It has been along time since I made an appearance here on my own blog (over a month I think) and I am deeply sorry for that.

However, there is a good reason for that and that is that I finally decided to stop talking about going travelling and actually start doing.

Taking some action .

So I bought a ticket and started my travelling on May 3rd. I have been to Atlanta, Jamaica, Los Angeles, San Francisco and I am currently in Vancouver which is simply an AMAZING city as you can see from the following pictures.

The above pictures are a day apart, just so you will get an idea of how the weather is like over here.

I had 10 flights in 3 weeks and I’ve been hoping around all the time so I didn’t really had the time to sit and work and for that reason I didn’t have much to write about. I don’t want to post here just so that I could say I posted something.

I prefer to post only when I have something valuable to share.

I got plenty of emails asking my opinions on the latest Google Penguin update and I promise I will share my thoughts on that once I will get some working time done and I will be able to test and see what really changed and what actually works now.

With that said, I do have something to share with you here today beside the little update about me travelling and having the time of my life . Being able to travel without working much but still making money is simply an amazing feeling but I know I shouldn’t let that go to my head.

There is still much more work to do and more action to take and I will be back on the saddle soon. Just need to figure out how to balance the traveling with some working.

I’ll figure it out and if you have tips please do share them with me .

AffilioBlueprint 3.0

I got early access to the all new AffilioBlueprint 3.0 from Mark Ling and I didn’t want that early free access to go to waste so I decided to share my early thoughts about AffilioBlueprint.

Mark Ling is one of the most successful affiliates and he is the man behind Affilorama which is in my opinion the best free online resource for affiliate marketing.

Since I predict some might ask, I will save us some time by answering and saying that the reason Mark is not on my Guru Trust list is that he promoted some products that I didn’t really think are any good or worth promoting but that was a long time ago and overall, I do think Mark Ling is one of the “good” guys in IM and Affilorama pretty much proves that.

AffilioBlueprint 3.0 Overview

AffilioBlueprint 3.0 Review

AffilioBlueprint 3.0 is a 12 step or 12 modules video course that will cover the following:

• Mindset
• Market Research
• Creating Content
• Website Setup
• Website Design
• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO
• Newsletters
• Tweaking
• Google AdWords

As you can see, AffilioBlueprint 3.0 does cover the entire process from the Mindset all the way to doing little tweaks and split testing in order to get better results from what you already have going plus it has 3 modules on Google AdWords.

Here is how Mark described AffilioBlueprint 3.0:

A complete 12-step affiliate marketing course. AffiloBlueprint shows them how to do everything from market researching and picking a product, all the way to SEO, link-building, conversion tracking, PPC, and more.

After skimming through it I have to say that it does look like AffilioBlueprint 3.0 covers all of what Mark mentioned and his description of the course seems to be spot on.

There are more than 80 videos and a great feature I really loved is the ability to keep track of your progress by doing the homework section at the end of each step/module.

You can also download all videos so you will be able to watch them at your own time without needing to be connected to the internet (I recently found out that while travelling, the internet is not always there for you and I have been to the more advanced parts of the world so far ).

With AffilioBlueprint 3.0 you will also get 4 bonuses:

1. Lead Generation Masterclass
2. 10k/Month AdSesne Blueprint
3. The 100K CPA Method
4. AffilioTheme – Custom WordPress theme
5. And more unannounced extras

Since I didn’t go through the payment process I’m not really sure about the upsells but form what I know, there aren’t any upsells and you will also get a one month trial membership to Affilorama Premium which you can cancel at any time.

AffilioBlueprint 3.0 Bottom Line

Mark Ling’s AffilioBlueprint 3.0 seems to be a great resource for newbies that are also actually planning to take some action. AffiloBlueprint provides a complete, step-by-step system that is easy to follow and implement but taking actual action is on you.

No one else will do that for you.

AffilioBlueprint 3.0 is a quality product and it isn’t a “thin” product like many others that are out there (I won’t name any names) and I do think newbies can actually learn the basics about affiliate marketing from it and find it to be valuable.

Click Here to Check AffilioBlueprint

Disclaimer for you. Yes, I will be making a commission if you decide to give AffilioBlueprint a try… (as if you didn’t know that already, right? ).

In any case, I got some more traveling and working to do and I hope you will hear from me soon. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts, comments, rants and anything else by commenting below.

Thanks!

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Traveling, Blogging, Life and a Short Review

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I love Andre Chaperon. That is no secret and he is one of the “gurus” I trust in the internet marketing niche and I recommended his products before.

Today I want to see if you can understand why I think Andre is different than any other marketer you know in the “make money online” niche.

I want you to check out this page of his:

http://frankvsmatt.com/

(This isn’t an affiliate link and I’m not trying to get you buy anything).

Just take a few minutes and read that page.

Read Frank’s story.

Read Matt’s story.

Read everything.

And than let me know if you understand what Andre is doing differently from any other marketer you encountered.

To make it easy for you, here are 3 main questions I would like to see your answers for:

1. What is that page?
2. What is the main purpose of that page?
3. What is different in that page than other similar pages? (you will need to answer the first question first)

Feel free to add anything else you want by commenting below.

You can learn a shit load of stuff just from reading that page so I strongly recommend you make the time .

And remember, not trying to promote anything here and there are no affiliate links here.

Thanks!

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Ask The Readers: What Andre Is Doing Differently?

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I got a few emails over the last week about a new SEO plugin called Push Button SEO. I rarely click on these emails unless I get them from trusted marketers and as you know, there are only very few gurus I actually trust.

In any case, since it is about SEO and I decided to take a look and I actually did watch the entire video.

All 25 minutes of it.

Here is my short review of the product and keep in mind, I didn’t buy the product and I didn’t test it out myself.

This review is based on the video on the sales page since it does show what the plugin does.

Push Button SEO Overview

Brian G. Johnson

I don’t really have much to say about the man behind Push Button SEO. I can say that the first product I bought online that actually helped me make money was a product by Brian.

I don’t really remember the name of the product but I do remember Brian as the creator of it.

I haven’t bought any other products or courses by Brian since although he did launch a few of them.

To summarize, although Brian G. Johnson is not on my “guru trust” list I don’t really have anything bad to say about him or his products.

Why I cover the creator of the product?

That is easy. As you gain experience with internet marketing you learn which marketers to avoid at all costs so when I see a product from such marketer I don’t even bother checking it out.

I just completely ignore it.

I strongly recommend you do the same and avoid visiting sales pages of products from marketers you know only create crap and that you know only care about making more sales.

The reason I’m telling you to avoid the sales page is to simply save you time and potentially money. The copywriters of these sales pages sure know their job and even if you land there with no intention to buy, you just might find yourself clicking on that buy button without really understanding why the hell you did that a few minutes or hours later .

