find a niche
- Set up a theme like WP Commerce Steel with PAGES as product listings
- Add a Blog with Search 2 Post creating POSTS
- In many cases, I would add up to 30 posts containing YouTube videos related to my niche with a short descriptive introductory paragraph, then I would stagger the release of each post over the next 1 – 2 months
- I would submit the site to about 75 social bookmarking sites and up to 1000 free directories in order to get it fully indexed.
- In some cases, I would go back and schedule a second round of 30 videos in the same way (this only works depending on how many decent videos there are in your niche. If you’re working in the Door Knob or Umbrella niche, there may not be a wide selection).
Now, in many cases, this was a huge recipe for success. In fact some of my “thin” sites that DIDN’T get deindexed were ones that I followed this exact formula on – specifically regarding adding the videos. Early in 09, I stopped adding posts of videos to my new sites, and those were some of the first to get slapped by G. Anyway, I believe this really helped me avoid getting sandboxed primarily because of the constant fresh content. In the early stages, there would be a fresh post to the blog daily with the videos I had pre-scheduled. Then after a month or two, when the site began to rank better, there would be more fresh content because there would be more traffic coming to the site and using Search 2 Post, which would add an additional new POST every time.
The downside to this plan, unfortunately, is that G decided that what I was doing was basically spam, which I don’t necessarily blame them for, and they proceeded to deindex about 90% of those sites.
In contrast to that, my setup process for the 100 EPN site challenge was as follows:
- Research 20 Niches
- Have articles produced for each of the 20 niches
- Register 20 domains
- Go through WP setup and config process for each domain
- Add content and EPN listings to each site
- Repeat 5 times until all 100 sites are complete
The failure on my part was in the planning stage. My main goal with this challenge was to replace my old deindexed EPN site with a greater number of new, correctly built sites that would be much more valuable as a long term asset. I feel that I was correct in how I chose to develop each site, as they are all fully indexed and I would imagine they will be so for a very long time. However, the thing I failed to think about during the planning stage, was the lack of fresh content, and the amount of time it would take in between building and deploying all 100 sites, and getting full gear into link building. Ultimately, the most important thing I learned so far from this process is that planning and testing is so important. For example, in retrospect, what I should have done was before embarking on this challenge, I should have created 10 – 20 of these niche sites in the exact same format to test what the results would be if I scaled the operation. The main reasons I didn’t do this were: I was extremely confident that the format would be successful based on what I saw from previous sites I owned, and also, I wanted to do this on an extremely large scale so that the payoff would be larger, faster.
IF I would have taken the time to do 10 test sites before starting in on the full 100, I would have learned that:
- My assertions were basically correct, that fewer auctions on each page would not result in lower earnings.
- Around 8 out of 10 of the test sites would rank excellent for their keywords for the first month, with little promotion
- Between about week 3-5, 8 out of 10 sites (80%) would be sandboxed.
- The remaining 20% of sites not sandboxed would lose some ranking as well, although keep a reasonable level of search traffic.
So if I knew then what I knew now, the main thing I would probably do different is stagger the release of content. Instead of publishing 5 articles at one time, I could start with maybe 2 articles and schedule 3 more over the next 30 days. Maybe also mix in a couple videos, or product reviews for additional posts I could deploy over the first two months. The second thing I would probably do, is instead of building the sites in batches of 20 and waiting until the bulk were fully built to begin heavily link building, I probably would do more of a 1-at-a-time approach where I would deploy 1 site at a time, and at the same time, accompany it with a few starter backlinks – like ezines, hubs, etc.
So the lesson here, is that while a massive effort is always a good move, when combined with careful planning and proven methods, the results will be even better, faster.
Overall Progress Update
So about 80% of my sites were sandboxed, which I would definitely call a setback, but I am certainly not down on the project, and I’m still quite happy with the results. Last month, I brought in just shy of $300 in EPN earnings from the 100 sites in this challenge. Slightly under what I planned, but overall still good. Also, based on the time when sites 60-100 were actually deployed, I can say that almost all ofthe $300 in earnings came from only the first 60 sites.
