Ahh, I’ve been discussing SEO with you with a general belief you were advising standard auto blog techniques. When someone creates an autoblog product and mentions auto blog and autopilot I tend to think they are doing the following.
Register a domain Install WordPress Install an auto blog plugin (WP Robot would be my choice) Install a handful of plugins to support the site automatically, auto tweeting, auto RSS syndication, auto backlinks sort of stuff Generally leave the site alone and work on backlinks and the next autoblog
That’s standard autoblogging, I take it that’s not what you advise in your Auto Blog Blueprint Course?
I can setup a blog like that in under 2 hours (could get it down to under an hour with a bit more thought and most of that time would be link building) which means I could easily build a few a day (and these would be fully SEO’d autoblogs) IF that’s all I wanted to do. Could build a ‘unique’ (unique settings) autoblog in 30 minutes if I skip the manual link building and relied on RSS syndication backlinks (all auto backlinks).
This autoblogging technique does work IF you build hundreds of blogs this way, but it would make a for a very boring way to make money online especially as you are lucky to have an autoblog that is 100% automated rank well for over a year, so you have to keep replacing the banned ones! Even a banned autoblog should make over 20 cents a day, so an absolute worst case scenario from an auto blog plan like this would be around $70 per domain per year. Less than $10 a year registration, $10 a year hosting and worse case scenario is $50 profit per domain per year. 1,000 autoblogs and you have $50,000 a year profit.
At 2 hours per domain working 8 hours a day you can build this sort of setup in well under a year. These are not pie in the sky numbers and is a worst case scenario for a person with few skills, but the right setup, many autoblogs will earn far more than $50 profit a year, so you can build an autoblog network that makes tens of thousands of dollars a year with far fewer than 1,000 domains, then there’s sub-domains that can make the setup cheaper, but makes it easier for search engines to find all autoblogs under a domain.
I’ve tested the above and it works today, but I have no interest in spending my days autoblogging that way (would make for a really boring life!).
If I were going to use autoblogs as a major part of my make money online strategy I’d do the following.
Set them up as above, but I’d keep the amount of scraped content to a minimum (wouldn’t post 100s of posts per day), a post or two per day per autoblog so I could keep an eye on what’s posted and go in later and edit the content and delete any posts I don’t like. Would also keep an eye on SERPs and further edit/optimise autoblogged content that are ranking so they become unique and won’t be banned long term. If a domain was doing particularly well I’d stop autoblogging and only add relatively unique content (not hard to rewrite affiliate content) so long term the domains though started as autoblogs become ‘normal’ sites.
A site a bit like UK Local and General Election Debate which started as a set of copied political party manifesto pledges (I manually copied them as there wasn’t usable RSS feeds) and when the site started to get popular I added unique search engine optimised posts that generated a lot more interest. In the 2010 UK general election that was one of the top UK political sites, it received so much traffic I had to upgrade dedicated servers three times and it still brought the fastest server the dedicated server company supplied to it’s knees on election day (estimate 1/4 million visitors in one day, lost a lot of log data because the server was running like it was under a DOS attack!).
This is not what I consider autoblogging per se (it’s not very automated), it’s finding ways to start sites off and when they start to rank well take them more seriously.
Is this the sort of make money from blogging techniques you advise in your Auto Blog Blueprint Course? Would explain why you only have 140 ‘autoblogs’ which is low for a long term dedicated autoblogger who has their autoblogs on true auto pilot.
I don’t really refer to it as auto blogging to my members anymore. Now I call it Blogging on auto or even Semi automatic blogging. I use a lot of unique content in my blogs and the only reason I have as many blogs as I do is from years of work.
I create blogs, test, see what works, build again, test, rinse, repeat. Google makes changes, I make more blogs to test, then make adjustments, move ahead.
This is all why I have now got my Auto Blog Blueprint Course on Version 3.0 after about 20 months now. Google changes, the web changes, and I change to adapt to these changes. I build for money and conversions. I do a tremendous about of niche research so I am building blogs which have a high probability of making me money. I strike out once and awhile, but for the most part I don’t anymore. I can see a profitable niche most of the time now without even seeing all the stats. I have been doing this so long now I can just see it.
I don’t do your standard auto blogging though and I laugh at most of the push button programs out there. My members are believers too. It doesn’t take long to see the system works. There is nothing magical about it. It is just a systematic approach to building profitable blogs that run on auto.
I actually tell my members that they should be able to make $5000 per month on auto with 20-25 blogs (niche dependent). The system was built more like running regular blogs with automation thrown in.
To setup your blogs on Auto, you need to establish a base that Google will recognize as solid Authoritative content when they are initially indexing your site. Google will classify your site and determine a lot about how they will categorize your site, etc., right from the beginning.
Setting up your SEO and linking structures right away will help create a base for the long term profitability of your Blog. Without it, you can go ahead and just post a ton of automated content with any of the Auto Blogging plugins that are out there, but in 2-3 months, your blog will get slapped by Google and you will be done.
2 years ago you could auto blog without a care in the world, now you have to be a little smarter because Google has gotten a whole lot smarter.
Success isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. Telling people they have to work to make money always scares them because most people looking for success online are looking for a get rich quick scheme anyway and there are not too many of them left that actually work.
Massive Passive Profits Autoblog Content not Matching Keywords
Hi Dave,
I have a problem on Massive Passive Profits autoblog. It pulls content to the blog which has nothing to do with the keywords, title I set for my blog in the campaign section. I have no idea how to fix that. I tried to put the keywords into ” ” so it would search for that term only, but the program does not accept it. I modified the keywords to be very specific to that site, but still pulling not related stuff, mostly from YouTube. You can see it on my site.
Did you run into this problem on your sites using Massive Passive Profit? How did you solve it?
Thanks for your help!
Gabor Ps. Caleb did great job on the banners I got! Very nice work!
That’s normal with autoblogs, how bad depends on your keyword choice and how the autoblog plugin decides what the content is about.
Choose a keyword you think would generate relevant content, but there’s always going to be articles etc… that you won’t think is relevant. More specific you are with the keywords, less content available to scrape :-)
YouTube is particularly bad, people who upload videos to YouTube use unrelated keywords (tags) all the time.
Not a lot you can do about it in my experience beyond being careful with your keywords.
I’ve been making sites with automated content before I even knew WordPress existed (over 7 years). Started with Amazon affiliate sites that were true 100% automated using an Amazon store script. Took an hour or two to setup, add some links and pretty much forget about them (made some easy money from them for a few years).
About 5 years ago Google cracked down on thin affiliate sites and my thin affiliate sites were all seriously downgraded in Google (never liked that sort of site so only had 20 of them, let most of them expire).
Since then every year or so I’ll test out new ideas for true auto blogging mainly because I like testing things (auto blogging doesn’t excite me, so won’t get into it in a big way). I’ve tested all sorts of ideas that revolve around keeping thin affiliate footprints to an absolute minimum and no matter what you do, 100% autoblogging does not work long term.
When I say does not work I mean if you take one domain, add a real autoblog to it (where the content is ALL automated) and all you do to that domain is work on backlinks (difficult to automate decent backlinks) and basic maintenance (upgrading WordPress, plugins etc…) medium term that domain will be downgraded in Google. Best I’ve got out of an autoblogged domain before it’s downgraded is about 2 years (and counting), but most are downgraded well before the 2 year mark.
For those into autoblogging in a big way, creating hundreds of autoblogs having an autoblog that makes a profit for a year is a success, but it is a full time job replacing banned domains. So even if you develop a true autoblog strategy it’s not build 100 domains on autopilot and forget about them as the millions poor in, as they are banned they need replacing, new backlinks building etc…
As JP has touched on what you’ve talked about Mike is not autoblogging per se, it’s not automated or on autopilot. You may well use duplicated content, RSS feeds, affiliate data-feeds etc… but you are spending a significant amount of time manipulating that content manually so it’s not recognised as duplicate/thin content. I’ve got a site like that with over 10,000 visitors a day, it’s not and has never been an auto blog.
Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not autoblogging on autopilot, it’s not a setup and forget strategy (which is the definition of auto blog/autopilot). I’d call it making money online with blogs or even making money online with WordPress which it sounds like what your Auto Blog Blueprint Course is about.
BTW Mike I’ve build a WordPress SEO Plugin that achieves the equivalent of noindex (like you get with the popular WordPress SEO Plugins) but it doesn’t waste/delete link benefit, actually redirects the link benefit back to the home page. Will be releasing it for free in June.
See Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin for details, hopefully those who are damaging their sites SEO using WordPress SEO Plugins like the Yoast SEO Plugin (awful SEO plugin because of the nofollow and noindex parts!!!) will switch to mine.
In my experience and many others true autoblogs are banned by Google long term, you are lucky to have one last more than a year.
I don’t consider a site an autoblog if you’ve manually rewritten most of the content or a significant amount of the content is unique.
I’ve got sites with not completely unique content that are doing well, pretty easy to take non-copyright content and reorganise it so it’s not easily recognised as duplicate content: would take a manually review and even then if you add extra value not in the original it seems to be acceptable by Google (important not to infringe copyright). Not easy to automate this process though, so not an autoblog/autopilot solution to generating content (all my sites with that type of content have taken a fair amount of effort to rewrite/reorganise).
Even when you take a unique content site and start autoblogging, it will be penalised in Google long term.
I just can’t see how long term (long term would be 3+ years consistently) anyone can keep an autoblog/autopilot site pulling in reasonable amounts of traffic from Google.
Autoblog/autopiolt would generally mean a site that new content is added on a regular basis (at least hundreds of articles a year) with little to no input from the site owner. For example if you had a site with say 50 unique articles that was ranking OK, if you turn it into an autoblog on autopilot and say a year later it’s at 1,000 articles (950 automatically added, not unique) it’s not going to last long in Google (if it keeps it’s traffic for over a year you’ve done well IME).
Can your Auto Blog Blueprint Course take a 50 unique article site to 1,000 articles on autopilot and keep it ranked well in Google for 3+ years consistently (consistently would be if you took 10 such sites, 7 would still be ranked well 3+ years later)?
If you can’t achieve this you haven’t cracked autoblogging.
Obviously you haven’t been listening to me. The answer is Yes. I have over 140 auto blogs and over 70 of those are over 3 years old and another 50 range in age from 8 months to 2 years old. I have around 20 I have made in the last 8 months, but I haven’t built a new auto blog in 2 months. Mainly because at $46,500 in April and closing in on the same figure for May, I would say I don’t really worry about it because most of them I haven’t touched in over a year outside of having my outsourcers run upgrades and clean ups.
I am on the 3rd iteration of the Auto Blog Blueprint in the last 20 months. I am pretty sure I am not just trying to get this figured out and I am not using unique content after the first 10 posts on each blog.
I rank #1 for thousands of keywords.
I even have 2 really crappy test sites that I haven’t done good SEO on or updated with decent content in over 18 months that are still ranking #1 for high competition keywords.
Look in Google at the Number #1 listing for “Harley Davidson Auctions” and “Nutritional Supplement Reviews” and you will find 2 crappy Auto Blogs sitting at number #1. They are mine. Hogwildauctions.com and NutritionalSupplementReviews.net.