Push Button SEO Sales Video

Here is a breakdown of the sales video for you:

• Introduction – 00:00 to 01:30 (blah blah blah)
• Who Is Brian G. Johnson – 01:30 to 04:30 (how great I am and why you should listen to me)
• Problem with SEO – 04:30 to 06:00
• The Solution – 06:00 to 06:50 (Why Push Button SEO is what you need)
• What Will Push Button SEO Do – 06:50 to 10:10
• Push Button SEO Demo – 10:10 to 16:20 (Finally the actual plugin and how it looks and works)
• Money Talk – 16:20 to 20:00 (You guessed it… making the price look very affordable)
• What You’ll Get – 20:00 to 21:00 (software, training, upgrades, updates… the usual…)
• Time to Make a Decision – 21:00 to 25:24 (Here are some scare tactics to help you buy it now)

Only 6 minutes out of the 25 are the actual footage of the plugin and how it works in the WordPress admin. That is 25% and I guess that is actually pretty cool.

When it comes to sales videos, this video is not the worst one I’ve seen.

The fact that you actually get to see the plugin in action is pretty awesome as some products or services don’t even tell you what you are paying for.

Enough said. Let’s move to what really matters.

My Thoughts About Push Button SEO

OK. It’s time to put the jokes aside and focus on the actual plugin.

Is it something you NEED?

Well, only you can answer that question but I will try to help you make a better decision.

Bottom line is this:

Push Button SEO doesn’t do anything you can’t do yourself.

It is only there to help you save time and make some tasks easier to do.

Push Button SEO is all about On Page SEO and if you don’t know it already, On Page SEO is only a small (but important) piece of the puzzle. There is also the other, more important part, called Off Page SEO (you know, getting links).

I personally don’t think that getting content the way they showed in the video and the way the plugin can help you get content is the right way to go. I would recommend you only go for unique and preferably average quality or better content for your money sites.

Adding images and videos and outbound links is also very important and can surly help in the post Panda days and Push Button SEO does make it fairly easy to add related images, videos and links but you can also do it manually.

Saying that with this plugin you will be able to create Content Rich sites is a bit of an overstatement in my opinion.

So, Who Needs Push Button SEO?

If you are a newbie or just lazy or looking to save some time when adding videos/images/links to your posts than Push Button SEO could be great. I’m sure that there are other solutions that can help you do the same but I can’t really think of any specific one right now.

If you know of one, feel free to share with everyone by commenting below.

One thing that I really don’t get is why limit the number of domains you can use the plugin on? This is the first time I see a multi site license that is limited. You can only use it on 50 domains.

Want more? Pay more and get the developer license.

I don’t get that.

But that’s me.

If you want read another review with more details and screenshots than you might want to check out Affilorama’s review.

If you used it yourself feel free to share your thoughts by commenting.

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Who Needs Push Button SEO?

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With all the buzz about Google, SEO and blog networks over the past few weeks it seems we (including me) forgot about the biggest SEO secret.

That secret that we were all looking for and the lucky ones were able to understand before losing hope (or money) and giving up.

The problem with this SEO secret is that most of us know it but it seems to simple to be true so we keep looking for something that makes more sense.

Something that is more complicated. Something expensive. Something that no one else knows.

After all, if it is complicated (or seems that way), and it is expensive and no one knows about it, it must be the answer to all our problems. It must be better than any other simple and obvious solution, right?

WRONG!

It is weird how the mind works or how we were fooled to think how it should work.

So What’s The Secret?

There is NO SECRET, dummy!

SEO at its core is simple and most chances are that you already know all you need to know to make it work. Jon Leger said it best on his latest forum thread:

… But most of what Google puts out is smoke and mirrors. The bottom line is still this: create great content for your human visitors and get lots of links from everywhere you can — relevant or otherwise — to get ranked in Google.

Psychological Warfare

Google knows they can’t solve everything algorithmically. With all the brain power they have (and they do have serious brain power) there is no escaping the fact that their bots won’t become human any time soon.

There are simply things that these bots can’t do by themselves and no matter how big Google are they can’t manually review every site on the web.

So what Google does is use another method aside from algorithm changes and that is psychological warfare and they are quite successful when applying it.

I’ve been fooled by it as many others. It is hard not to.

All you need to do is check the various SEO and internet marketing forums after every Google Panda update and you immediately get the feeling that the sky is falling and SEO is dead.

It happened before and will happen again in the future but as the past proves, SEO is till here and it survived everything Google threw at it.

Even if things are different now and what used to work doesn’t work anymore or at least doesn’t work as good as it used to SEO is still here, alive and kicking and will remain for the foreseeable future (IMO).

The bottom line is still this: create great content for your human visitors and get lots of links from everywhere you can — relevant or otherwise — to get ranked in Google.

A Recent Example

The de-indexing of blog networks is a perfect example for how Google used psychological warfare. I personally don’t think Google found a magic formula that enables their bots to detect blogs that are part of a network and de-index them.

I think manual reviews had a great part of what we saw in the de-indexation of entire networks and tens of thousands of blogs.

The tweet from Matt Cutts, the vague link evaluation update and the simple fact that Google has been hitting these networks so hard has a lot do with creating panic then just a regular algo update.

Not all blog networks have been hit and as far as I know, small private networks weren’t hit at all or at least not as bad. It seems that Google manually targeted the bigger and more popular ones (BMR, ALN, HPS and all the Callen brothers networks) just to cause the panic that we are all seeing.

When you see people in forums saying that they will never use a blog network or a high PR homepage network you are seeing exactly what Google was aiming for.

They probably know they can’t algorithmically rid the internet from such networks so they took out quite a few of the bigger ones and the psychological effect of that will relieve them from dealing with all the others.

People are just to scared or panicked to be using them and that is a win win for Google.

They de-indexed some (many) blogs and made everyone scared to be using those that weren’t effected.

The Mistake I Made

The mistake I made was pretty simple. I fell in love with how easy and effortless it was to rank using the power of blog networks. I made a mistake and I paid for it.

I can sit on my ass and cry all day long that Google screwed me (like these guys) but the truth is that I did that to myself.

Guilty as charged.

I knew that Google will eventually turn off the lights on the blog networks party and I decided to ignore it.

As if I had Steve Jobs reality distortion filed ability.

I didn’t and turned out the even the great Steve Jobs couldn’t make that distortion field work when it came to his health but I’m getting sidetracked here (but you should really read the book).

Instead of getting ready for the day that blog networks will be targeted I decided to keep using them and rely on them too much. I got careless and I’m paying for that now.

The Lesson I Learned

Instead of crying and feeling sorry for myself (which is the easiest thing to do) I need to learn from my mistake and rethink the way I approach SEO.

Go back to basics.

Again, Jon Leger said it best:

The bottom line is still this: create great content for your human visitors and get lots of links from everywhere you can — relevant or otherwise — to get ranked in Google.

That is what I need to do. That is what you need to do if you found yourself in the same situation. The main focus will be on getting lots of links from everywhere you can but there is a twist here that I will address in just a bit.

Blog networks are only one method of link building. SEO was alive before they came along and SEO will probably still be alive and kicking after Google will finish them off (either completely or partially. Doesn’t really matter).

You probably know all about the other link building methods that are available for you but I will share them with you just in case:

• Profile Links (Forums and Web 2.0)
• Blog Commenting
• Guest Posting – This is only a valid strategy for the authority type of sites or blogs you create. I don’t really see how you can implement this for small niche websites.
• Article directories
• Social Bookmarking
• RSS Submissions
• Pad Submissions
• Video
• Slideshow
• Wiki
• Social media
• Link exchange
• Press Releases
• and more…

Going Back to Basics

It isn’t easy to go back to basics. At least not for me so what I did was go over Shane Melaugh’s Backlink Battleplan 2.0 again which was great since Shane updated it recently (hence the 2.0 ).