When I originally planned the challenge, I was targeting a minimum of $500 profit in September, but I didn’t account for almost 1 additonal month of time to get all 100 sites deployed. I didn’t even get sites 41-60 completed until the final days of August, so I had a lot of really green sites in September. One thing that did help me was the Google honeymoon period, for which many of my sites were ranking on the first page of SERPS for several weeks before being sandboxed.
Fighting Sandboxing
First things first. I put Google Analytics on the first 50 sites I deployed – hopefully it won’t come back to haunt me, but the reports show that as of right now, my overall traffic on those 50 sites is up 29% when compared to the previous 30 days, so despite a majority of my sites getting sandboxed, my overall traffic is still up.
One reason why is my initial link building campaign. I started off by developing ezines for sites 21-60 – several ezines for each site to be more specific. The great thing about this is that it’s almost a perfect counter to being sandboxed. Many of the niches I’ve targeted are not that competitive, and ezines can rank extremely easily, and they are able to pass on quite a bit of traffic to my sites, which results in a good deal of clicks.
Also, when looking at referring traffic over the last 7 days, I’ve noticed a trend that a lot of my sites are beginning to bring in a nice amount of searches for their main targeted keywords – from Bing. If Bing is already giving me top rankings, that means that Yahoo will probably be soon to follow.
So really, I could literally wait out the 6-8 month sandboxing period and still get plenty of traffic/clicks from ezines/hubs/infobarrels, and yahoo/bing. Then when my sites do get released from Google, things will spike and I should be in amazing shape…
…but I’m not going to do that.
Although there is no concrete way to get out of the sandbox, and almost anyone you ask will probably tell you to keep adding content and building links, I feel I have enough sites where I can split test different strategies and hopefully find a way to get out of the sandbox faster than 6-8 months, which I can then apply globally to all my sites.
The first thing I am going to do – literally today, is look over my EPN stats for the last 2 months, and select 3-5 of the best performing sites from that time period that are currently sandboxed. Then I’m going to go ahead and send a variety of new links (in moderation), and schedule a handful of new posts for each site. I’ll monitor the progress a couple times a week, and hopefully something will click within a couple of weeks.
If not, I will take another couple batches of sites, and try really split testing by adding a larger volume of content to some sites, and add different types of links to others.
Last, but not least, I’m going to work on backing up my already-deployed ezine articles with additional links, so that they can enjoy top rankings while their corresponding sites are sandboxed, and I will continue to have a flow of traffic from every site.
At the same time, I already spent an hour today determining exactly which sites out of the first 50 sites are NOT sandboxed. I’m going to take these sites and begin sending more backlinks to them right away, so that I can hopefully start getting top rankings with a few. If I can get to a top 3 Google ranking for 5 sites by November, and 20 sites by December, I will be 100% satisfied.
This Month’s Earnings and QCP
As I stated above, I earned around $300 from these 100 sites last month. This month I am currently on pace to earn *slightly* less. I have a feeling I will actually come out ahead, and likely closer to $500 in earnings from these sites this month, but only time will tell. Overall these sites have been performing pretty well in terms of individual ECP, however I have some other older sites which get a large volume of clicks every day and have lower ECP, which I feel is probably driving down the overall value of the new sites. I strongly anticipate at some point in the next 6 months, I will be weeding out most of my older EPN sites and focusing only on the new sites.
Overall, my earnings under the new QCP system are down about 15-20%. As with most other people, I am still utterly confused and disappointed with the new system. I strongly hope it evens out at some point, although I don’t have high hopes. Probably the worst thing about the new system is its hard to follow any kind of trend on a day to day basis, which makes it extremely difficult to optimize for the best overall result.
Every Thorn Has its Rose
Although there’s no denying that it sucks having a large amount of my new sites sandboxed, there are still some positives. The main one being that thanks to some analysis, I’ve determined exactly which sites aren’t sandboxed, and I can concentrate more of my efforts on those sites specifically, instead of a general massive effort on all 100 sites. This will help me test exactly what is moste effective, and at some point I will be able to apply the same methods to the rest of the sites, whenever they are un-sandboxed. I should be able to squeeze a nice income out of my non-sandboxed sites relatively quickly, which should at least give me a preview into what my earnings will look like 6 months from now, as well as help to recoup the investment I made in content and labor on this project rather quickly.