These are just crappy test sites I don’t even care about and I am dominating. How do you think I am doing with sites that are actually built right?
Harley Davidson Auctions and Nutritional Supplement Reviews
The two SERPs examples “Harley Davidson Auctions” and “Nutritional Supplement Reviews” are not what I’d call hard SERPs, especially not for a home page SERP. They are long tail SERPs and so not good example SERPs to show autoblogs do well long term. Even downgraded autoblogs can generate traffic from long tail SERPs.
Looking through the top ten Google results shows:
Harley Davidson Auctions SERP, all ten results are for PR0 and PR1 pages. Only three of the pages are home page results. Not exactly a highly competitive SERP.
Nutritional Supplement Reviews SERP, most of the ten results are for PR2 and less pages. Seven of the pages are home page results, but only two of those appear to specifically targeting the Nutritional Supplement Reviews SERP on the home page. More competition than the Harley Davidson SERP, but not hard SERPs.
These are not hard SERPs with a lot of competition.
The results do suggest those two domains are not banned yet, difficult to say if they are downgraded you really have to look at overall traffic relative to the niche, how many pages indexed etc… relative to overall traffic.
The Harley Davidson domain was a dropped domain and looks like you backdated some of the posts to at least 2006. Looks like it’s around 2 years old (March 2009 maybe)?
The Nutritional Supplement Reviews domain is just over 2 years old.
I’d be much more interested to hear what sort of traffic these two domains pull in considering the Harley Davidson domain has over 1,200 pages indexed and the Nutritional Supplement Reviews domain has over 7,300 pages indexed. If these are well ranked domains they should gain quite a bit of traffic from all that indexed content? The Alexa rankings (which are far from accurate) suggest relatively low traffic numbers for so much indexed content.
Maybe we look on success in a different way. I’m comparing to what I’d expect from the same content if it were unique (not thin content). If you have a 7,000 page site and you’ve worked on backlinks etc… you might expect it to pull in a fair amount of traffic, actual amount is very much dependent on the niche etc… but if it’s under 100 visitors a day it’s probably downgraded in Google.
I have a thin computer affiliate store that last month generated 3,000 unique visitors (4,200 visits according to Awstats). That wouldn’t be a bad traffic figure for a small site, but there’s 12,000 pages indexed in Google. It’s generating traffic from the sorts of SERPs you used as examples above. If a sites got thousands of pages of unique content it should be generating thousands of visits a day. Autoblogs have thousands of pages, but they tend not to generate thousands of visitors a day long term because Google downgrades them.
Just to confirm the money you make from your sites, it doesn’t include sales of your Auto Blog Blueprint Course right? Really irritating when Internet marketers show their earnings to sell a product and a lot of the money is from selling the product that’s supposed to make the purchaser the money.
I am sorry but you are way off base on quite a few points here. I had thought previously that you actually knew a little about SEO and Niche SEO Marketing, but it is obvious that you don’t. This is not a slam, but an observation made due to several glaring mistakes you have made in your comments above.
First off, you missed the point on listing those 2 sites entirely. Read my Comments again. These 2 sites are examples of Crap sites that I am not trying to make money with, nor do I do any SEO on them, nor do I actively build backlinks to them. They are test sites I randomly add different things to, but for the most part, neither site has had anything done to it for a very long time.
The point is, that even though these sites are complete and utter crap, they still rank #1 for their chosen Niches and this is the goal of every Auto Blogger. So if you chose to use my Auto Blog Blueprint system instead of following the bad example of these sites, you could make a ton of money using the Long Tail Keywords these sites would spawn.
You said that these are long tail keyword sites that wouldn’t be good for Auto Blogs.
Why?
You said these are in Low and Medium Competition Niches.
Yep. Of course.
You have to understand Niche SEO Marketing to understand this and obviously you do not. With an Auto Blog you want a 2 or 3 keyword domain which is in a Medium to Low Competition Niche that also allows you to create even more Long Tail Keywords from it with the Titles and Contents of your Blog Posts that are automatically generated.
You said these are not good Auto Blog Domains. I say you are flat out crazy. I make over $500 per month from each of these blogs (from Ebay and Amazon, and some CJ.com) and I do nothing with them and they are crap. Imagine if I put even a little effort into them?
When picking a Niche for Auto Blogging, we want Keywords that are Marketable and allow us to publish a medium to large amount of content which uses the Primary and Related Keywords of the Domain. Why would we pick a high competition set of keywords when all we have to do is look at Low and Medium Competition Keywords which also get a median amount of traffic starting at around 900 to 1000 visitors per month and up. That way we can rank in the top 3 results for our chosen keywords and make money right away and in a lot of cases not even have to build many backlinks to succeed and profit. Going for a high competition niche set of keywords is just plain stupid if you want to be able to make a lot of money fast. Sure, you could work on 3-4 sites for several months with a lot of unique content, build a lot of backlinks, and maybe, just maybe you will squeeze out a high competition ranking and make some money, but why would you when you can dominate tons of low competition niches that can get you similar traffic and targeted profits. People who search long tail convert faster than any general single word browser.
It is called, “Work Smarter, not Harder!”
Another problem you have here is you actually use AWStats. Anyone who does Marketing knows that AWStats adds in all types of additional Bot visits which skew your results. For real stats you need to use tools like Clicky or Google Anaylytics which tell you the real story. If you are giving your visitors here to this site AWStats numbers to validate your success than you better take a second look. Good SEO might give you 5000 AWStats visitors a month, but most of those visits are going to be Bot visits from Search Engine Spiders and not real Visitors. This is SEO Marketing 101.
The profits I list here and elsewhere are strictly for my Auto Blogs and I am not adding in my Profits from the sales of the Auto Blog Blueprint, which are actually less than what I make with my Auto Blogs themselves.
I appreciate your Technical SEO knowledge here David, but you have a lot to learn about the actual application of that knowledge.
Mike Johnson Autoblog Blueprint Course Review the Measurement of SEO Success
You completely missed my point, I asked whether our views of SEO success are different for a reason, I’ve had similar discussions where I’ll be saying that’s not a good result because my measure of SEO success is different to whoever I was discussing SEO with. Your two example sites (and I appreciate they are not your best examples) don’t look like high traffic sites and your last comment seems to suggest I’m right if you are saying an autoblog like those tend to receive around 1,000 visitors a month long term.
If those domains tend to receive around 1,000 visitors a month they are not doing well in the search engines (1,000 visitors a month to a domain with so many indexed pages isn’t a lot of search engine traffic). Remember I am talking search engine optimization only, not conversions, if a site can convert 100 visitors a month into a reasonable amount of cash that’s a good site to own. I do own Google penalised sites that turn a profit.
1,000 visitors a month for a domain with 7,000 plus pages indexed is not doing well SEO wise, I would expect a lot more traffic if it wasn’t downgraded. This is the sort of traffic levels I’ve seen on my test autoblogs (remember I don’t build many autoblogs, not my thing) long term, but they are downgraded in Google (they should be doing much better). I’ve never said the autoblogs I’ve tested receive no traffic, I’ve stated in my autoblog tests long term they are all downgraded (downgraded is not the same as banned, banned would be no traffic from Google). A few thousand visitors a month (which I’m finding isn’t hard to achieve) to an autoblog domain with thousands of indexed pages is a downgraded autoblog in my experience (or a very low traffic niche : higher traffic niche autoblogs tend to be downgraded faster).
So it sounds like many of your autoblogs are downgraded relative to similar sites that aren’t autoblogs. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money from them, if you can convert 1,000 visitors a month to an autoblog and make $500 a month that’s a lot more money than I’ve made from similar levels of traffic on my downgraded autoblogs!
Example affiliate toy store that’s downgraded, all it’s SERPs are long tail (easy stuff), around 1,000 pages indexed, visitors over the past month ~1,000, revenue from AdSense around $20, product sales around $100 (commission ~$10).
Money wise rubbish to what you say you can make. I will add I don’t create affiliate sites to make money per se (they are not fully monetised, just AdSense and whatever affiliate the content covers), they are testing SEO autoblog concepts.
How much traffic do you think you get over your network of ~140 autoblogs a month to make over $40,000?
If you can on average make $500 on 1,000 visitors you’d only need about 80,000 visitors a month to make your $40,000. I get more traffic than that in two days, but don’t make anywhere near $40,000 from it. The domain you are on now receives around 10,000 visitors a month.
BTW going to move these comments to a new post about autoblogging when I get the time as most of it isn’t about WordPress SEO Plugins it’s related to your Auto Blog Blueprint Course.
I missed one point in my Comments above. You mentioned that Google will downgrade the sites I listed above after awhile because they are auto blogs. If you use the Wayback Machine, you would see that these Blogs actually have gained ranking. They are both a little more than 2 years old and within the last 6 months and AFTER the Google Farmer and Panda Updates, they actually gained in Ranking and are sitting at Number #1 for their Target Keywords.
The amount of traffic I am talking about when picking a set of Primary Keywords for your Domain is what I am talking about. Not all the traffic. I might have to just give you access to my Auto Blog Blueprint Course for Free because the big picture eludes you because you have a very defined idea of what you believe is the right way to do this. While some of it may work, it is not the only way.
When building an Auto Blog, the first thing I tell my members is that SEO starts when picking you Niche. You can start off with success by picking a Niche set of “Primary Keywords” which are the Identity words for your Blog. You pick this niche based on the the Traffic these Primary Keywords get (my minimums for members are 900-1000 visits per month for the #1 position in Google for those Keywords). We then look at the level of competition in several ways and determine if when using Advanced SEO Techniques alone it is possible to Rank for these Search Terms (Primary Keywords). Then we also look at whether or not those Keywords (the Niche) has the potential for Profitability based on available Affiliate Programs and other factors. Then we move forward to buying our Domain. This is the edited for television version.
The basis for this is that even if you don’t or can’t rank #1 for the Primary Keywords, more than likely you will be able to get on Page #1 because we do use Backlink Building techniques and other Social Media Marketing techniques as well (mostly all automated). With an Auto Blog, it really does not matter. Why? Because we are looking at all the traffic you can gain from the Long Tail traffic your Blog Posts will get because after we Identify our Primary Keywords, we then develop a list of Related Keywords (LSI) from which our Blog Posts will be based on. We use a bunch of other plugins and techniques to take advantage of these Keywords.
The end result: Tons of traffic from multiple search terms with varying degrees of traffic and in the end, one Auto Blog can end up Ranking #1 for a couple hundred Long Tail Search Terms.
The thing you keep saying over and over through your Posts here is that each Blog needs to get thousands and thousands of searches each month to determine success. That is not even close to true. How can you spell success for a site based on traffic when in reality each Search Term in Google and other search engines receive different levels of traffic?
One of my more profitable Auto Blogs only receives approximately 900 visits per month, but the Niche it is focused on is a heavy Buyer Niche which sells Big Ticket items. My visitor to conversion ratio is about 15% and since I make $200 per sale, I average between $1500 and $3000 per month on that Blog alone. It only has 85 posts on it and I only have my auto settings to post to it once every 5 weeks. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly because it is a small niche and you need to throttle your Auto Posting accordingly and not just post away like an idiot.