Since I have a full time outsourcer doing most of the link building for me I could have skipped that and just tell him to go over that and refine the link building strategy he is using, but that would have been a big mistake.

Another big mistake.

Even though I have someone doing most of the link building for me, I feel that I need to get my hands “dirty” again and do some stuff myself just as I used to do before I was able to afford any help.

This way I can make sure that whatever changes I make are going to work and I will also be able to better explain what should change from now on and how things should be done.

Having an outsourcer is pretty damn great but you should always stay on top of things and don’t get too comfortable with it.

When things are getting too comfortable something is going to happen

At least that is how I feel .

Here Comes The Twist

Remember the twist I mentioned before?

Here it is.

I think you need to focus on getting links from sources and methods that are not very popular at the moment.

As the old famous saying goes:

“When They Zig, You Zag”

So when everyone is talking about X you should stop or reduce your dependence on it and focus on Y.

For example, If everyone and their mother are using blog networks, you should focus on building your own private network (which is something I should have done).

Again, that is just an example.

Once a link building method or source becomes too popular you need to rely on it less and find something new. When something becomes too popular it will simply lose its power and effectives over time and what happened with the blog networks is a great example.

It is much easier said than done. That is for sure. It isn’t easy to stop using or use less something that works while it still working but it would be better for long term success.

SEO is dynamic and always changing so you really need to be on top of things in order to succeed long term so that all these Google updates and changes will be simple bumps in the road instead of major roadblocks.

So, What Say You?

It is that time again.

The time when I hand the keyboard over to you and ask you for your 2 cents.

I would really like to read what you think about the stuff I shared on this article. More than usual actually , so please make the effort to let me know what you REALLY think.

It would also be great if you could share some less known link building methods with everyone. Something you’ve been using and seeing great results with.

My audience isn’t that big (yet) so you don’t need to worry about making that method outdated by sharing it here. Don’t use that as an excuse .

P.S. being sick sucks ,

P.S.S. Thank god for daylight saving time .

Thanks!

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The Biggest SEO Secret You Don’t Know You Know

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As you all probably know, there is a big buzz around the internet marketing world lately about blog networks being mass de-indexed and many sites losing rankings (including mine) as a result of all this mass de-indexing.

Well, there is no need to guess anymore or assume that the reason for the rankings loss has been caused due to blog networks being targeted by Google. It is official now. Google is targeting various blog networks and this comes directly from Matt Cutts himself (the head of Google’s Webspam team) as you can clearly see on his twitter when he responded to a question about this specific topic.

I must say I was really surprised to see Matt Cutts being so clear when saying that Google has blog networks under its radar. I don’t really know if he or anyone else in Google has ever clearly said what they are targeting or doing when it comes to dealing with web spam.

If you read between the lines of the twitter message that was sent to Matt and his reply, it is pretty clear that Authority Link Network (ALN) is 100% under Google’s radar and the 5000+ blogs that were de-indexed from the network is more than enough proof that Google is hitting it hard. According to the emails I got from the owner of ALN it seems they are aware and transparent with their users about what is happening. They also announced a few changes to the network that will effect how it will be used but I don’t really know how effective they will be if the entire network is under Google’s radar. Only time will tell and in any case, ALN 2.0 has just been released.

If all of this wasn’t proof enough, on the 19th of March BuildMyRank has been completely de-indexed by Google and the service has pretty much ended in its current form as you can clearly read for yourself.

Among the various blog networks, BuildMyRank has been considered to be the higher quality type of blog network accepting only unique content and providing high PR links. I think that the 150 word limit per post had a lot to do with how Google was able to get the entire BMR network de-indexed.

Who Else Has Been Hit?

Aside from Authority Link Network (ALN) and BuildMyRank (BMR), I can also say that SEO Link Monster has been pretty much de-indexed completely and you can read all about it on my SEO Link Monster Update I posted at the beginning of the month. High PR Society (HPS) just reported via email to their members that they lost 50% of their blogs.

Other blog networks that I can’t confirm but are rumored to be hit and de-indexed are:

• SEO Linkvine Elite
• SEONitro
• BacklinkBuddy

One thing that I really don’t like about the guys behind SEO Link Monster, SEO Linkvine Elite and SEO Nitro is that they aren’t sharing anything with their members as far as I know. While other networks have been transparent about what Google is up too, the owners of these networks (The Callen brothers and Dori Friend) have remained quite and didn’t share anything.

If you know of any other networks that were hit, please feel free to share by commenting below and please make sure to add a link to the source if you can.

How Google Did It?

I don’t know anything for a fact but I can make some guesses and share the guesses that were made by others that I had the chance to read.

One assumption that I read was that Google sent out tons of warning messages via Google Webmaster Tools saying that they detected unnatural links. When someone gets such a message and decided to reply to Google confessing that he only used this or that type of service than Google will simply de-index all the blogs on the link profile of that site or they will manually review these sites and de-index the ones they see fit. Since Google can send out millions of these messages it is enough that only a very small percentage will reply to allow them to de-index tons of blogs.

Another assumption is that Google manually reviewed blogs that were hosted on SEO hosting accounts since it is well known that blog networks are using such hosting accounts in order to have various IP’s across their network. Focusing on IP’s from such hosting providers probably helped Google to narrow down the search and by manually reviewing the sites on those IP’s it was easier to find the blogs that were part of various blog networks.

Again, these are all guesses since I don’t think anyone knows for sure how Google did it but it is pretty clear that once Google made up its mind to eradicate blog networks they have the brains and the resources needed to pull it off.

Why Google Did It?

Aside from the fact that building links via blog networks is against Google’s TOS (and just about any other form of manually creating links for your sites) I think it is more about fighting spam.

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team and it is called that for a reason. When you think about it, 99% of the content published on these networks is pure spam. It is being created only for the purpose of creating links and adds no value what so ever to anyone so it is in Google’s interest to get rid of it.

What More Google Is Planning?

It seems Google are not nearly done and they are already planning an upcoming algo change which will be focused on “Overly Optimized Sites” according to Matt Cutts. Matt announced this during a panel on SXSW which was named: Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better! and you can listen to it on that link.

Vanessa Fox from NinebyBlue has wrote a pretty comprehensive post about this upcoming algo change and I recommend you check it out if you want to learn more about what it means. The post is filled with quotes from Matt himself so if you don’t have the time to listen to the whole panel on SXSW than you should at least read this as it brings the most important parts.

Are Blog Networks Dead?

I don’t think blog networks are dead but they defiantly lost their power and using them should be done differently from now on.

I can’t say I’m surprised as I knew that one day Google will lay a death blow to the entire blog network concept since most of them can clearly be labeled as spam, I just didn’t think it will happen anytime soon. I guess the right way to say it (or write it) is that I hoped Google won’t get the time to deal with the blog networks and that I and others could keep link building as we did for the past year or so.

Wishful thinking .

Blog networks have became so popular mainly because they are very easy to use, especially if you combined them with spun content services like the Ultra Spinnalbe Articles and Article Builder, and because they simply worked great as far as helping sites rank.