I will also be able to condense my findings into a proven method for researching, developing and deploying niche sites into a proven system that I can share with the readers of this blog. I’ve already learned a lot over the past couple of months from this huge undertaking, and I expect I will continue to learn new things almost daily. When it’s all said and done, I should have a very solid system for making money online via niche sites.
Plans for the Future
This site is almost a year old now, and I also am nearing 100 RSS subscribers. Once I reach that milestone, I plan on getting back to some of the basics I had in mind when I created this site – namely, releasing free wordpress themes. When I hit 100 subscribers, I plan on doing a complete overhaul on my original WP Contempo theme, and re-releasing it. I also have plans in the works for more themes.
As for EPN, I doubt I will be investing a lot more time and/or money into new EPN-based sites for quite a while. I want to have a firm grasp on exactly how the new system works, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to that point right now. I have plenty of EPN targeted assets right now, to the point where I should be able to be making a comfortable full time income off of them within several months. I may double back and work on more sites in the future, but as of right now, I have no plans.
Based on the complete and utter chaos that is EPN, I’m going to be heavily shifting focus back to AdSense. I’ve been enjoying modest AdSense earnings for quite a while now, thanks to a handful of sites, and I want to expand on that, and fully learn the ropes to being successful with AdSense. My plan from here on out, is to work on developing a minimum of 1 x 100+ article authority site each month, using only AdSense as a monitization method. I’ve been following the teachings of the Keyword Academy very closely, and they, along with many others in the same crowd are all shifting their focus towards developing authority sites. I feel this is a no-brainer for me, as I already have several authority sites, and I own quite a few aged domains/sites with huge potential for growth. I think by adding 1 new authority site to my portfolio each month, I should rapidly be able to increase my overall MMO income.
I may take a big leap and start looking at Amazon as a source of revenue at some point as well. There are a lot of things I hate about the amazon affilate program, but the way things are going with EPN, it’s looking more and more like a solid alternative every day. I don’t expect to do much with this until I’m essentially done with my EPN snipers, but I do have it cooking on the backburner.
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Sam,
WOW! This was one informative post. Thank you for sharing your findings and I look forward to the updates. I have found that for non competitive keywords you can avoid the sandbox, and hold position but if your site is competing with others you go to the sandbox. I wonder what you used for your keyword analysis and what was your threshold for searches per month to qualify your target keywords? Great job…enough to get me motivated again.
Gerry
Prior Lake
Hey Gerry,
Good to hear from you. It is definitely possible to avoid the sandbox for keywords with very little competition. Some of my 20% that weren’t sandboxed were also some of the least competitive. Overall, the keywords I chose are all relatively competitive, so in retrospect I’m not really surprised to be sandboxed.
For keyword research, I followed the system taught by The Keyword Academy for 80 of the sites, and used an adapted version of thier formula for the other 20 sites.
I like this experimental approach – sounds like it’s going well financially too.
I will have to check out the Keyword Academy. I am trying to determine a threshold for search volume, that makes sense from a site development standpoint. I have been using Micro Niche Finder,targeting terms that have a minimum monthly search volume of 1000 searches. I am curious what other “successful” niche site builder use. Maybe its a trade secret.
Looking forward to your continuation of these posts
@annabelt – After a few years of doing this, I’ve found that no matter what, nobody is going to be able to sell you a quick fix for making money online that will compensate for a lack of experience. Not everything I’ve tried has always worked out, but in my opinion experimenting and testing is the only real way to be successful long term in this business.
@Gerald – I’ve heard good things about MNF, but haven’t used it myself. I did a lot of traffic based keyword research in the past using the AdWords keyword tool. One thing you will learn from the Keyword Academy is that traffic alone is not the only criteria for selecting a good niche.
Uh…please excuse me for being blunt but I think the payoff for you (and your readership) in the end will be worth it. I practically fell out of my seat when I read your post under the heading–”Fighting Sandboxing”–in which you started off by saying: ”
“First things first. I put Google Analytics on the first 50 sites I deployed.”