Like I said before, work smarter, not harder.
By doing effective research, you can do this and make a lot of money. I have Auto Blogs which get over 15,000 visitors a month and over 20 Comments per day because I build my sites to look and feel like a Blog, not an Auto Blog.
And what is this 7000 pages indexed thing? I don’t mass post and I tell my members not to mass post. I have another example site I show my members (a unique content blog) which averages 4 posts per month, but because they are targeted and I build a nice amount of backlinks to the site, I make between $4000 and $5000 per month with that site (and no, this is not part of my Auto Blogging Profits stats). You only should post based on your Niche and the amount of available content for the niche. You find this out via always having a Private, No Index, No Follow Test Blog. By throttling how often you post based on content availability, you keep your quality level high, you Keywords targeted, and your success rate higher.
You seem to have a predefined idea of what auto blogging is and spamming search engines worked a few years ago, it doesn’t anymore.
Once again, I know what downgraded means. I have actually had most of my sites move up in the ranks after Google cleaned things up here with Panda and Farmer. I have had numerous Members post #1 Ranking results for their blogs in my Member Only Forum and this is due to the Advanced SEO and other techniques we use. I have yet to have any Rankings downgraded but for 2 or 3 old junk blogs I had. I don’t think my Blogs would be sitting at #1 for their search terms if they were being downgraded. There is enough competition there that if they were, it would be blatantly obvious, don’t you think?
One last thing. I don’t use Adsense. I have it on a few blogs here and there, but mostly I don’t use it. Why? Targeting. You need ot do the targeting in your Monetization. Why let Google do that for you? They make more money from it then you do and the Adwords Partner gets all the Profits for the sale. As an Affiliate you make a lot more money.
You need to learn a lot about using SEO and Marketing together. What are 80,000 visits a month if you can’t convert the traffic into Profits? I could create a ton of Information style blogs and rake in tons of traffic too if that was my goal, but my goal is to make money.
Plus, you are using AWStats so your traffic numbers are way off anyways. You have been running around here quoting high traffic numbers and most of them are Bot visits. That is probably the number #1 reason why you think you get 70,000 visitors to a single site and it doesn’t convert as high as the traffic would suggest. I always look to get at least 2-3% Conversions on my traffic. if I don’t, then I try to change things up to help boost conversions. It is called Split Testing and yes, you can do it on Auto Blogs, but you actually need to use REAL stats to figure this out.
I keep stats on all my sites and I get a little over 750,000 visitors each month to all my sites. This is a baseline and it goes up and down based on the time of year. It is a 5000+ visitor per month average and each site is different based on the niche. Some do great, others do good, and some do average. It is the nature of Niche SEO Marketing. I don’t need 80,000 visitors a month to make over $40,000 each month because I don’t go after High Competition Niches.
You still don’t get what I mean, if you listen you might make even more money and if I take your earnings on face value I might have something to learn from you about monetizing search engine traffic.
Either you aren’t SEO’ing your domains very well or they are downgraded (or most likely a combination). All because a domain is improving over time does not mean it isn’t carrying a Google penalty, I had a site drop from over 10,000 visitors a day to 2,000, it was a clear penalty, but most people would consider 2,000 visitors a day a successful site (I knew it should do better). Had that site never got it’s great rankings and always stayed around the 2,000 visitor a day mark I’d have not known for sure it was penalized. Based on what you’ve said I suspect many of your autoblogs are downgraded, and if you are making $40K from them a month you are very good at monetising them.
If I’m right there’s not a lot you can do about it (unless it’s only better SEO needed) since a penalized autoblog is highly unlikely to ever have it’s penalty lifted. You don’t hide the affiliate fingerprints like linking to affiliate sites in a very easy to spot way, so maybe you could keep new ones from being downgraded as fast.
You can’t be arguing you have 140 autoblogs and NONE of them have been downgraded? I don’t care how good you are at SEO, hiding thin affiliate content fingerprints, monetizing traffic autoblogs are hated by Google and out of 140 autoblogs some will be downgraded. If you do believe none of your 140 auto blogs are downgraded you are the only autoblogger I’ve talked to not to admit some of their autoblogs are carrying Google penalties.
The visitor numbers I state are accurate (they are estimates, but reasonably accurate).
I don’t only use Awstats for traffic number estimates, for starters I don’t think there’s a way to track multiple sites using Awstats so to get my traffic estimates just through Awstats I’d have to look at stats for 90ish domains and add them altogether manually! I don’t have the time for that.
Awstats doesn’t count bots in with the visitor numbers, an example:
According to Awstats one of my sites received this number of visitors etc… in May.
Unique visitors 47,822 Number of visits 60,872 Pages 123,377 Hits 835,837
Googlebot 92,438 Other bots about 2,000
This is a test autoblog that I started about 10 months ago BTW.
If I used a number from Awstats for traffic I’d be referring to Unique visitors only. So if I say my sites receive between 50,000 and 60,000 unique visitors a day I mean real visitors, not bots. Been doing this long enough to know the difference.
For a quick network estimate I look at AdSense impressions (running on most of my sites) and estimate traffic numbers from that and this estimate does match up with the Awstat figures. With AdSense impressions you know they have to be real visitors (javascript turned on) and with ad blocking software these days could be an under estimate.
Anyway, what really sucks from this conversation is it looks like my ninety odd sites (got around 100 domains with about 90 with sites on) receives around double the traffic your 140 sites receive, but you make several times more money from the traffic than I do (that sucks). Your sites on average receive over 5,000 visitors a month, mine about 16,000 (conservative estimate). I don’t even make all my sites to generate loads of traffic, got one on Roman Festivals, you can imagine how little traffic and money that gets :-) Hmm, number 1 in Google for Rome Festivals and that’s a SERP that could be monetised for travel and I haven’t (had the site years).
Basically if we both take this information on face value (sorry, but a lot of people into Internet marketing lie about their online earnings) I do far better gaining traffic from search engines (traffic per domain 3 times higher) and you do far better converting traffic to cash (that really sucks you get half my traffic and make more money, did I mention that sucks :-)).
I’ve said many times on my sites about making money online I suck at fully monetising my search engine traffic, I have domains that make no money (jokes site for example currently at around 7,000 visitors a day and makes ZERO money), making money per se doesn’t excite me, I find the challenge of figuring out how to generate lots of traffic from Google far more interesting than just making money (yes, I’m an idiot, but a happy idiot :-)). I’ll have to take a look at your Auto Blog Blueprint Course when I have some free time see if there’s anything useful I might use.
To reiterate, either your domains aren’t SEO’d very well and/or the autoblogs are downgraded. When you’ve been doing search engine optimization as long as I have (10 years) you know when a site isn’t performing as well as it should and from the sounds of things yours aren’t. Most of my domains aren’t autoblogs or thin affiliate content (little risk of a Google penalty), relative to autoblogs my sites will have a fraction of the content. This means your network of 140 domains compared to my 90 odd domains will have many, many times more content pages indexed in Google (where I have a 50 page 100% unique content site, you have a 1,000+ page duplicate content autoblog). If your sites are reasonably well SEO’d with that amount of content you should be receiving several times more traffic than I do (should be millions of visitors a month). You can’t argue with the SEO logic, a site with 100 pages indexed relative to a site with 1,000 pages index, if everything else is equal the 1,000 page site should have more SERPs.
Mike if you are still following this post would like your opinion on an autoblog test site: (Update: deleted the site).
It’s running Stallion and WPRobot Autoblog Plugin default setup (setup a few basic campaigns, made no template changes, so pretty much out the box WPRobot).
Everything on the site is Stallion built in features and plugins Akismet and WP Super Cache.
The 125px wide ads (can be set to other pixel sizes) on the menu are a new Stallion feature, add up to 20 banner ads (they rotate) with the option to cloak affiliate links using the Stallion built in javascript/css cloaking code, meaning no wasted link benefit on affiliate banners.
You know how good WP Robot is as an autoblog plugin, Stallion fixes the SEO and thin affiliate footprint mistakes. All nofollow links (including links within comments) generated through WP Robot can be converted to javascript/css links, the Amazon buy now images can be changed and the location moved, take a look at ###### for an example.
Only thin affiliate/autoblog footprint left from WP Robot derived content is the actual text based content (that’s assuming the WP Robot setup is thought out, renamed the wprobt3 plugin folder, save images to server). should mean search engines will find it that much harder to find WP Robot autoblogs.
I don’t mean this how its sounds but there’s no other way to put it.
What you don’t suck at is SEO and monetization, but what you do suck at is the aesthetics of theme design. The site at dvd-video-store.info is just plain fugly; no other word for it. All the other themes you have produced, to the human eye, all fugly too. And if your other sites are based on them, I guess their fugly too.
I don’t doubt your expertise one little bit, when it comes to SEO, but you really suck at the aesthetics of good visual design.
Did I mention you really suck theme design aesthetics?… 8^)
P.S. Yeah, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that results are more important than looks, but that’s a cop-out. Why can’t you have both? You maybe then might find you’re better at monetization.
WordPress Theme Design Aesthetics vs WordPress SEO Features
I can’t deny I’m not a web designer per se, I’ve not designed a WordPress theme look from scratch, original Stallion was based on a popular WordPress theme which I took the general look of and added to the WordPress SEO ad theme framework (the SEO and ad code behind the scenes). So you are knocking the theme designer whose WordPress theme I used as inspiration, not me :-)
In the Stallion update I made code changes to make it easier to create new designs, which is the next step. In principle a lot of WordPress theme designs can be imported into Stallion just adding a css file and relevant images (next stage : watch this space).
Although Stallion has lots of colour schemes they are based on the same general look, I’m currently looking for new ideas for the next set of Stallion designs. Been looking at Internet Marketers websites for design ideas and so far they all have bog standard designs generally along the lines of the Stallion Simple design with most of the interesting features being WordPress plugins** and a couple of unique images.
** I only use plugins and other code that doesn’t damage a sites SEO. For example there’s some really nice looking social network plugins that I’d like to use, BUT they use nofollow links that damage a sites SEO.
I am not knocking you or the people who you took your original inspiration from, I am just trying to have you see my point of view. I would have, and would still, buy your theme, if it wasn’t so fugly. My immediate reaction, and it hasn’t changed over the months since I first saw it, is – I would have to spend a too much of my time getting it to look nice (since you got it to play nice), but I can’t then spend that time on driving traffic – which is what I want to do. And I am sure I am not alone.
There is more to SEO than On Page/On Site SEO Factors
The big thing I think you get wrapped up in David is perfect On Site SEO. In my experience, the small details you are talking about make up a very small percentage of your actual ranking factors. Authority and Content will take precedence over coding issues or a few links with nofollow anyday.
I have numerous sites ranking well above their competitors because of a good combination of both Authority, Content, and on page/ on site SEO. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If it did, Google would end up having a lot of sites with crap content ranked number #1 ahead of sites with Great content because of this.