I will be the first to admit that I made the mistake of relying on such networks quite heavily and now it is my time to pay . With that said, using blog networks has helped me a lot over the past year and I made money by using them (among other things) so I don’t regret using them, I only regret not being prepared for the day Google will end them. This is totally my fault and I can’t blame anyone other than myself.

Even though the future of blog networks looks pretty bad right now, I don’t personally think they are dead in the water. I think that some blog networks will still work and stay active and it does seem that many of them are already making some necessary changes that will make it harder for Google to track their blogs down and that means it will make it harder for their users to use them which will result in less people actually using them which is probably a good thing for everyone involved.

What Does This All Mean?

In short, this means that if your link building strategy has relied on the use of such blog networks, you will need to update it and adapt to these new changes. This is something that is very common when it comes to SEO since it is dynamic and will continue to change and evolve.

You need to be aware of that and you need to be prepared to make changes and tweaks to your link building strategy so you will always be on top. I personally think that this latest Google update (Panda 3.3) is the most important one since the original Panda. Panda probably had a much bigger impact and caused a lot more panic and “SEO is dead” titles all over the internet but we managed to survive it so I don’t think all of the current panic and “SEO is dead” claims are justified. But only time will tell.

What’s Next in Regard to Link Building?

Good question that I have been asking myself for the past few days. It seems that the ease of using blog networks and their great effectiveness in providing good rankings has made me (and others) forget that they will eventually come to an end. It seems pretty clear that things are going to get a bit harder now (at least in the near future) but not all is lost.

SEO isn’t dead yet.

There are many ways to build links that existed before blog networks and will outlive them. My plan for now is to go back to what I was doing when I first started and that was to build web 2.0 properties and use a tired link building strategy. Any links from blog networks or other low quality type of links I will point to sites on the 1st tier and not directly to my money sites. This is a solid strategy that works but it is slower and more time consuming than what worked until a month ago.

You can check out Pat Flynn’s backlink strategy as it is very similar to what I’m talking about and even thought he posted it over a year ago it still applies and still works (with slight changes and tweaks) and whenever there is a big update he makes sure to include it in the post itself.

What About Small Niche Websites?

One thing that has been on my mind for the past few days is the future of building small niche websites. I’m talking about sites that are made to me monetized with AdSesne, Amazon and Clickbank products and mainly focus on a very small number of keywords (1-5). Blog networks had a big part of promoting such sites and getting them to rank quickly and without them the entire promotion will take longer and will probably be more expensive. All of this makes me think if this entire concept is still viable.

Keep in mind I’m not making any final decisions here, just sharing my thoughts with you. It seems to me that promoting too many little niche sites becomes a much harder without the ease and power of using blog networks in the process of link building. I will of course put this to the test since I don’t like to make any assumptions without basing them on some facts and personal experience but I wanted to put this out there so that I will be able to get your thoughts on this subject.

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It’s Official, Blog Networks Are Getting Squashed By Google

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As you know (or not) this blog is powered by Thesis but it looks the way it looks thanks to the great Thesis skin I’m using which is called BlogSkin that was created by ThesisAwesome. Thesis is a really great WordPress theme framework and many would say it is the best and if you want to learn more about it you can read my Thesis review for all the details.

The main problem with Thesis and one of the main reasons I don’t recommend it for everyone is the fact that in order to really make it look great and unique you need to know how to do it yourself, pay a developer to do it for you or to use a ready made Thesis skin that someone else created for this exact purpose.

The easiest choice and cheapest one among these three is to find a great Thesis skin to use since paying a developer to design one for you will most likely cost anywhere in the 4 figure range and developing one yourself would take time and as you know, time is money. It took me quite a while to find a great Thesis skin that I really loved and that provided me with the features I was looking for. The downside of using a ready made skin for Thesis is that you are probably not going to be the only one using it (especially if it is a good skin) but I found that for me it was the best choice (for now).

There are quite a few Thesis skins available but I would have expected much more to be honest. Thesis is probably the most popular theme framework and it is being used on tens of thousands of sites so I figured it will be an easy task to find a great skin. But it wasn’t. I find that one of the biggest downsides of Thesis is that they don’t create their own skins or child themes which is something their biggest competitor, Genesis, is doing quite well with more than 40 child themes you can choose from not including child themes created by by other designers from the StudioPress Marketplace.

How to Select a Skin?

The best tip I can provide you with is to select a skin from someone that also provides full support for the skin so that you will be able to get help if you have any problems or issues. As you can suspect, finding great support for Thesis skins that are being offered for free isn’t going to be very easy and in general, I would recommend you go for a premium skin since they will simply be much better than any free skin you can find.

Where to Find a Great Skin for Thesis?

For the best Thesis skins you should focus on sites that offer a number of skins and full support. Here are the best resources I found:

Thesis Awesome

Thesis Awesome is the number one recommendation I have for you since I have been using one of their Skins on this blog and I don’t like to recommend anything without any personal experience. You can find 8 skins in their portfolio, none of them are free but the prices are very affordable.

The best thing about Thesis Awesome is the support they provide. I have had so many questions and little changes I wanted to make to the skin and I got all the help I needed on the support forums usually within 24 hours. Just from visiting the Thesis Awesome site you can get a very clear indication of how professional the site and the skins are. For those of you that are looking for a landing page type of skin for Thesis you need to look no further than the new ProductSkin.

Since I have been using BlogSkin on this blog I can say that thanks to the option panel that comes with the skin it is very easy to control all of the various features the skin has and there is no need to touch or edit any code and in any case, you can always get help on the support forum.

Click here to check out all of Thesis Awesome skins.

Thesis Themes

Thesis Themes are the largest market for Thesis skins (according to them). They offer their own skins for thesis (paid & free) but they also have a marketplace on the site that I think should be a lot bigger and list all of the available skins for Thesis but as of March 2012 it only shows 3 skins. I personally think that Thesis Themes should put a little more work into adding all the available Thesis skins to their marketplace. I know that I would have done that if I was the owner of the site since it will provide more value to the visitors and it can also make more money to the site owners as they can be using affiliate links to all the skins that offer affiliate programs.

Thesis Themes are offering 10 skins of their own, 6 are premium skins and 4 are free. From the looks of the skins they do seem to be great looking skins and I did play with one of them in the past (ThesisPlay).

Click here to check out all of Thesis Themes skins.

Thesis Ready

Thesis Ready is a site that aims to help you get the most from WordPress and Thesis. They offer Thesis skins and WordPress plugins. You will find 12 Thesis skins on Thesis Ready and 4 of them are free to download and use. What I found strange was to see the BlogSkin listed as their own skin. I know that BlogSkin was created by the guys over at Thesis Awesome so I was pretty surprised to see that, especially since there is no mention that the skin was created by someone else and if I didn’t know better, I would think it was created by the guys at Thesis Ready.

I contacted Hesham Zebida (the developer behind Thesis Awesome) and told him about the situation. He told me that he knows about it and that he had an agreement with Adam (from Thesis Ready) so I guess its OK and no harm was done. With that said, the version of BlogSkin being offered on Thesis Ready is not the latest version and the support you will get will be from the guys at Thesis Ready. Bottom line is that if you want to purchase BlogSkin, I recommend you do it from Thesis Awesome since you will get the latest version and the best possible support.