OMG, are you F-ing KIDDING me?? Don’t you know that Google Analytics is one of their primary tools used to figure out WHO should be sandboxed and/or de-indexed??
Please do a little research on the Warriorforum.com site in which Internet marketing experts (those who are actually making 6-figure incomes) have conducted research to provide quantitative analysis of this fact.
Normally, I’m just a lurker but when I read that your method of avoiding sandboxing was by installing Google Analytics, I had to speak up. I mean, that’s like saying my method for avoiding drowning is to go deep sea diving without a scuba tank.
Hey Jasper,
Thanks for your comment. I definitely agree with some of what your saying. I put a lot of thought into whether to use google analytics at all, and obviously there is some risk involved, a big risk potentially. But it’s a risk I am obviously willing to take.
I put a lot of effort into each site, to make sure that all 100 are of high quality. My whole point in doing this experiment is to create sites that are going to deliver over a long period of time, as opposed to thin sites that likely won’t have as long of a lifespan. It’s not as if I put up 50 new bans sites, all in one day, and put analytics on each one. These 50 sites running analytics were put up over the course of about 2 months, with analytics being added at varying times. Does that make it safe? No, of course not. Obviously Google can easily trace all 50 back to me. Does the fact that they can trace all 50 sites back to me mean that they are all going to get deindexed? I strongly doubt it. This isn’t a network of sites, they are all independent of each other, and they were all created with the common goal of providing relevant information to searchers, which in my opinion, will ultimately make it far less likely that they will be deindexed. Sandboxing isn’t my real concern here, it’s avoiding deindexing, and I’m banking on the fact that putting analytics on half of my sites is not going to ultimately get me deindexed.
Overall, hindsight being 20/20, i would probably not add analytics to half of the sites if I were to do it over, as it is definitely helpful for analysis, but it is not vitally important. I knew there was some risk involved to begin with, so far, despite the fact that some of my sites appear to be sandboxed, I still do not think it is going to make or break the whole campaign, and frankly, if the 50 sites running analytics do get deindexed, it isn’t going to end my Internet marketing career.
If you actually read what I’m saying, I was not implying that adding analytics to some of my sites was in any way a form of fighting sandboxing at all, I was simply backing up my point that although many of the sites appeared to be sandboxed, my overall traffic had increased almost 30%. I obviously would not recommend Google Analytics as a solution to getting out of the sandbox.
Furthermore, since I wrote that post, I’ve done quite a bit of initial analysis and found at least 10 more sites from that first group of 50 that I now believe are actually not sandboxed, which means now there are probably only around 50% of sites in that group sandboxed as opposed to my originaly estimate of 80%. In fact, from what I can tell, a lot more sites in my second batch of 50 appear to be sandboxed than my first batch running analytics.
In regards to Warrior Forum, I could not disagree with you more. In my opinion, most of the so-called gurus on WF are simply trying to pimp their own products, and quite frankly, I would imagine that a majority of Internet marketers who are making a six figure income probably have a lot better thing to do than sit around in WF all day taking questions from noobs. There is defintely some valuable information there, but you have to weed through a lot of bullshit to get to it. I’ve been making money online for several years now, almost soley through trial and error. There are very few online resources I actually follow, and even fewer that have actually ever taught me anything that helped me make money online. What I’ve learned from experience is that if you really want to be successful it’s going to take hard work, massive action, and trial and error. I don’t expect everything I do to turn out perfectly but if I keep throwing shit at the wall, some of it is sure to stick.
Again, I agree with you that it is not necessarily a great idea to put Google analytics on half the sites in the experiment, but at the same time, I put thought into it beforehand and decided it was a calculated risk, worth taking in my opinion. I haven’t made any claims of being an Internet marketing expert whatsoever, and I’m not doing this with the intention of profiting from it. I simply decided to take on this challenge, and document my results throughout the process, so that hopefully some of my readers will benefit from it. If I run into a lot of problems as a result of having Google Analytics on my sites, you can best believe I will share that information with everyone, and until then anyone doing a similar project and using analytics on a large amount of sites is doing so at their own risk.