Consider the ranking factors and the power of each before worrying too much about a single plugin which uses nofollow. In the big scheme of things these are small factors which matter less (I am not saying they don’t matter at all) then what content and a strong External linking program will do for a site.
Stallion Onsite WordPress SEO vs Off Site WordPress SEO
Of course there’s a lot more to SEO than getting things right on the site/page, in fact off site SEO factors are more important than onsite SEO factors.
If a site has no decent backlinks (nothing more important than aged backlinks), resulting in a fair amount of link benefit flowing through a site it doesn’t matter how great your onsite SEO is because it’s only going to rank for the easiest of long-tail SERPs. In comparison a site with awful onsite SEO, but lots of decent aged backlinks can rank high just because of the aged backlinks (aged backlinks results in an authority site).
Basically a strong backlink strategy can make up for what you loose by not fully SEOing everything onsite, but if you have a strong backlink strategy and fully SEO’d it’s better than just a strong backlinks strategy.
WordPress themes in general do not increase a sites backlinks, there are plugins that can help, for example I’ve used the CopyFeed plugin which adds links to your RSS feeds, when autobloggers use your feeds to create sites you gain free backlinks links.
Do a Google search for 6a1bca1906e697d83e6b6242198d3b22 and it shows sites that are copying the RSS feed from a jokes site of mine, that’s free backlinks, they are going to scrape my RSS feed anyway, now I get a handful of links for each post they scrape.
Even then the plugins that generate backlinks tend to be of low quality, for SEO success a lot of your time is going to be spent gaining backlinks, not SEOing content etc… that sort of free backlink isn’t going to get a site ranked high for hard SERPs. Might be OK on an autoblog with loads of content, all depends what you consider successful : a domain that costs under $50 a year to maintain etc… is a profitable domain if it makes $200 a year say.
Although a major feature of Stallion is protecting wasted link benefit by removing nofollow links and making it easy to cloak affiliate links etc.. (which for an autoblog is a must do to hide autoblog footprints). Stallion does a lot more than save link benefit.
Have you installed Stallion on a test site Mike? If you haven’t you won’t have seen all the SEO and other features. There are hundreds of options not including some of the plugin like features built into Stallion (they aren’t all SEO options).
Example of the built in Stallion SEO you won’t get with any other WordPress theme.
You will find one of my comments here in the top 10 for both SERPs.
I’m not targeting your Auto Blog Blueprint Course SERPs via articles as an affiliate (if I was I’d write stand alone articles), yet because of the inbuilt SEO of Stallion I’m competing for some of your long-tail SERPs during a comment based conversation I’m enjoying. That’s thanks to a combination of WordPress plugins and code snippets I’ve pulled together to form the Stallion SEO theme.
I’ve given this comment a title “Stallion Onsite WordPress SEO vs Off Site WordPress SEO” a very long-tail SERP that this site currently doesn’t rank top 10 in Google for. There’s a good chance after the Stallion SEO Super Comments Page for this comment is indexed by Google (via the link bottom right on this comment) it will be number 1 for this phrase. This is almost free organic Google traffic, I’d be writing this comment anyway, but because it’s going to form a Stallion SEO Super Comment I’ve gone to a little bit more effort to give it an SEO’d title and a little SEO through the content. No other WordPress theme does anything similar to this.
Then there’s the WP Robot Autoblog Plugin Features added to Stallion, that should be right up your street. Stallion hides the autoblog footprints associated with WP Robot usage and SEO’d some of the content (cloaks affiliate links, saving link benefit). Do you use WP Robot, I’m sure you must be recommending it in your course, it’s the best autoblog plugin around?
Assuming you are working on backlinks, why would you not want your on site SEO to be as close to 100% SEO’d as possible so it fully utilizes all your hard earned link benefit? I just don’t get why you’d waste link benefit and not add more SEO when there’s a theme like Stallion that’s designed for Internet Marketers, autobloggers etc…
The only good reason I can think of is not SEOing everything results in making more money (I don’t understand why better SEO would = less money?). If that’s the case, fine, don’t fully SEO everything. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want both (that’s what I’m aiming for)?
I don’t disagree with you at all. I was only commenting on the fact that you seem to worry too much about SEO when making a site look good or adding functionality might take away from SEO, but in a lot of cases, functionality and Appearance go a long ways toward sales. Sales are the end result everyone wants.
I agree, if I can have a site with Perfect SEO and have a perfect Off Site SEO package as well, I would be one happy camper.
I might have to talk to you about getting this theme into my new project. The WPRobot integration is really a great feature, especially with the way Google is treating these sites now.
Yep I take the SEO side of WordPress seriously, SEO is my business and it doesn’t feel right not to get 100% SEO into a website. I’m very happy with the SEO aspects of Stallion now, I don’t think there’s much more to add SEO wise (maybe ability to manipulate title elements and meta description tags better, but they are minor issues and covered by plugins adequately). Now it’s time to focus on aesthetics and interesting features.
So what you are experiencing in the comments is my attempt to try to educate others to how I understand SEO. In some respects it’s frustrating, the majority of people who would benefit from using Stallion don’t understand enough about SEO to know they’d benefit!
When you have the webmaster forums etc… still advising SEO techniques that are long dead like using meta keywords tags and submitting sites to search engines for example (total waste of time) trying to explain the sidebar headings of my SEO themes for over 5 years have been SEO’d by NOT using H2/H3 headings that even today the vast majority if WordPress themes use as sidebar headings.
Or even though the title of the site (the home page link at the top using the blog name as anchor text) in the header area of a site running Stallion (all my SEO themes) looks the same size on every page, but it’s actually a H1 heading on the home page, dated archives and the 404 error page, but on the rest of the site it’s within a span tag (no SEO value in a span tag, it’s SEO neutral) that’s styled to look the same size etc… as the H1 heading .
The SEO benefit of this is SEO 101, you only use a H1 heading for the SERPs you are targeting on THAT page, the home page is likely to be targeting the title of the site, but the categories and individual posts aren’t, their H1 heading should be the name of the category, tag, search results, name of the post/page (which is the case on my SEO themes).
With most WordPress themes you’ll find the H1 heading holds the home page link within the header (every page gets the same H1 heading) and the title of categories, individual posts etc… use a H2 heading. This is basic SEO 101 and was the first things I fixed in the WordPress themes I used when I started using WordPress over 5 years ago.
A WordPress SEO theme that doesn’t achieve these very basic SEO goals (very easy to do) are not WordPress SEO themes.
Now you all feel sorry for me because I’m so misunderstood :-)
Profit Focused Marketing Course
Had a read of the comments on your new profit.fm site, sounds interesting, not enough info to understand exactly what you have planned.
Are you trying to pull everything together you need to run a successful WordPress site into one package? So rather than just covering autoblogging, everything.
That’s what I’m trying to achieve with Stallion to a degree (not covering absolutely EVERYTHING, that would be a massive project) with the Stallion theme the core that I add to with updates and free plugins (some built directly into Stallion, others recommended) and the best premium plugins for achieving specific things (like Wp Robot for autoblogging).
Definitely interested in what you are working on, great to have some feature requests I can add to Stallion in the future to work with what you have planned.
You tend to see everything like its a science and forget that there are humans involved; which makes it more of a black art. I guess I can see why you relate to the mathematical needs of the search engines (its easier), but don’t forget, humans have needs too.
What good is a website which uncannily draws in the traffic via the search engines, if when they get there, there first reaction is – ugh! SEO without a welcoming, easily understood, clean, modern theme design is somewhat pointless, don’t you think? They both go hand in hand.
And I guess the majority of your customers are not developers, or they would create their own themes. So how many more customers would there be if you stopped designing the look and feel (and brought in an expert), and stuck to doing what you are expert in?
Just my two cents, but I think you would have a much greater success if Stallion Theme (horrible name too by the way – what have horses got to do with it?), was designed to look as attractive is it works underneath.
Stallion Theme Design vs Search Engine Optimization
You aren’t wrong about the Stallion design in 2011 since if you don’t like it, you don’t like: it’s subjective, you can’t be wrong in what you like/don’t like :-)
Others like the main Stallion design (the colours) which is based on Talian (the original Talian 1 was a very popular theme a few years ago), I have to admit when I first started working on the Talian colour scheme I didn’t like it, but it grew on me and it was the most popular design I sold on the site.
SEO wise Stallion is going to be very difficult to improve upon and any new SEO features are going to add minor SEO improvements: though I said this when I created Talian 5 and Stallion 6 has some significant SEO upgrades :-)
In an update I worked on layouts: the sidebar location Stallion went from a double 200px wide layout only to covering all the basic layouts possible, other than adding sidebars within sidebars not much else I can improve there.
Stallion Sidebar Layouts Left 200px Right 200px Left 200px Left 200px Right 200px Right 200px Left 255px Left 165px Right 255px Right 165px Left 310px Right 310px No Sidebars
Worked on custom ad options: on top of widget locations strategically placed through out the theme allowing the addition of ads and other widgets almost anywhere there’s two easy to use custom ad widgets. I’m using both custom ad types on this site, they are the 125px by 125px ads and the large Stallion banner at the bottom of the right menu.
Also made a start on improving the aesthetic appeal of Stallion sites, added the TwentyEleven header system. My version is better than the original, both SEO wise and user wise, with TwentyEleven and other themes based on TwentyEleven you are limited to the theme developers images and one more image you add. In Stallion there are image sets, and custom slots for 10 of your own packages (up to 80 more images). Like with TwentyEleven you can associate an image with a post and have it show in the header.
Added two image based navigation menus, one that’s used with a thumbnail feature I added that gives you a featured post slider.
I’m concentrating mostly on the user experience. So far added new colour schemes.
Added a YouTube widget, this takes the YouTube videos from a YouTube feed and puts them on your sidebar. So if you have a YouTube channel and want the latest videos from it on your blog automatically, this will achieve it. Added a Google translation widget, this widget allows your visitors to change your content to another language via a drop down menu, I’ve associated this into the Google analytics code built into Stallion, so you can track language translations as well.
Also working on a better author box, got the code to allow users to add more things to their author page (your profile page). WordPress core has email, website, AIM and a few other options I don’t think anyone uses.
Can add Twitter Username Facebook Username Google Buzz Username LinkedIn Username Flickr Username Youtube Username Pintrest Username etc…
Just have to incorporate the code into the Stallion author box so you can link to those external sites above.
So now I have the SEO pretty much done and dusted I’m working on the user experience.
No time frame for the next Stallion update (planned to have it done at the start of the year!), having some health problems that’s making it difficult to work for long periods of time, so a lot of stuff is on hold unfortunately until I feel better.
Really sucks as have a lot of new features in the works, though not looked at cloaking for other plugins. If the Amazon plugin uses nofollow links (most plugins do use nofollow) the Stallion link cloaking will work with no additional changes as it can convert all nofollow links to Stallion cloaked links already.
What is autoblogging on autopilot?
Ahh, I’ve been discussing SEO with you with a general belief you were advising standard auto blog techniques. When someone creates an autoblog product and mentions auto blog and autopilot I tend to think they are doing the following.