The skins offered by Thesis Ready look OK. I personally don’t think they come close to those offered by the other resources I mention here, but that is just my own personal opinion.

Click here to check out all of Thesis Ready skins.

Themedy

Themedy is a very professional looking site that offers premium child themes and skins for the top WordPress frameworks bundled with loads of options and great support. You will find child themes for the Genesis framework and skins for Thesis.

You will find 12 child themes / skins being offered on Themedy, 11 of them are premium and will work for both Genesis and Thesis meaning that every theme they offer has 2 versions. Themedy are also offering one free skin called Fremedy. All of their skins look great and very professional and I personally liked Feedpop and could see me using it on a blog. You should also know that the developers of both Genesis (Brain Gardner & Brain Clark) and Thesis (Chris Pearson) are recommending you check Themedy out so you can be sure their Genesis child themes and Thesis skins are of the highest quality.

Themedy are offering a club membership that will provide you access to all their skins or you can buy any specific skin you like. You will also gain access to their support forum in which you will get all the support you need.

Click here to check out all of Themedy skins.

Kolakube

Kolakube has been created by Alex Mangini, an 18 year old designer/blogger that used to own the great blogussion blog up until a few months ago when he decided to sell it for $20,000 and focus on other projects.

The first Thesis skin I used on this blog was Alex’s Blogussion skin that I can’t seem to find anywhere. I guess he took it off the market and it is no longer for sale. Kolakube is more than just a site that offers Thesis skins but since that is what this post is about, I will mainly focus on that part.

Kolabkue offers one free portfolio type skin called KolFolio and 6 other premium skins. I really love all the skins Alex has created and you can really see how talented this kid is with every skin he creates. He has created a skin especially for marketers that has page leads and a landing page built into called Marketers Delight 2 and I personally love how his Chronicl skin looks and I might take it out for a spin .

Alex is also offering freebies on his Kubicle page so you can check that out since you might find something you can use on your sites like his great custom optin forms for all 3 major auto responders (AWeber, MailChimp & GetResponse).

Just by visiting Kolakube you will quickly understand how talented Alex is and I personally think his Thesis skins are the best looking ones but I’m not sure I will be moving to one of them anytime soon since the skin i’m using now provides me with everything I need but I did get a little excited when I checked his Chronicl skin so who knows, maybe I will make a change soon .

Click here to check out all of Kolabube skins.

Other Thesis Skins

There are probably more Thesis skins out there but I decided not to include all of them, mainly because most of the other skins are not as good as the ones I mentioned already and when you get a skin for Thesis you really want it to come with full support.

With that said, I do want to mention one more free skin I was able to find and it is called Kickstarter and was created by Mark Macdonald. It looks pretty great and it is free so I figured some might want to check it out. I didn’t find any support forum for it but I did see that Mark is helping out users via the comments on the skin page so if you have any problems, you can try getting help by commenting or contacting Mark directly.

And The Winner Is…

I didn’t plan on making this into a competition when I started writing this Thesis Skins Roundup but after going over all of the great Thesis skin resources I feel I need to rank them up for you just for the fun of it. So here it goes, (starting with the 3rd place):

Thesis Skins Roundup Conclusion

I am more than certain that you will be able to find a great skin for Thesis among the resources I mentioned here. There are some really great skins for Thesis out there, you just need to know where to find them and I hope that I helped in some way.

Just to state the obvious so it will be clear, in order to use a Thesis skin you will first need to get the Thesis Framework for WordPress.

Thanks.

To your success (and mine ),

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Thesis Skins Roundup, Where to Find The Best Skins for Thesis

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If you are familiar with my blog and my reviews you should already know that Jonathan Leger is one of very few internet marketing “gurus” I trust and he is on my “Guru Trust” list. Jon has proven time and time again that he knows what are the problems internet marketers are facing and more importantly, he proved that he can create tools and services that help those specific problems.

Among his great creations you will find The Best Spinner, Instant Article Wizard, 1-Way Links, WebComp Analyst and Article Builder. For these reasons I was pretty excited when Jon announced a new tool he is working on that will address a very big problem many of us have, keyword research, and I really wanted to see what he will come up with and if it is going to be as good as some of his other tools.

Keyword Canine Overview

Keyword Canine Videos

I thought of making a video showing what Keyword Canine is all about but since Jon already made one I figured it will be easier (and better) to share it with you. So you can watch the demo video here.

So What Is Keyword Canine?

That is a very good question and here is the what Jon has to say about what this tool is and why he think you might need it:

Keyword Canine is simply the easiest keyword research and discovery tool on the market today. In just a few seconds you can analyze any set of keywords to see what the competition is like. It also continuously builds a list of niches worth ranking for and provides them to you! So if you’re not sure what market to break into, Keyword Canine does the legwork for you to show you what’s out there.

Keyword Canine has 3 main features:

Analyze

With the Analyze feature you will be able to do 2 things:

1. Analyze Keywords – This tool will analyze the specific set of keywords you provide and give you a full analysis of the search engine results.
2. Analyze Related Keywords – This tool will find related terms for the keywords you provide and give you the competition analysis for those terms.

The keyword analysis report that Keyword Canine will generate for you will include SERP competition data, Traffic/Advertiser Date (through AdWords API) and available domains (EMD’s) as you can see in the following screenshot for the keyphrase – Keyword Research:

As you can see, Jon has also developed some sort of an algorithm that takes all the data into account and provide a score between 0-100 that determines how easy (or hard) it would be to rank on the first page of Google for the specific keyword you analyzed.

On top of that (and probably more important), the keyword analysis will also include the top 10 results in Google for the keyword you analyzed, showing you the Page Title, Page URL, Page PR and the number of Page Links and Site Links:

As you can see, authority sites will be highlighted. This reports pretty much cover all of the most important factors to consider when analyzing the competition. By clicking on the number shown under the PageLinks column, Keyword Canine will generate a report for you and I will cover that under the Reports feature.

Reports

And here is the reports section . After clicking on the number shown on the PageLink column a report will be quoted for that specific URL and once completed (usually in under a minute) will include Anchor Text Breakdown, PageRank Breakdown, Country Breakdown and Follow/No Follow:

You will also be able to see a complete list of links sorted by PR showing you the URL of the linking page, PageRank and Anchor Text. Here is a screenshot of just the first 10 links (out of the 102):

You can also create a report for any URL you want by simply clicking on the Create New Report button on the reports page. You can export all the reports you create to CSV or TSV and Keyword Canine will only save them for 30 days. There is a limit for the reports you generate which is that a maximum of 2,500 backlinks will be analyzed for any URL.

According to Jon, the backlink analysis report only analyzes the higher quality links (your “real” competition) so that you will only get the most important information shown.

Niches

The niche discovery tool is the feature I was most excited about when I first heard about Keyword Canine. Here is how this feature is described by Jon:

Our exclusive Niche Finder feature allows you to quickly and easily browse through the latest keywords KC has found. You can also filter the last 30 days of keywords by CPC, search volume, avg. PR and more to quickly find HOT niches to target! And once a keyword is in our database for 31 days, it is no longer available in the niche finder, so you know the keywords have limited exposure!