Sam, thanks for your thoughtful reply. First off, I fully agree with you that the WarriorForum is chock-full of a lot of Internet marketing wannabee fakers…but it is also a forum of choice for many successful Internet marketers as well. There are a few Internet marketers whom I have come to know and trust who are also members of the Warriorforum and who have said they have personally researched the Google Analytics effect. They have confirmed through their own experience that the rate of a Analytics-connected site being sandboxed relative to a non-Analytics site occurred at a ratio of about 3-to-1 for their own sites.
The question for me is, why use Google Analytics when there are other free diagnostic tools available that neither disclose your personal data to Google nor can be attributable to a higher rate of sandboxing or de-indexing.
For most white-hat folks who do nothing to raise the eyebrows of Google, it makes no difference whether or not you give up your data through Analytics. However, I sometimes lean a little toward gray-hat tactics and have been well advised to steer clear of Google’s ubiquitous radar.
Again, this is just my 2-cents for what its worth. That said, the points you’ve made above are lucid and well-received.
Yeah that is a perfectly valid question. I guess the main reason I chose to use Google analytics is because of the depth of reporting. That being said, I haven’t really used a lot of other analytics tools besides Stat Counter.
Again, in retrospect, having extremely comprehensive reports is probably not particularly necessary in this case, so if I could do it all over I would probably only use GA on an extremely small handful of sites, or not at all.
But let me ask you this – at this point, there’s no point in removing it from the sites I’ve already added to – I mean once it’s been added, there’s no going back, right? Or do you think it would actually still be beneficial to remove it from the sites I’ve currently got it on?
That’s the same question I asked when I heard about the issue. Although no one (except Google) knows for sure, the feedback I got was that you could, in fact, close the barn door and Google would be none the wiser. In other words, “yes…you can remove Analytics at any time” because once you do, Google’s ability to easily track your stats through that conduit is closed. Personally, I am in the process of deleting my accounts from my 40 blogs because I plan to try a new posting strategy which might raise suspicions with Google. One of the key rules in the Super Affiliate rulebook is: “Act normal. Do nothing out of the ordinary to raise Google’s suspicions unnecessarily. Do everything to avoid leaving footprints.” In my mind, removing Analytics from my blogs is like raking the sandtrap after I’ve walked through it. No reason to ever let Google know I was there!
Excellent. Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it. I think I will go ahead and remove it from my sites just to be on the safe side. What tracking would you recommend using as an alternative? Stat Counter?
Stat Counter seems to be the default counter of choice. It never hurts to look for alternatives. If I find one, I’ll let you know. Thank you for allowing me to post my thoughts on your forum. Of course, don’t anything I’ve said above as gospel; although, I think you’ll find much of it reflects common opinion among many marketers who are making a living doing this stuff.
You might want to look into Piwik for stats.
If you’ve got something relevant to post for open-source folks, I wouldn’t mind linking to it to try getting you a few more subscribers. Thanks to some aggregators, I get around 8K readers by RSS so even .1% would help.
Hey Donnie,
Great to hear from you man, thanks for stopping by. The Piwik recommendation is brilliant – that is exactly what I’m looking for. I’m going to give it a try right now. I do release free WordPress themes from time to time… I don’t know if that’s open source enough for you?
Glad the Piwik rec will help.
Re open source, something I’d be interested in pointing at would be a post that talks about how/whether WP being open-source software affects your life, as a web dev actually using the stuff. Do you ever modify the WP core directly, file bugs, create patches, interact on WP mailing lists or forums, etc? It would be like a case study of a “typical” web-dev business.
I kinda need something more targeted than “here is a collection of themes” — I don’t doubt your capabilities at all, but I do need to come up with a compelling benefit for my readers beyond another set of themes.
Yeah I think I know exactly what you mean. Free WordPress themes are a dime a dozen, so there’s really nothing special about that. I use WordPress a lot but for 2 main reasons. 1 is for creating small niche sites, like the ones in this challenge, and the second is using it as a content management solution for my web design clients. I really have not had to do much modification to the WP core, as it is already almost perfectly built to suit my needs, and if anything, it just keeps getting better with each new version. Of course, I do a lot of editing on template files, but that is mostly just front end stuff, nothing too special. I’ve used the WP forums a few times, but never had a lot of luck. Generally, if I run into a problem, I just Google it and someone usually has an answer on their blog.