Register a domain
Install WordPress
Install an auto blog plugin (WP Robot would be my choice)
Install a handful of plugins to support the site automatically, auto tweeting, auto RSS syndication, auto backlinks sort of stuff
Generally leave the site alone and work on backlinks and the next autoblog
That’s standard autoblogging, I take it that’s not what you advise in your Auto Blog Blueprint Course?
I can setup a blog like that in under 2 hours (could get it down to under an hour with a bit more thought and most of that time would be link building) which means I could easily build a few a day (and these would be fully SEO’d autoblogs) IF that’s all I wanted to do. Could build a ‘unique’ (unique settings) autoblog in 30 minutes if I skip the manual link building and relied on RSS syndication backlinks (all auto backlinks).
This autoblogging technique does work IF you build hundreds of blogs this way, but it would make a for a very boring way to make money online especially as you are lucky to have an autoblog that is 100% automated rank well for over a year, so you have to keep replacing the banned ones! Even a banned autoblog should make over 20 cents a day, so an absolute worst case scenario from an auto blog plan like this would be around $70 per domain per year. Less than $10 a year registration, $10 a year hosting and worse case scenario is $50 profit per domain per year. 1,000 autoblogs and you have $50,000 a year profit.
At 2 hours per domain working 8 hours a day you can build this sort of setup in well under a year. These are not pie in the sky numbers and is a worst case scenario for a person with few skills, but the right setup, many autoblogs will earn far more than $50 profit a year, so you can build an autoblog network that makes tens of thousands of dollars a year with far fewer than 1,000 domains, then there’s sub-domains that can make the setup cheaper, but makes it easier for search engines to find all autoblogs under a domain.
I’ve tested the above and it works today, but I have no interest in spending my days autoblogging that way (would make for a really boring life!).
If I were going to use autoblogs as a major part of my make money online strategy I’d do the following.
Set them up as above, but I’d keep the amount of scraped content to a minimum (wouldn’t post 100s of posts per day), a post or two per day per autoblog so I could keep an eye on what’s posted and go in later and edit the content and delete any posts I don’t like. Would also keep an eye on SERPs and further edit/optimise autoblogged content that are ranking so they become unique and won’t be banned long term. If a domain was doing particularly well I’d stop autoblogging and only add relatively unique content (not hard to rewrite affiliate content) so long term the domains though started as autoblogs become ‘normal’ sites.
A site a bit like UK Local and General Election Debate which started as a set of copied political party manifesto pledges (I manually copied them as there wasn’t usable RSS feeds) and when the site started to get popular I added unique search engine optimised posts that generated a lot more interest. In the 2010 UK general election that was one of the top UK political sites, it received so much traffic I had to upgrade dedicated servers three times and it still brought the fastest server the dedicated server company supplied to it’s knees on election day (estimate 1/4 million visitors in one day, lost a lot of log data because the server was running like it was under a DOS attack!).
This is not what I consider autoblogging per se (it’s not very automated), it’s finding ways to start sites off and when they start to rank well take them more seriously.
Is this the sort of make money from blogging techniques you advise in your Auto Blog Blueprint Course? Would explain why you only have 140 ‘autoblogs’ which is low for a long term dedicated autoblogger who has their autoblogs on true auto pilot.
David
I don’t really refer to it as auto blogging to my members anymore. Now I call it Blogging on auto or even Semi automatic blogging. I use a lot of unique content in my blogs and the only reason I have as many blogs as I do is from years of work.
I create blogs, test, see what works, build again, test, rinse, repeat. Google makes changes, I make more blogs to test, then make adjustments, move ahead.
This is all why I have now got my Auto Blog Blueprint Course on Version 3.0 after about 20 months now. Google changes, the web changes, and I change to adapt to these changes. I build for money and conversions. I do a tremendous about of niche research so I am building blogs which have a high probability of making me money. I strike out once and awhile, but for the most part I don’t anymore. I can see a profitable niche most of the time now without even seeing all the stats. I have been doing this so long now I can just see it.
I don’t do your standard auto blogging though and I laugh at most of the push button programs out there. My members are believers too. It doesn’t take long to see the system works. There is nothing magical about it. It is just a systematic approach to building profitable blogs that run on auto.
I actually tell my members that they should be able to make $5000 per month on auto with 20-25 blogs (niche dependent). The system was built more like running regular blogs with automation thrown in.
Mike
So Mike,
Do you care to explain the name of your product? Cause I’m really confuse now.
Mi definition of “autopilot” doesn’t involve “work on it in a day/week/monthly base”
Are you aware of the meaning of the word “Auto”?
To setup your blogs on Auto, you need to establish a base that Google will recognize as solid Authoritative content when they are initially indexing your site. Google will classify your site and determine a lot about how they will categorize your site, etc., right from the beginning.
Setting up your SEO and linking structures right away will help create a base for the long term profitability of your Blog. Without it, you can go ahead and just post a ton of automated content with any of the Auto Blogging plugins that are out there, but in 2-3 months, your blog will get slapped by Google and you will be done.
2 years ago you could auto blog without a care in the world, now you have to be a little smarter because Google has gotten a whole lot smarter.
Success isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. Telling people they have to work to make money always scares them because most people looking for success online are looking for a get rich quick scheme anyway and there are not too many of them left that actually work.
Mike
Hi Dave,
I have a problem on Massive Passive Profits autoblog. It pulls content to the blog which has nothing to do with the keywords, title I set for my blog in the campaign section. I have no idea how to fix that. I tried to put the keywords into ” ” so it would search for that term only, but the program does not accept it. I modified the keywords to be very specific to that site, but still pulling not related stuff, mostly from YouTube. You can see it on my site.
Did you run into this problem on your sites using Massive Passive Profit? How did you solve it?
Thanks for your help!
Gabor
Ps. Caleb did great job on the banners I got! Very nice work!
That’s normal with autoblogs, how bad depends on your keyword choice and how the autoblog plugin decides what the content is about.
Choose a keyword you think would generate relevant content, but there’s always going to be articles etc… that you won’t think is relevant. More specific you are with the keywords, less content available to scrape :-)
YouTube is particularly bad, people who upload videos to YouTube use unrelated keywords (tags) all the time.
Not a lot you can do about it in my experience beyond being careful with your keywords.
David
Hi Dave,
Thanks a for the help, I may just skip you tube from the sites.
Regards,
Gabor
I’ve been making sites with automated content before I even knew WordPress existed (over 7 years). Started with Amazon affiliate sites that were true 100% automated using an Amazon store script. Took an hour or two to setup, add some links and pretty much forget about them (made some easy money from them for a few years).
About 5 years ago Google cracked down on thin affiliate sites and my thin affiliate sites were all seriously downgraded in Google (never liked that sort of site so only had 20 of them, let most of them expire).
Since then every year or so I’ll test out new ideas for true auto blogging mainly because I like testing things (auto blogging doesn’t excite me, so won’t get into it in a big way). I’ve tested all sorts of ideas that revolve around keeping thin affiliate footprints to an absolute minimum and no matter what you do, 100% autoblogging does not work long term.
When I say does not work I mean if you take one domain, add a real autoblog to it (where the content is ALL automated) and all you do to that domain is work on backlinks (difficult to automate decent backlinks) and basic maintenance (upgrading WordPress, plugins etc…) medium term that domain will be downgraded in Google. Best I’ve got out of an autoblogged domain before it’s downgraded is about 2 years (and counting), but most are downgraded well before the 2 year mark.
For those into autoblogging in a big way, creating hundreds of autoblogs having an autoblog that makes a profit for a year is a success, but it is a full time job replacing banned domains. So even if you develop a true autoblog strategy it’s not build 100 domains on autopilot and forget about them as the millions poor in, as they are banned they need replacing, new backlinks building etc…
As JP has touched on what you’ve talked about Mike is not autoblogging per se, it’s not automated or on autopilot. You may well use duplicated content, RSS feeds, affiliate data-feeds etc… but you are spending a significant amount of time manipulating that content manually so it’s not recognised as duplicate/thin content. I’ve got a site like that with over 10,000 visitors a day, it’s not and has never been an auto blog.
Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not autoblogging on autopilot, it’s not a setup and forget strategy (which is the definition of auto blog/autopilot). I’d call it making money online with blogs or even making money online with WordPress which it sounds like what your Auto Blog Blueprint Course is about.
BTW Mike I’ve build a WordPress SEO Plugin that achieves the equivalent of noindex (like you get with the popular WordPress SEO Plugins) but it doesn’t waste/delete link benefit, actually redirects the link benefit back to the home page. Will be releasing it for free in June.
See Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin for details, hopefully those who are damaging their sites SEO using WordPress SEO Plugins like the Yoast SEO Plugin (awful SEO plugin because of the nofollow and noindex parts!!!) will switch to mine.
David
My system does allow the users to run their blogs on Autopilot and it is a true auto blogging system. It is the setup of each blog that is not.
Mike
In my experience and many others true autoblogs are banned by Google long term, you are lucky to have one last more than a year.
I don’t consider a site an autoblog if you’ve manually rewritten most of the content or a significant amount of the content is unique.
I’ve got sites with not completely unique content that are doing well, pretty easy to take non-copyright content and reorganise it so it’s not easily recognised as duplicate content: would take a manually review and even then if you add extra value not in the original it seems to be acceptable by Google (important not to infringe copyright). Not easy to automate this process though, so not an autoblog/autopilot solution to generating content (all my sites with that type of content have taken a fair amount of effort to rewrite/reorganise).
Even when you take a unique content site and start autoblogging, it will be penalised in Google long term.
I just can’t see how long term (long term would be 3+ years consistently) anyone can keep an autoblog/autopilot site pulling in reasonable amounts of traffic from Google.
Autoblog/autopiolt would generally mean a site that new content is added on a regular basis (at least hundreds of articles a year) with little to no input from the site owner. For example if you had a site with say 50 unique articles that was ranking OK, if you turn it into an autoblog on autopilot and say a year later it’s at 1,000 articles (950 automatically added, not unique) it’s not going to last long in Google (if it keeps it’s traffic for over a year you’ve done well IME).
Can your Auto Blog Blueprint Course take a 50 unique article site to 1,000 articles on autopilot and keep it ranked well in Google for 3+ years consistently (consistently would be if you took 10 such sites, 7 would still be ranked well 3+ years later)?
If you can’t achieve this you haven’t cracked autoblogging.
David
Obviously you haven’t been listening to me. The answer is Yes. I have over 140 auto blogs and over 70 of those are over 3 years old and another 50 range in age from 8 months to 2 years old. I have around 20 I have made in the last 8 months, but I haven’t built a new auto blog in 2 months. Mainly because at $46,500 in April and closing in on the same figure for May, I would say I don’t really worry about it because most of them I haven’t touched in over a year outside of having my outsourcers run upgrades and clean ups.
I am on the 3rd iteration of the Auto Blog Blueprint in the last 20 months. I am pretty sure I am not just trying to get this figured out and I am not using unique content after the first 10 posts on each blog.
I rank #1 for thousands of keywords.
I even have 2 really crappy test sites that I haven’t done good SEO on or updated with decent content in over 18 months that are still ranking #1 for high competition keywords.