The information provided for you in the Niches section is a list of keywords on various niches that Keyword Canine “sniffed” out of the past 30 days. As you can see in the following screenshot, it shows you the difficulty level, the keyword, number of results, average PR of the top 10 sites for that keyword in Google, average SiteLinks, Low SiteLinks, number of local and global exact match searches, AdWords advertiser competition and CPC:

By clicking on any keyword you will get to see the complete analysis report for that keyword which would look exactly the same as the report shown above under the analysis feature of Keyword Canine.

The niche discovery tool currently covers niches and keywords on Google US, UK, Germany and France. The filtering functionality is pretty great and allows to filter the keywords so it will be easier to find what you are looking for:

Additional Keyword Canine Features

On top of the main 3 features I covered, Keyword Canine also has an API that allows you to analyze keywords and get back all of the data that appears on the Analysis results page except for the domain name availability and additional keyword suggestions.

Keyword Canine also has a support forum that will help you find out everything you need about the tool, get your questions answered and suggest new features to be included. For any problems you have you can also contact Jon’s helpdesk.

So, Has Leger Done it Again?

I must say that my answer is NO. I don’t think Jon has done it again and I really don’t see anything groundbreaking with Keyword Canine and how it will change my keyword research in any way. Maybe I’m missing something or I’m not using it in the way it was indented but that is my first impression from the tool.

The truly unique feature it has is the Niche Discovery Tool which I thought would be awesome when I first heard about it but I don’t see myself finding any great niches or building great sites around the keywords it provides. I learned that building one page sites around one specific keyword doesn’t really work and Keyword Canine doesn’t really make it easer to find a great main keywords with a bunch of related keywords that is worth attacking.

The fact that every user of Keyword Canine has access to the same list of keywords isn’t a big help also and I think that adding an option to filter out keywords that only have available domains would make the tool much better and will help save tons of time.

Keyword Canine is currently closed but I’m pretty sure it will reopen in the near future as that is how the process of a new product launch works with most of Jon’s tools and services. He allows a number of users to purchase the tool (usually 500) and than he closes the doors for a few weeks in order to make it much better thanks to the great feedback he gets from those initial members.

I will keep on checking on Keyword Canine and the new addition and updated it will get in the coming weeks and if anything will change I will be sure to update my review and let you all know.

Other Alternatives

For now, if you are looking for a keyword research tool than you can find better solutions. The best niche research tool in my opinion is Market Samurai and you can read all about it on my Market Samurai Review which will also show you how to get it for a discounted price.

For building small niche sites and leveraging the power of EMD’s I will recommend you give Long Tail Pro a try as it really can really save tons of time thanks to the ability to search for more than one see keyword at a time and the EMD filter feature it has. You can also read all about it on my Long Tail Pro Review.

Thanks.

To your success (and mine ),

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Keyword Canine Review, Has Leger Done it Again?

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As you probably already know Google has released Google Panda 3.3 on February 2012 along with 40 other search quality changes. I mentioned some of those changes on my recent rankings drop post and one of the most important changes and probably the one that is responsible for the massive de-indexing of blog networks and many people losing their rankings is the one about link evaluation.

Here is exactly what Google said about it:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

Google only said that they turned off a method of link analysis that they used for several years but they didn’t say exactly what it is. I read what was in my opinion the best explanation to what Google really turned off and I decided to share it with you here as I’m sure you might find it very useful.  The article was originally written in Hebrew by Shimon Diament, a project manager at SEO Israel. I asked for his permission to translate parts of his article and share them with you and he gladly agreed.

Translation Begins

The truth is that when Google announces on their official blog that “We have changed the way in which we evaluate links” many SEOers are running in frenzy thinking the world has come to an end before they really take the time to sit and analyze what Google really said. So lets analyze what Google said and try to figure out what is really going on.

First, Google admits that they often use certain link characteristics to better understand the content of the linked page. What link characteristics can help Google understand what the content on the linked page is about? A Link or backlink has two important characteristics: the link method(href, JS, Flash) and the anchor text.

You might jump into conclusion and immediately think that Google is talking about the link method, meaning that Google indicates that from now on they are also taking into account JavaScript and Flash links rather than only standard Href links. If that was the case, they wouldn’t have mentioned the words – “the topic of the linked page” since the link method (JS, Flash, Href) has no effect on the content of the linked paged so we are left with the second possibility: the anchor text.

So now we know that Google used the anchor text in order to better understand the content of the page it was linking to. Please note that not only the Title, Description, Headings and Content of the page determined what the page is about but also the anchor text that was used to link to that page. If we would paraphrase from web pages to people, we can say that in order to understand who you are, it isn’t enough to hear what you say about yourself (Title, Description, Headings and Content) but also what others say about you (Anchor Text).

The truth is that Google reliance on anchor text has caused them some problems in the past. I’m sure you would recall the following Google bombing cases: Adobe Reader site being ranked number one for the term “click here” because that was the anchor text used on links in millions of pages directing to the download page of the Adobe Reader. And the much more funny case of the search term “Miserable failure” and President Bush.

Google’s latest update, and here we get to the second sentence of their bombastic statement, announces that from now on, a method used by Google for years to evaluate links will disappear:

We are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.

And the method is the weight given to anchor text to understand the subject of the page to which it links to. It seems that from now on, Google will not rely (completely or partially) on anchor text in order to evaluate what the linked page is about and for what key phrases it should rank for. So the question most would ask is what will Google rely on instead? The answer would be the title, description and the content itself. Google actually implied about such a change 4 months ago on their blog when they said the following:

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

Google announced that it will show better titles by reducing the effect anchor text had on them (for those that didn’t know, Google did use the anchor text of links along with the title tag of the page in order to determine the title shown on the SERPs).

Before you jump into conclusions and say that Google simply decided to take search back 10 years when they evaluated pages based only on their title and description tags you should read carefully what they announced 4 months ago:

We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title […] The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

Meaning that the relevancy between the page content and its title tag will determine which title will be presented in the search results. If by Google calculations the title tag is accurate to the page content it will display it, and if not, it will determine a more appropriate title to the page content. Google isn’t interested in displaying “marketing” type of titles that draw attention and raise CTR if those titles are not accurately summarizing what the page is about.

How Does This All Relate to Rankings and SEO Work?

Very simple. Understanding the content of the page and choosing the title of that page will determine for what key phrases that page will rank in the search results. If we would summarize now the link evaluation update that caused the big stir in the SEO world, we could say that:

Google announced this month that it will stop the use of anchor text in understanding the content of the linked page. In addition, Google has recently announced that it stopped using anchor text when determining the title of pages. From now on, Google will rely on page content analysis in order to better determine what the page is about and what title should be displayed for it in the SERPs.

The conclusion for link building is that what you will use for anchor text will not change what Google thinks about the page and therefore will not determine or have any effect on that page rankings for the phrase used as anchor text. It doesn’t matter how many links we will build with “SEO” as anchor text, the ranking of the page that we are linking all those “SEO” links to will not change in Google.

Keep in mind that we are only talking about the anchor text of the link and not the link itself! Google have made no claim that outbound links have stopped promoting the linked pages. The only claim Google made is that it no longer matters what anchor text we will use for those links.