Just wondering how this is going for you? It’s been about a month since your last update… and I was curious about your progress.
These posts of yours have the potential to be a great inspiration to many people all over the web, if you keep them updated.
P.S. I really enjoy your writing style. Keep it up.
Hey Brad,
I’m planning on posting another update soon. Quite frankly, all of my sites are off to a pretty slow start. I think the approach I used, is more prone to sandboxing, because I’m really just receiving a trickle of daily search traffic to each site. The good news is, my November numbers are looking much better, so they are improving every month, and once they are fully done with the sandboxing period, I should be looking at a very nice overall improvement. I made about $300 from all 100 sites in October, and I’m hoping to see at least $500 this month. I was originally expecting much higher numbers for the holiday season, but overall I’m still satisfied. I’ve done a ton of link building to all 100 sites, and outside of adding single links, I’ve mostly moved on to some other projects now – specifically, I’ve found a new way to do thin phpbay sites that I’m testing, I’m working on some large authority adsense sites, and I’m working on a network of holiday shopping-targeted sites – also, I have been doing all my new sites since the project on pre-owned domains.
It sounds like you are learning a lot in the process, which is great. $300 is not bad. Sure, it’s probably not what you were expecting… but, having high expectations will leave one disappointed 99% of the time.
If you look at the bright side, $300 is enough to pay a good portion of your utility bills, or a large chunk of a car payment… or large fraction of your rent/mortgage. $500 per month will be better.
Long ago, someone on a SEO forum gave me the advice of using pre-owned domains to avoid sandboxing by G. I think that eventually, G will catch on to this too… but, for now, it seems to work (although still not a sure thing). It’s a shame pre-owned domain names are still expensive when purchasing on a large scale. Even using coupons and promo codes, I’ve only been able to lower the price down to about $12 on GoDaddy for a pre-owned domain. That means that 100 pre-owned domains will cost a minimum of $1200. Ouch.
I have also heard that hiding your plugins folder from the G spider will help too (or renaming the folders). Not sure how much of that is based on fact, though. Personally, I never really thought that the G spider would look in my wordpress folder and look for autoblogging plugins, but maybe they do. Any thoughts on this?
Yeah 300 is definitely nothing to scoff at. The best part is I’m basically on the absolute low end of what my earnings will be from these sites, so all I need to do is be patient and eventually they will reach their potential.
I’m paying about $15 for expired domains, give or take, too. I don’t think I will be doing these sites in big batches in the forseeable future, but I am going to try and crank out at least 10 new sites on expired domains each month. I’ve been trying to find the best expired domains and going from there, rather than doing keyword research and finding expired domains to match. I’ve only got 1 fully completed so far, but I have about 8 more in production that should all be done this week – so we’ll see how it goes.
I spent most of my free time since August building backlinks to my 100 sites, so it’s nice to be working on some other projects now.
Oh yeah, and in regards to the plugins folder – I have never heard anything to indicate that it’s important to hide your plugins folder. I really can’t imagine a scenario where it would be a factor in any way.
I think the real issue is that if you’re using auto-blogging plugins, there is probably some other kind of footprint that’s getting you into trouble. Personally I don’t use any autoblogging at all – I don’t think it has any benefit over the long term. I’ve been doing this for 3 years and I’ve already had a few sites that were doing amazing, and have since been deindexed, so while the short term money is great, it really sucks when a cash cow gets deindexed, so I’ve really shifted focus to creating stable web properties that are as white-hat as possible.
My bad. I thought that you were setting up your EPN sites to add content every day via an autoblog plugin. After reading over your post again, I see now that I was mistaken.
I have some experience in autoblogging, but not with the EPN. I’ve just recently applied to the EPN and hope to get accepted soon. At that point, I may begin monetizing my blogs and creating more and more of them.
I personally believe, however, that working on long term strategies is the best approach. Which usually means spending a lot of time to make your blog look nice, and NOT monetizing it until G decides it likes your site. This always takes more time, and makes for a slow start. After G decides it likes your site, then monetize away… but, don’t forget to keep your site content-rich. G loves content. That’s where autoblogging can help.