Look in Google at the Number #1 listing for “Harley Davidson Auctions” and “Nutritional Supplement Reviews” and you will find 2 crappy Auto Blogs sitting at number #1. They are mine. Hogwildauctions.com and NutritionalSupplementReviews.net.
These are just crappy test sites I don’t even care about and I am dominating. How do you think I am doing with sites that are actually built right?
Mike
The two SERPs examples “Harley Davidson Auctions” and “Nutritional Supplement Reviews” are not what I’d call hard SERPs, especially not for a home page SERP. They are long tail SERPs and so not good example SERPs to show autoblogs do well long term. Even downgraded autoblogs can generate traffic from long tail SERPs.
Looking through the top ten Google results shows:
Harley Davidson Auctions SERP, all ten results are for PR0 and PR1 pages. Only three of the pages are home page results. Not exactly a highly competitive SERP.
Nutritional Supplement Reviews SERP, most of the ten results are for PR2 and less pages. Seven of the pages are home page results, but only two of those appear to specifically targeting the Nutritional Supplement Reviews SERP on the home page. More competition than the Harley Davidson SERP, but not hard SERPs.
These are not hard SERPs with a lot of competition.
The results do suggest those two domains are not banned yet, difficult to say if they are downgraded you really have to look at overall traffic relative to the niche, how many pages indexed etc… relative to overall traffic.
The Harley Davidson domain was a dropped domain and looks like you backdated some of the posts to at least 2006. Looks like it’s around 2 years old (March 2009 maybe)?
The Nutritional Supplement Reviews domain is just over 2 years old.
I’d be much more interested to hear what sort of traffic these two domains pull in considering the Harley Davidson domain has over 1,200 pages indexed and the Nutritional Supplement Reviews domain has over 7,300 pages indexed. If these are well ranked domains they should gain quite a bit of traffic from all that indexed content? The Alexa rankings (which are far from accurate) suggest relatively low traffic numbers for so much indexed content.
Maybe we look on success in a different way. I’m comparing to what I’d expect from the same content if it were unique (not thin content). If you have a 7,000 page site and you’ve worked on backlinks etc… you might expect it to pull in a fair amount of traffic, actual amount is very much dependent on the niche etc… but if it’s under 100 visitors a day it’s probably downgraded in Google.
I have a thin computer affiliate store that last month generated 3,000 unique visitors (4,200 visits according to Awstats). That wouldn’t be a bad traffic figure for a small site, but there’s 12,000 pages indexed in Google. It’s generating traffic from the sorts of SERPs you used as examples above. If a sites got thousands of pages of unique content it should be generating thousands of visits a day. Autoblogs have thousands of pages, but they tend not to generate thousands of visitors a day long term because Google downgrades them.
Just to confirm the money you make from your sites, it doesn’t include sales of your Auto Blog Blueprint Course right? Really irritating when Internet marketers show their earnings to sell a product and a lot of the money is from selling the product that’s supposed to make the purchaser the money.
David
David,
I am sorry but you are way off base on quite a few points here. I had thought previously that you actually knew a little about SEO and Niche SEO Marketing, but it is obvious that you don’t. This is not a slam, but an observation made due to several glaring mistakes you have made in your comments above.
First off, you missed the point on listing those 2 sites entirely. Read my Comments again. These 2 sites are examples of Crap sites that I am not trying to make money with, nor do I do any SEO on them, nor do I actively build backlinks to them. They are test sites I randomly add different things to, but for the most part, neither site has had anything done to it for a very long time.
The point is, that even though these sites are complete and utter crap, they still rank #1 for their chosen Niches and this is the goal of every Auto Blogger. So if you chose to use my Auto Blog Blueprint system instead of following the bad example of these sites, you could make a ton of money using the Long Tail Keywords these sites would spawn.
You said that these are long tail keyword sites that wouldn’t be good for Auto Blogs.
Why?
You said these are in Low and Medium Competition Niches.
Yep. Of course.
You have to understand Niche SEO Marketing to understand this and obviously you do not. With an Auto Blog you want a 2 or 3 keyword domain which is in a Medium to Low Competition Niche that also allows you to create even more Long Tail Keywords from it with the Titles and Contents of your Blog Posts that are automatically generated.
You said these are not good Auto Blog Domains. I say you are flat out crazy. I make over $500 per month from each of these blogs (from Ebay and Amazon, and some CJ.com) and I do nothing with them and they are crap. Imagine if I put even a little effort into them?
When picking a Niche for Auto Blogging, we want Keywords that are Marketable and allow us to publish a medium to large amount of content which uses the Primary and Related Keywords of the Domain. Why would we pick a high competition set of keywords when all we have to do is look at Low and Medium Competition Keywords which also get a median amount of traffic starting at around 900 to 1000 visitors per month and up. That way we can rank in the top 3 results for our chosen keywords and make money right away and in a lot of cases not even have to build many backlinks to succeed and profit. Going for a high competition niche set of keywords is just plain stupid if you want to be able to make a lot of money fast. Sure, you could work on 3-4 sites for several months with a lot of unique content, build a lot of backlinks, and maybe, just maybe you will squeeze out a high competition ranking and make some money, but why would you when you can dominate tons of low competition niches that can get you similar traffic and targeted profits. People who search long tail convert faster than any general single word browser.
It is called, “Work Smarter, not Harder!”
Another problem you have here is you actually use AWStats. Anyone who does Marketing knows that AWStats adds in all types of additional Bot visits which skew your results. For real stats you need to use tools like Clicky or Google Anaylytics which tell you the real story. If you are giving your visitors here to this site AWStats numbers to validate your success than you better take a second look. Good SEO might give you 5000 AWStats visitors a month, but most of those visits are going to be Bot visits from Search Engine Spiders and not real Visitors. This is SEO Marketing 101.
The profits I list here and elsewhere are strictly for my Auto Blogs and I am not adding in my Profits from the sales of the Auto Blog Blueprint, which are actually less than what I make with my Auto Blogs themselves.
I appreciate your Technical SEO knowledge here David, but you have a lot to learn about the actual application of that knowledge.
Mike
You completely missed my point, I asked whether our views of SEO success are different for a reason, I’ve had similar discussions where I’ll be saying that’s not a good result because my measure of SEO success is different to whoever I was discussing SEO with. Your two example sites (and I appreciate they are not your best examples) don’t look like high traffic sites and your last comment seems to suggest I’m right if you are saying an autoblog like those tend to receive around 1,000 visitors a month long term.
If those domains tend to receive around 1,000 visitors a month they are not doing well in the search engines (1,000 visitors a month to a domain with so many indexed pages isn’t a lot of search engine traffic). Remember I am talking search engine optimization only, not conversions, if a site can convert 100 visitors a month into a reasonable amount of cash that’s a good site to own. I do own Google penalised sites that turn a profit.
1,000 visitors a month for a domain with 7,000 plus pages indexed is not doing well SEO wise, I would expect a lot more traffic if it wasn’t downgraded. This is the sort of traffic levels I’ve seen on my test autoblogs (remember I don’t build many autoblogs, not my thing) long term, but they are downgraded in Google (they should be doing much better). I’ve never said the autoblogs I’ve tested receive no traffic, I’ve stated in my autoblog tests long term they are all downgraded (downgraded is not the same as banned, banned would be no traffic from Google). A few thousand visitors a month (which I’m finding isn’t hard to achieve) to an autoblog domain with thousands of indexed pages is a downgraded autoblog in my experience (or a very low traffic niche : higher traffic niche autoblogs tend to be downgraded faster).
So it sounds like many of your autoblogs are downgraded relative to similar sites that aren’t autoblogs. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money from them, if you can convert 1,000 visitors a month to an autoblog and make $500 a month that’s a lot more money than I’ve made from similar levels of traffic on my downgraded autoblogs!
Example affiliate toy store that’s downgraded, all it’s SERPs are long tail (easy stuff), around 1,000 pages indexed, visitors over the past month ~1,000, revenue from AdSense around $20, product sales around $100 (commission ~$10).
Money wise rubbish to what you say you can make. I will add I don’t create affiliate sites to make money per se (they are not fully monetised, just AdSense and whatever affiliate the content covers), they are testing SEO autoblog concepts.
How much traffic do you think you get over your network of ~140 autoblogs a month to make over $40,000?
If you can on average make $500 on 1,000 visitors you’d only need about 80,000 visitors a month to make your $40,000. I get more traffic than that in two days, but don’t make anywhere near $40,000 from it. The domain you are on now receives around 10,000 visitors a month.
BTW going to move these comments to a new post about autoblogging when I get the time as most of it isn’t about WordPress SEO Plugins it’s related to your Auto Blog Blueprint Course.
David
David,
I missed one point in my Comments above. You mentioned that Google will downgrade the sites I listed above after awhile because they are auto blogs. If you use the Wayback Machine, you would see that these Blogs actually have gained ranking. They are both a little more than 2 years old and within the last 6 months and AFTER the Google Farmer and Panda Updates, they actually gained in Ranking and are sitting at Number #1 for their Target Keywords.
Explain that?
Mike
Once again: No.
The amount of traffic I am talking about when picking a set of Primary Keywords for your Domain is what I am talking about. Not all the traffic. I might have to just give you access to my Auto Blog Blueprint Course for Free because the big picture eludes you because you have a very defined idea of what you believe is the right way to do this. While some of it may work, it is not the only way.
When building an Auto Blog, the first thing I tell my members is that SEO starts when picking you Niche. You can start off with success by picking a Niche set of “Primary Keywords” which are the Identity words for your Blog. You pick this niche based on the the Traffic these Primary Keywords get (my minimums for members are 900-1000 visits per month for the #1 position in Google for those Keywords). We then look at the level of competition in several ways and determine if when using Advanced SEO Techniques alone it is possible to Rank for these Search Terms (Primary Keywords). Then we also look at whether or not those Keywords (the Niche) has the potential for Profitability based on available Affiliate Programs and other factors. Then we move forward to buying our Domain. This is the edited for television version.
The basis for this is that even if you don’t or can’t rank #1 for the Primary Keywords, more than likely you will be able to get on Page #1 because we do use Backlink Building techniques and other Social Media Marketing techniques as well (mostly all automated). With an Auto Blog, it really does not matter. Why? Because we are looking at all the traffic you can gain from the Long Tail traffic your Blog Posts will get because after we Identify our Primary Keywords, we then develop a list of Related Keywords (LSI) from which our Blog Posts will be based on. We use a bunch of other plugins and techniques to take advantage of these Keywords.
The end result: Tons of traffic from multiple search terms with varying degrees of traffic and in the end, one Auto Blog can end up Ranking #1 for a couple hundred Long Tail Search Terms.
The thing you keep saying over and over through your Posts here is that each Blog needs to get thousands and thousands of searches each month to determine success. That is not even close to true. How can you spell success for a site based on traffic when in reality each Search Term in Google and other search engines receive different levels of traffic?
One of my more profitable Auto Blogs only receives approximately 900 visits per month, but the Niche it is focused on is a heavy Buyer Niche which sells Big Ticket items. My visitor to conversion ratio is about 15% and since I make $200 per sale, I average between $1500 and $3000 per month on that Blog alone. It only has 85 posts on it and I only have my auto settings to post to it once every 5 weeks. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mainly because it is a small niche and you need to throttle your Auto Posting accordingly and not just post away like an idiot.