That’s it. Now you decide if this is indeed the most important search quality update by Google in recent years.

Translation Ends

I sure hope I was able to translate the article the best way possible and do it justice. As I mentioned earlier, it seemed to me when I read this article that it was the best explanation for what Google meant (not that anyone really knows) about the link evaluation update they announced recently and I do think it makes sense although I personally don’t really believe they turned anchor text off and that they would ignore it completely. I find it hard to believe they would simply turn such an important factor off but it does have its flaws and in general, I do think anchor text lost some of its power and will keep losing it in the coming future, with or without any announcement from Google.

What Do You Think?

Do you agree with Shimon? Do you think anchor text has been turned off by Google? Do you think that they turned off something else? Do you think it is the single most important search quality update of recent years? Where do you see link building and SEO going from here? Do you think all the hype and hoopla about this link evaluation update is justified? Please share your thoughts by commenting below. Every comment would be great appreciated .

Thanks.

To you success (and mine ),

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What Google’s Link Evaluation Update Really Means

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On February 7th SEO Link Monster launched with a very big hype around it since everyone in the industry were promoting it. Over the past few days I have learned some new things about this network that I feel I must share with my readers since my SEO Link Monster Review got a lot of visitors over the first week of the launch.

So What Happened?

I received and email from Chris Fong asking me if I noticed any indexing changes with the network. He told me that the ability to download the submission reports has been removed and that his indexing tests showed that all the URLs his articles were submitted to are no longer indexed.

I immediately checked and also noticed that you can no longer download the submission reports and basically you can no longer see the domains your article have been submitted to. That was a very cool feature SLM had but I guess the downside of that feature raised its head and the network got hit because of it.

I also took the 364 URLs I had from my case study, stripped them down to the rood domain and removed all duplicates. I ended up with a list of 93 unique domains that my articles were submitted to and I run an indexing check using Scrapebox. Here are the results:

And as you can see, all of the domains are not indexed. When I did the same test on February 6th I got and 88.46% index rate and the very high index rate was the biggest selling point for SEO Link Monster.

I also asked Chris if he can provide me with all of the URLs he collected during his own case study and he agreed. Chris send me a list with 99 unique domains and I checked to make sure that none of his 99 domains are the same as the 93 domains on my own list. There were no duplicate domains so it seems that we were on two different sub networks on the SLM. I run the 99 domains to check for indexing rates and here are the results:

Did SEO Link Monster Network Got De-indexed?

From the numbers I saw and shared with you I have no other assumption to make other than to say that at least a part of the network got de-indexed. I don’t know how many blogs the network has and I only had 192 unique domains to check. In any case, it doesn’t really look good that so many domains have been de-indexed just a couple of weeks after launch.

Remember that I checked indexing rates for the rood domains, not the pages that my articles are actually pm. All of the domains are no longer indexed with Google. Not my 93 unique domains and not Chris’s 99 unique domains.

That could be an explanation to why my SEO Link Monster Review dropped to page 8 or something like that on Google a few days ago since I was promoting it using SLM during the case study I did. I also suffered ranking drops on other reviews that I didn’t promote with SLM and you can read all about what happened on my Rankings Drop, Googe Panda 3.3 and Lessons Learned post.

I emailed Matt Callen about the entire situation asking if he can provide some answers as to what happened and he replied saying that they decided to remove the submission report feature since it could be used to report URLs to Google which one of the users was actually suspected of doing and that results in de-indexing of a sub set of domains on the network. Matt also said that they are proactively moving forward to protect the network for everyone and to help increase its effectiveness over the long term and they replaced every blog that was de-indexed.

What Does This Mean?

I don’t really know but on the looks of it, it doesn’t look good. Here are some of the thoughts I had (combined with the ones Chris shared on his own SEO Link Monster Case Study update):

• Lack of IP Diversity - Chris checked his list of 99 domains and found that every 5 domains are using the same IP. I checked the list of 93 domains I have and I can confirm that. Every 5 domains are sharing the same IP and according to the tests Chris did to other blog networks, that is a very bad ratio.
• Unspun Content - This is something I didn’t even know you can do with SLM since I didn’t even consider it would be possible so I didn’t check it. Allowing unspun content to be submitted to the network is a big NO NO in my opinion and I don’t understand how that is even an option.
• Sharing The URLs – I liked this feature for the same Chris did since it makes this case studies much easier to do but the downside was simply too big and it didn’t take long for the network to suffer from this. It is a good thing they removed this feature.
• Too Much Hype – I don’t really agree with Chris on this assumption as I really doubt Google will trouble itself over such a product launch but who knows. I think it simply the fact that users reported the URLs of the network and a really bad timing due to the recent Google algo update that probably had something to do with things (or not).
• No Categories – The fact that SLM doesn’t divide the blogs in the networks into categories is a problem. I think that the relevancy of the blog you are liking from counts for something and by not dividing the network into categories there is really no order in things. All other blog networks have categories so I don’t really see the advantage of not having them other than making it easier to build and maintain the network.

The bottom line is that my semi recommendation for SEO Link Monster has turned to a clear not recommended at this point after all the recent changes I shared with you here.

Fell free to share your thoughts by commenting below.

Thanks.

To your success (and mine ),

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SEO Link Monster Update

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I guess it was only a matter of time but I really wished and even started to think it won’t happen to me. But turns out that it did. On February 21st I lost quite a few of my top ranked Google positions and most of my reviews have dropped in rankings significantly. It really sucks but I promised myself not to take it too hard and not let it depress me in any way.

So far so good

When it happened I didn’t really knew why and what was the main reason. I had some ideas but they turned out to be wrong so no need to mention them. This is also the reason it took me about a week to get this post out there. I really wanted to get a better understanding as to what happened, both for me and for you.

So What Happened?

It seems that Google has finally targeted the networks that provide homepage backlinks services (HPBL) and they simply de-indexed tons of sites and blogs across the internet which was the cause for major ranking drops in all the sites that were using these services and were being linked to on the sites that got de-indexed.

You can read more about this issue on the following threads on the Traffic Planet forum:

• Does Google Penalize Your Site If Your Link Network Gets Deindexed
• Thoughts Feedback on Googles Recent Slapping/Algo Change

Here is also an interesting video from Terry Kyle about this recent Google update. Terry had one of the most famous and popular homepage backlinks services that was closed a while back so he knows a thing or two about operating such networks.

The problem is that I didn’t use these type of services on my blog so that didn’t make much sense to me unless you also include private blog networks being de-indexed, networks such as BuildMyRank which I did use quite a bit on all of the pages that got hit on my blog. So I did a little more research and found this thread:

• Huge ranking drop for domains on BMR

It seems that other BMR users have noticed the same kind of drops in rankings. I asked the guys over at BMR about this and they didn’t confirm any major de-indexing across their network but when you think about it, why would they confirm that?

I decided to check this myself as BMR has an option for you to find where your posts have been published on. I asked my VA to go over all of the posts I have in BMR and grab all the URLs it could find where my posts have been published. I ended up with a list of 729 URLs on 682 unique domains.