Many people think that autoblogging is “black hat,” but I don’t completely agree. There are many news sites out there who just pull the news from somewhere else. They don’t make the news. They don’t even write the news. They simply reprint the news. That’s how I look at autoblogging.
Great stuff here. Keep it up. The new version of WP 2.8 and up will auto hide plugins by including an index file.
That’s great that they are making that update to the WP core. Honestly, Brad’s comment yesterday was the first I’d ever heard about anything involving the plugins folder, however I do think I will be checking into it a little bit more, as I see how there could be some potential vulnerability there. Joomla has this same practice of placing index files in every folder, so there is obviously a good reason for doing so.
Yeah, my old strategy was to auto-gen content, and I believe it was a large contributing factor to getting a lot of my well-performing sites deindexed in Google.
You definitely have a point – there’s nothing necessarily wrong with auto generated content, and it can be valuable to visitors to your site, however Google does not love duplicate content, so you don’t get any real benefit there as far as I’m concerned, and you can get a niche site with 5-10 posts ranked #1 in Google just fine without autogenerating thousands of pages of duplicate content. Not that it doesn’t help to have fresh content daily, but a large number of different niches contain top ranking sites that don’t have many actual pages of content.
Sam,
There are some other measures the savvy IM’ers take to avoid creating a footprint for G to spot. Look into it. You would be surprised.
Along the same lines, keep in mind what other people here have said about their Analytics services. Yes, it looks great and it’s nice to have, but it also leaves you completely open to inspection. Use Piwik or something else.
Some of the more paranoid (I’m almost there) have switched from Adsense over to the Yahoo! alternative because supposedly having Adsense on a lot of sites under the same account causes your sites to be flagged for inspection. Yes, it’s just a conspiracy theory, but it’s something to think about.
I’ve had Statcounter for all my sites for a couple of years and been happy with it. I tried putting Google Analytics on some of them recently as I’d heard you could track sales and adsense profits better with it, but I’m taking it off again now because it slowed the sites down so much.
@anna – There’s nothing really wrong with statcounter, per say, it’s just a matter of what you want to get out of your stats. I’ve used stat counter and in my opinion, the level of reporting is not even remotely close to analytics. That’s just my own personal taste, and I know there are a lot of marketers doing well out there using stat counter – I just don’t care for it.
Analytics defintiely should not be slowing your site down unless your traffic numbers are off the charts, and even then I doubt it would slow you down at all. It’s probably more of a hosting issue than an analytics issue.
@brad: Believe me, I took a lot of care to avoid leaving footprints, and since these sites are all white hat anyway, I don’t believe I have much to hide, other than the fact that I own another 100 sites in various niches, which I don’t think is a crime, last time I checked.
That’s the main reason I was using Google Analytics to begin with – and I have to say that I still haven’t really found a perfect replacement. I did try using Piwik, and it does work well, however the main problem I’m having is I can’t view combined data for all my sites at once. For example, with GA, when I had my 50 sites set up in an analytics account, I could see the overall traffic numbers, bounce rate, time on page, etc, for all 50 sites combines, as opposed to each individual site. I personally have found that information to be very helpful, and these sites are not yet at a stage where it helps that much to view individual statistics for each site. At some point it will be helpful – once they are out of the sandbox and starting to rank for the targeted terms.
I did completely remove analytics from all my sites as was previously recommended above, however I still miss it and I highly doubt I will find anything that is even remotely as powerful – especially for free.
As far as adsense goes, switching to yahoo ads will not even come close to approaching the same performance any site would get with AdSense. That is why there aren’t a lot of internet marketers running Yahoo or any other PPC ads. The only reason they would is because their adsense account was banned or they couldn’t get one. If you have a lot of sites running adsense, its fine, just don’t link them together. Other than that, I wouldn’t worry at all untily you reach the $100/day point. Then set up an LLC and get a second AdSense account.
The main point is, as long as you’re keeping your web property white-hat, the risk is going to be a lot smaller, and there isn’t much reason to resort to anything crazy to avoid getting penalized. If you’re still concerned about it, focus on quality authority sites instead of quantity niche sites, as there is even less risk.