Like I said before, work smarter, not harder.
By doing effective research, you can do this and make a lot of money. I have Auto Blogs which get over 15,000 visitors a month and over 20 Comments per day because I build my sites to look and feel like a Blog, not an Auto Blog.
And what is this 7000 pages indexed thing? I don’t mass post and I tell my members not to mass post. I have another example site I show my members (a unique content blog) which averages 4 posts per month, but because they are targeted and I build a nice amount of backlinks to the site, I make between $4000 and $5000 per month with that site (and no, this is not part of my Auto Blogging Profits stats). You only should post based on your Niche and the amount of available content for the niche. You find this out via always having a Private, No Index, No Follow Test Blog. By throttling how often you post based on content availability, you keep your quality level high, you Keywords targeted, and your success rate higher.
You seem to have a predefined idea of what auto blogging is and spamming search engines worked a few years ago, it doesn’t anymore.
Once again, I know what downgraded means. I have actually had most of my sites move up in the ranks after Google cleaned things up here with Panda and Farmer. I have had numerous Members post #1 Ranking results for their blogs in my Member Only Forum and this is due to the Advanced SEO and other techniques we use. I have yet to have any Rankings downgraded but for 2 or 3 old junk blogs I had. I don’t think my Blogs would be sitting at #1 for their search terms if they were being downgraded. There is enough competition there that if they were, it would be blatantly obvious, don’t you think?
One last thing. I don’t use Adsense. I have it on a few blogs here and there, but mostly I don’t use it. Why? Targeting. You need ot do the targeting in your Monetization. Why let Google do that for you? They make more money from it then you do and the Adwords Partner gets all the Profits for the sale. As an Affiliate you make a lot more money.
You need to learn a lot about using SEO and Marketing together. What are 80,000 visits a month if you can’t convert the traffic into Profits? I could create a ton of Information style blogs and rake in tons of traffic too if that was my goal, but my goal is to make money.
Plus, you are using AWStats so your traffic numbers are way off anyways. You have been running around here quoting high traffic numbers and most of them are Bot visits. That is probably the number #1 reason why you think you get 70,000 visitors to a single site and it doesn’t convert as high as the traffic would suggest. I always look to get at least 2-3% Conversions on my traffic. if I don’t, then I try to change things up to help boost conversions. It is called Split Testing and yes, you can do it on Auto Blogs, but you actually need to use REAL stats to figure this out.
I keep stats on all my sites and I get a little over 750,000 visitors each month to all my sites. This is a baseline and it goes up and down based on the time of year. It is a 5000+ visitor per month average and each site is different based on the niche. Some do great, others do good, and some do average. It is the nature of Niche SEO Marketing. I don’t need 80,000 visitors a month to make over $40,000 each month because I don’t go after High Competition Niches.
I go after profits.
Mike
You still don’t get what I mean, if you listen you might make even more money and if I take your earnings on face value I might have something to learn from you about monetizing search engine traffic.
Either you aren’t SEO’ing your domains very well or they are downgraded (or most likely a combination). All because a domain is improving over time does not mean it isn’t carrying a Google penalty, I had a site drop from over 10,000 visitors a day to 2,000, it was a clear penalty, but most people would consider 2,000 visitors a day a successful site (I knew it should do better). Had that site never got it’s great rankings and always stayed around the 2,000 visitor a day mark I’d have not known for sure it was penalized. Based on what you’ve said I suspect many of your autoblogs are downgraded, and if you are making $40K from them a month you are very good at monetising them.
If I’m right there’s not a lot you can do about it (unless it’s only better SEO needed) since a penalized autoblog is highly unlikely to ever have it’s penalty lifted. You don’t hide the affiliate fingerprints like linking to affiliate sites in a very easy to spot way, so maybe you could keep new ones from being downgraded as fast.
You can’t be arguing you have 140 autoblogs and NONE of them have been downgraded? I don’t care how good you are at SEO, hiding thin affiliate content fingerprints, monetizing traffic autoblogs are hated by Google and out of 140 autoblogs some will be downgraded. If you do believe none of your 140 auto blogs are downgraded you are the only autoblogger I’ve talked to not to admit some of their autoblogs are carrying Google penalties.
The visitor numbers I state are accurate (they are estimates, but reasonably accurate).
I don’t only use Awstats for traffic number estimates, for starters I don’t think there’s a way to track multiple sites using Awstats so to get my traffic estimates just through Awstats I’d have to look at stats for 90ish domains and add them altogether manually! I don’t have the time for that.
Awstats doesn’t count bots in with the visitor numbers, an example:
According to Awstats one of my sites received this number of visitors etc… in May.
Unique visitors 47,822
Number of visits 60,872
Pages 123,377
Hits 835,837
Googlebot 92,438
Other bots about 2,000
This is a test autoblog that I started about 10 months ago BTW.
If I used a number from Awstats for traffic I’d be referring to Unique visitors only. So if I say my sites receive between 50,000 and 60,000 unique visitors a day I mean real visitors, not bots. Been doing this long enough to know the difference.
For a quick network estimate I look at AdSense impressions (running on most of my sites) and estimate traffic numbers from that and this estimate does match up with the Awstat figures. With AdSense impressions you know they have to be real visitors (javascript turned on) and with ad blocking software these days could be an under estimate.
Anyway, what really sucks from this conversation is it looks like my ninety odd sites (got around 100 domains with about 90 with sites on) receives around double the traffic your 140 sites receive, but you make several times more money from the traffic than I do (that sucks). Your sites on average receive over 5,000 visitors a month, mine about 16,000 (conservative estimate). I don’t even make all my sites to generate loads of traffic, got one on Roman Festivals, you can imagine how little traffic and money that gets :-) Hmm, number 1 in Google for Rome Festivals and that’s a SERP that could be monetised for travel and I haven’t (had the site years).
Basically if we both take this information on face value (sorry, but a lot of people into Internet marketing lie about their online earnings) I do far better gaining traffic from search engines (traffic per domain 3 times higher) and you do far better converting traffic to cash (that really sucks you get half my traffic and make more money, did I mention that sucks :-)).
I’ve said many times on my sites about making money online I suck at fully monetising my search engine traffic, I have domains that make no money (jokes site for example currently at around 7,000 visitors a day and makes ZERO money), making money per se doesn’t excite me, I find the challenge of figuring out how to generate lots of traffic from Google far more interesting than just making money (yes, I’m an idiot, but a happy idiot :-)). I’ll have to take a look at your Auto Blog Blueprint Course when I have some free time see if there’s anything useful I might use.
To reiterate, either your domains aren’t SEO’d very well and/or the autoblogs are downgraded. When you’ve been doing search engine optimization as long as I have (10 years) you know when a site isn’t performing as well as it should and from the sounds of things yours aren’t. Most of my domains aren’t autoblogs or thin affiliate content (little risk of a Google penalty), relative to autoblogs my sites will have a fraction of the content. This means your network of 140 domains compared to my 90 odd domains will have many, many times more content pages indexed in Google (where I have a 50 page 100% unique content site, you have a 1,000+ page duplicate content autoblog). If your sites are reasonably well SEO’d with that amount of content you should be receiving several times more traffic than I do (should be millions of visitors a month). You can’t argue with the SEO logic, a site with 100 pages indexed relative to a site with 1,000 pages index, if everything else is equal the 1,000 page site should have more SERPs.
David
Mike if you are still following this post would like your opinion on an autoblog test site: (Update: deleted the site).
It’s running Stallion and WPRobot Autoblog Plugin default setup (setup a few basic campaigns, made no template changes, so pretty much out the box WPRobot).
Everything on the site is Stallion built in features and plugins Akismet and WP Super Cache.
The 125px wide ads (can be set to other pixel sizes) on the menu are a new Stallion feature, add up to 20 banner ads (they rotate) with the option to cloak affiliate links using the Stallion built in javascript/css cloaking code, meaning no wasted link benefit on affiliate banners.
You know how good WP Robot is as an autoblog plugin, Stallion fixes the SEO and thin affiliate footprint mistakes. All nofollow links (including links within comments) generated through WP Robot can be converted to javascript/css links, the Amazon buy now images can be changed and the location moved, take a look at ###### for an example.
Only thin affiliate/autoblog footprint left from WP Robot derived content is the actual text based content (that’s assuming the WP Robot setup is thought out, renamed the wprobt3 plugin folder, save images to server). should mean search engines will find it that much harder to find WP Robot autoblogs.
David
I don’t mean this how its sounds but there’s no other way to put it.
What you don’t suck at is SEO and monetization, but what you do suck at is the aesthetics of theme design. The site at dvd-video-store.info is just plain fugly; no other word for it. All the other themes you have produced, to the human eye, all fugly too. And if your other sites are based on them, I guess their fugly too.
I don’t doubt your expertise one little bit, when it comes to SEO, but you really suck at the aesthetics of good visual design.
Did I mention you really suck theme design aesthetics?… 8^)
P.S. Yeah, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that results are more important than looks, but that’s a cop-out. Why can’t you have both? You maybe then might find you’re better at monetization.
I can’t deny I’m not a web designer per se, I’ve not designed a WordPress theme look from scratch, original Stallion was based on a popular WordPress theme which I took the general look of and added to the WordPress SEO ad theme framework (the SEO and ad code behind the scenes). So you are knocking the theme designer whose WordPress theme I used as inspiration, not me :-)
In the Stallion update I made code changes to make it easier to create new designs, which is the next step. In principle a lot of WordPress theme designs can be imported into Stallion just adding a css file and relevant images (next stage : watch this space).
Although Stallion has lots of colour schemes they are based on the same general look, I’m currently looking for new ideas for the next set of Stallion designs. Been looking at Internet Marketers websites for design ideas and so far they all have bog standard designs generally along the lines of the Stallion Simple design with most of the interesting features being WordPress plugins** and a couple of unique images.
** I only use plugins and other code that doesn’t damage a sites SEO. For example there’s some really nice looking social network plugins that I’d like to use, BUT they use nofollow links that damage a sites SEO.
David
David,
I am not knocking you or the people who you took your original inspiration from, I am just trying to have you see my point of view. I would have, and would still, buy your theme, if it wasn’t so fugly. My immediate reaction, and it hasn’t changed over the months since I first saw it, is – I would have to spend a too much of my time getting it to look nice (since you got it to play nice), but I can’t then spend that time on driving traffic – which is what I want to do. And I am sure I am not alone.
Terence.
The big thing I think you get wrapped up in David is perfect On Site SEO. In my experience, the small details you are talking about make up a very small percentage of your actual ranking factors. Authority and Content will take precedence over coding issues or a few links with nofollow anyday.
I have numerous sites ranking well above their competitors because of a good combination of both Authority, Content, and on page/ on site SEO. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If it did, Google would end up having a lot of sites with crap content ranked number #1 ahead of sites with Great content because of this.