I checked the index rate of the 682 unique domains suing Scrapebox and all of them are indexed:

Must admit I didn’t expect such results. 100% index rate is pretty amazing and I have been posting to this network for the past 6 months or so. I also took the 729 page URLs where the actual posts are located on and run them to check the index rate and here are the results:

A 98.3% index rate. From these results it doesn’t really look like BMR was targeted by Google or penalized. If that was the case than I should have seen a much much lower index rates. I assume that the 682 blogs I checked are only a small part of the entire BMR network so the fact that they are all OK and indexed doesn’t mean that BMR wasn’t affected in any way. I simply can’t say anything for sure and i’m providing you with all the information I have.

Must admit that when I read the forum thread about BMR I kind of already made up my mind that BMR was responsible for my loss of rankings. I am more than happy that I didn’t take what I read for granted and actually took the time to check this out myself. Turns out BMR has nothing to do with my loss of rankings and I just want to emphasize that you shouldn’t take anything you read in such forums for granted. Test things out for yourself and see what is true and what isn’t. There is so much miss information out there that you really need to learn not to take as the cold hard truth. People have opinions about everything and today it is very easy to share them with others thanks to the internet but only few really take the time to test what they say and validate if it is indeed true or not.

Google Confirms Panda 3.3

It took a while but Google finally confirmed a new Panda update along with 40 search quality updates that took place in February. This is mainly what I was waiting for and the reason I delayed publishing this post. I simply waited to get some kind of confimation that Google indeed made some changes to their search algorithm.

I’m not even going to try and explain what all these changes mean (mostly because I don’t know) but there seems to be one major change Google announced that will take most of the attention. Among those 40 search quality changes, Google says the following:

Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

This doesn’t really say much except to confirm that Google keeps on updating Panda which was first launched a year ago, on February 2011 and caused a huge stir in the search engine optimization world. If you are not very familiar with Google Panda and all of its updates across the last year than you should check out The Google Panda Update, One Year Later infographic.

Here is the one major change I mentioned. It has to do with link evaluation and here is what Google has to say about it:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

What did they turn off?

That is the main question and Google will not be providing any clearer answers. You can bet that every one that are doing SEO are asking themselves what is this signal that was turned off and what does it mean for the future of link building. From what I was able to read online it seems most people are putting their money on anchor text being the signal that was tuned off.

I don’t really know if that is true or not (no one does) but if it is true, than how will Google rank pages now? Based on what factors? It seems to me that anchor text is just too important of a factor when it comes to determining which pages should rank for specific keywords.

I guess only time and testing will tell exactly what happened and what has changed.

How Was my Blog Affected?

As some of you already noticed and mentioned in various comments over the past week, most of my reviews are no longer ranking where they used to rank. Some of my reviews dropped to the bottom of page one, others to pages 2 and 3 and one also dropped all the way to page 8. It varies across all of my top reviews and of course that translates into loss of traffic and income.

How big of an impact it made I don’t yet know since it has only been a week but I’m sure I’ll get the big picture over the next few weeks and I will be able to better understand the scope of losing these rankings.

Got be honest with you. It really sucks

It also came in a pretty bad timing as it seemed my blog was doing better than ever and was breaking traffic and income records just before I got hit. Maybe someone from Google visited my blog and read my Lets Get Personal, My Real Name Is Not Dave post in which I said that I plan to rebrand the blog and move it to a new domain but I’m not doing it yet because I don’t know how it will effect my rankings, and he decided to help me out and make the decision to move to the new domain much easier .

Is It a Penalty or Not?

This is a question I don’t really know the answer to yet. I’m not sure if my blog got penalized or if I just lost the rankings because many of the links that helped me gain them simply got de-indexed which will obviously result in a loss of traffic.

My blog didn’t get de-indexed and I still have pages that are ranking just as they did before. From what I read in the tread I mentioned above it seems that some say it is a penalty and others say it isn’t. There is no clear answer and even though my blog didn’t get de-indexed doesn’t mean it wasn’t penalized as you can clearly understand from the following statement that was made by Matt Cutts from Google:

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

Focus on the parts I highlighted and never mind that he talks about duplicate content in this case. It just goes to show that Google can penalize sites by dropping their rankings and not just by de-indexing them.

I guess the only way to get a clear answer is to try and get the rankings I lost back by building links and promoting those pages, and that is what I’m going to do. You can be sure that I will share the results with you once I will get some information and hopefully it will be good news .

What Did I Learn?

It has only been a week and the entire picture is not clear yet but I know that there are plenty to learn from what happened and that is what I’m planning to do. There is good in what happened and it might take me a while to figure what it was but I know I will do my best to figure it out and learn from this experience.

With that said, I did manage to learn a few things that I want to share with you:

SEO Is Risky

SEO is a risky business and it is constantly changing. The methods that work today might not work tomorrow and might actually hurt you tomorrow. Keep in mind that in the eyes of Google, any link building method is not legit unless the links are being built naturally by people coming to your site, liking the content and simply sharing it out of their own free will.

Anchor Text Diversity

I don’t know if low anchor text diversity has anything to do with the recent Google update (but I feel it does), and I’m not sure there is a way to know that for sure but I can tell you that I didn’t really diversify the anchor texts I used when promoting my reviews on this blog. I only started doing so recently so that is also something I learned and that I will implement from now on with all my link building.

Aside from the actual keywords I will target, I will also use the following as anchor texts:

• Click here
• The root domain
• The full URL
• General keywords that I will use to promote the home page
• Any other general keywords you might think of

Don’t Use Homepage Backlinks Services

Even though I didn’t use these services, I don’t see me using them now as it seems clear that Google targeted these type of blogs and networks according to all the chatter on the traffic planet forum. If you are still thinking of using such services than I recommend you watch the video from Terry Kyle as he mentions what type of network will be safer than others to use.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

Relying on just one site is not smart in my opinion. This blog provides me with most of my income and as long as it was OK and my rankings were high everything really looked great. But I learned what many others have learned online over the years, that things can change in a split second.

I have no doubt that my income will take a hit due to the rankings drop I experienced but I’m happy to say that I already decided a few months ago to focus on creating additional income sources that are not related to this blog so that I won’t depend on it too much.

Pat Flynn had a very interesting post about this issue. He asked his readers What’s Better: Having 1 Site or 10 Sites? which turned out to be one of the most popular posts on his blog and I think you can learn a lot from the various comments and thoughts his readers shared.

Traffic Is Not Just Google

The same way relying on just one site isn’t smart, I also think that relying only on Google as the main traffic source is not a smart thing to do. There are plenty of other traffic sources out there that I should be using and I planning to focus on that alongside the traffic I get from Google.

The other traffic sources I can think of are:

• Building an email list
• Increasing your RSS subscribers
• Social Sites, mainly Twitter and Facebook
• YouTube

My big brother has what is probably the biggest architectural visualization blog online and Google isn’t among his top 10 traffic sources which just goes to show that you can build a very big and successful blog without focusing only on SEO and traffic from Google.

Your Turn

Did you notice any ranking changes over the past few days? Did any of your sites got hit? Do you have any ideas on why that happened and what has changed after the last Google update?

Please share your thoughts by commenting below. I’m sure we can all learn from each others experiences so don’t be a stranger.

Thanks.

To your success (and mine ),

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Rankings Drop, Googe Panda 3.3 and Lessons Learned

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