Consider the ranking factors and the power of each before worrying too much about a single plugin which uses nofollow. In the big scheme of things these are small factors which matter less (I am not saying they don’t matter at all) then what content and a strong External linking program will do for a site.
Just my 2 cents after seeing the exchange here.
Mike
Of course there’s a lot more to SEO than getting things right on the site/page, in fact off site SEO factors are more important than onsite SEO factors.
If a site has no decent backlinks (nothing more important than aged backlinks), resulting in a fair amount of link benefit flowing through a site it doesn’t matter how great your onsite SEO is because it’s only going to rank for the easiest of long-tail SERPs. In comparison a site with awful onsite SEO, but lots of decent aged backlinks can rank high just because of the aged backlinks (aged backlinks results in an authority site).
Basically a strong backlink strategy can make up for what you loose by not fully SEOing everything onsite, but if you have a strong backlink strategy and fully SEO’d it’s better than just a strong backlinks strategy.
WordPress themes in general do not increase a sites backlinks, there are plugins that can help, for example I’ve used the CopyFeed plugin which adds links to your RSS feeds, when autobloggers use your feeds to create sites you gain free backlinks links.
Do a Google search for 6a1bca1906e697d83e6b6242198d3b22 and it shows sites that are copying the RSS feed from a jokes site of mine, that’s free backlinks, they are going to scrape my RSS feed anyway, now I get a handful of links for each post they scrape.
Even then the plugins that generate backlinks tend to be of low quality, for SEO success a lot of your time is going to be spent gaining backlinks, not SEOing content etc… that sort of free backlink isn’t going to get a site ranked high for hard SERPs. Might be OK on an autoblog with loads of content, all depends what you consider successful : a domain that costs under $50 a year to maintain etc… is a profitable domain if it makes $200 a year say.
Although a major feature of Stallion is protecting wasted link benefit by removing nofollow links and making it easy to cloak affiliate links etc.. (which for an autoblog is a must do to hide autoblog footprints). Stallion does a lot more than save link benefit.
Have you installed Stallion on a test site Mike? If you haven’t you won’t have seen all the SEO and other features. There are hundreds of options not including some of the plugin like features built into Stallion (they aren’t all SEO options).
Example of the built in Stallion SEO you won’t get with any other WordPress theme.
Do a Google search for
Autoblog Blueprint Course
Autoblog Blueprint Course Review
You will find one of my comments here in the top 10 for both SERPs.
I’m not targeting your Auto Blog Blueprint Course SERPs via articles as an affiliate (if I was I’d write stand alone articles), yet because of the inbuilt SEO of Stallion I’m competing for some of your long-tail SERPs during a comment based conversation I’m enjoying. That’s thanks to a combination of WordPress plugins and code snippets I’ve pulled together to form the Stallion SEO theme.
I’ve given this comment a title “Stallion Onsite WordPress SEO vs Off Site WordPress SEO” a very long-tail SERP that this site currently doesn’t rank top 10 in Google for. There’s a good chance after the Stallion SEO Super Comments Page for this comment is indexed by Google (via the link bottom right on this comment) it will be number 1 for this phrase. This is almost free organic Google traffic, I’d be writing this comment anyway, but because it’s going to form a Stallion SEO Super Comment I’ve gone to a little bit more effort to give it an SEO’d title and a little SEO through the content. No other WordPress theme does anything similar to this.
Then there’s the WP Robot Autoblog Plugin Features added to Stallion, that should be right up your street. Stallion hides the autoblog footprints associated with WP Robot usage and SEO’d some of the content (cloaks affiliate links, saving link benefit). Do you use WP Robot, I’m sure you must be recommending it in your course, it’s the best autoblog plugin around?
Assuming you are working on backlinks, why would you not want your on site SEO to be as close to 100% SEO’d as possible so it fully utilizes all your hard earned link benefit? I just don’t get why you’d waste link benefit and not add more SEO when there’s a theme like Stallion that’s designed for Internet Marketers, autobloggers etc…
The only good reason I can think of is not SEOing everything results in making more money (I don’t understand why better SEO would = less money?). If that’s the case, fine, don’t fully SEO everything. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want both (that’s what I’m aiming for)?
David
David,
I don’t disagree with you at all. I was only commenting on the fact that you seem to worry too much about SEO when making a site look good or adding functionality might take away from SEO, but in a lot of cases, functionality and Appearance go a long ways toward sales. Sales are the end result everyone wants.
I agree, if I can have a site with Perfect SEO and have a perfect Off Site SEO package as well, I would be one happy camper.
I might have to talk to you about getting this theme into my new project. The WPRobot integration is really a great feature, especially with the way Google is treating these sites now.
Mike
Yep I take the SEO side of WordPress seriously, SEO is my business and it doesn’t feel right not to get 100% SEO into a website. I’m very happy with the SEO aspects of Stallion now, I don’t think there’s much more to add SEO wise (maybe ability to manipulate title elements and meta description tags better, but they are minor issues and covered by plugins adequately). Now it’s time to focus on aesthetics and interesting features.
So what you are experiencing in the comments is my attempt to try to educate others to how I understand SEO. In some respects it’s frustrating, the majority of people who would benefit from using Stallion don’t understand enough about SEO to know they’d benefit!
When you have the webmaster forums etc… still advising SEO techniques that are long dead like using meta keywords tags and submitting sites to search engines for example (total waste of time) trying to explain the sidebar headings of my SEO themes for over 5 years have been SEO’d by NOT using H2/H3 headings that even today the vast majority if WordPress themes use as sidebar headings.
Or even though the title of the site (the home page link at the top using the blog name as anchor text) in the header area of a site running Stallion (all my SEO themes) looks the same size on every page, but it’s actually a H1 heading on the home page, dated archives and the 404 error page, but on the rest of the site it’s within a span tag (no SEO value in a span tag, it’s SEO neutral) that’s styled to look the same size etc… as the H1 heading .
The SEO benefit of this is SEO 101, you only use a H1 heading for the SERPs you are targeting on THAT page, the home page is likely to be targeting the title of the site, but the categories and individual posts aren’t, their H1 heading should be the name of the category, tag, search results, name of the post/page (which is the case on my SEO themes).
With most WordPress themes you’ll find the H1 heading holds the home page link within the header (every page gets the same H1 heading) and the title of categories, individual posts etc… use a H2 heading. This is basic SEO 101 and was the first things I fixed in the WordPress themes I used when I started using WordPress over 5 years ago.
A WordPress SEO theme that doesn’t achieve these very basic SEO goals (very easy to do) are not WordPress SEO themes.
Now you all feel sorry for me because I’m so misunderstood :-)
Profit Focused Marketing Course
Had a read of the comments on your new profit.fm site, sounds interesting, not enough info to understand exactly what you have planned.
Are you trying to pull everything together you need to run a successful WordPress site into one package? So rather than just covering autoblogging, everything.
That’s what I’m trying to achieve with Stallion to a degree (not covering absolutely EVERYTHING, that would be a massive project) with the Stallion theme the core that I add to with updates and free plugins (some built directly into Stallion, others recommended) and the best premium plugins for achieving specific things (like Wp Robot for autoblogging).
Definitely interested in what you are working on, great to have some feature requests I can add to Stallion in the future to work with what you have planned.
David
David,
You’re not misunderstood. You misunderstand!
You tend to see everything like its a science and forget that there are humans involved; which makes it more of a black art. I guess I can see why you relate to the mathematical needs of the search engines (its easier), but don’t forget, humans have needs too.
What good is a website which uncannily draws in the traffic via the search engines, if when they get there, there first reaction is – ugh! SEO without a welcoming, easily understood, clean, modern theme design is somewhat pointless, don’t you think? They both go hand in hand.
And I guess the majority of your customers are not developers, or they would create their own themes. So how many more customers would there be if you stopped designing the look and feel (and brought in an expert), and stuck to doing what you are expert in?
Just my two cents, but I think you would have a much greater success if Stallion Theme (horrible name too by the way – what have horses got to do with it?), was designed to look as attractive is it works underneath.
Terence.
You aren’t wrong about the Stallion design in 2011 since if you don’t like it, you don’t like: it’s subjective, you can’t be wrong in what you like/don’t like :-)
Others like the main Stallion design (the colours) which is based on Talian (the original Talian 1 was a very popular theme a few years ago), I have to admit when I first started working on the Talian colour scheme I didn’t like it, but it grew on me and it was the most popular design I sold on the site.
SEO wise Stallion is going to be very difficult to improve upon and any new SEO features are going to add minor SEO improvements: though I said this when I created Talian 5 and Stallion 6 has some significant SEO upgrades :-)
In an update I worked on layouts: the sidebar location Stallion went from a double 200px wide layout only to covering all the basic layouts possible, other than adding sidebars within sidebars not much else I can improve there.
Worked on custom ad options: on top of widget locations strategically placed through out the theme allowing the addition of ads and other widgets almost anywhere there’s two easy to use custom ad widgets. I’m using both custom ad types on this site, they are the 125px by 125px ads and the large Stallion banner at the bottom of the right menu.
Also made a start on improving the aesthetic appeal of Stallion sites, added the TwentyEleven header system. My version is better than the original, both SEO wise and user wise, with TwentyEleven and other themes based on TwentyEleven you are limited to the theme developers images and one more image you add. In Stallion there are image sets, and custom slots for 10 of your own packages (up to 80 more images). Like with TwentyEleven you can associate an image with a post and have it show in the header.
Added two image based navigation menus, one that’s used with a thumbnail feature I added that gives you a featured post slider.
I’m concentrating mostly on the user experience. So far added new colour schemes.
Added a YouTube widget, this takes the YouTube videos from a YouTube feed and puts them on your sidebar. So if you have a YouTube channel and want the latest videos from it on your blog automatically, this will achieve it. Added a Google translation widget, this widget allows your visitors to change your content to another language via a drop down menu, I’ve associated this into the Google analytics code built into Stallion, so you can track language translations as well.
Also working on a better author box, got the code to allow users to add more things to their author page (your profile page). WordPress core has email, website, AIM and a few other options I don’t think anyone uses.
Can add
Twitter Username
Facebook Username
Google Buzz Username
LinkedIn Username
Flickr Username
Youtube Username
Pintrest Username
etc…
Just have to incorporate the code into the Stallion author box so you can link to those external sites above.
So now I have the SEO pretty much done and dusted I’m working on the user experience.
David
Hi David,
Any date yet for the next Stallion update? Im also wondering if you will be integrating cloaking for any of the other Amazon autoblog plugins.
No time frame for the next Stallion update (planned to have it done at the start of the year!), having some health problems that’s making it difficult to work for long periods of time, so a lot of stuff is on hold unfortunately until I feel better.
Really sucks as have a lot of new features in the works, though not looked at cloaking for other plugins. If the Amazon plugin uses nofollow links (most plugins do use nofollow) the Stallion link cloaking will work with no additional changes as it can convert all nofollow links to Stallion cloaked links already.
David
Hi David,
Very sorry to hear about your health issues, and hope you will soon feel better. Thanks for the SEO tip about the nofollow cloaking.
By the way, I think Stallion is a fantastic theme with an incredible number of SEO features, and am really enjoying using it.
Daniel