How Do You Identify Pages That Google Doesn’t Like?

For most people it’s common sense, we all have pages on our sites that are very thin on content whilst at the same time being perhaps heavy on links? I know some bloggers are very fond of creating summary posts that link out to dozens of articles on other blogs. These are great for getting people to look at your blog with the added bonus of maybe a link back. However unless you are writing a solid 150+ words about each link Google isn’t going to like it. There is a ratio of unique content to outbound links that needs to be kept to in most cases.

The simplest check I do to see the status of a page is to check its page rank. If it’s been around for a while and still shows as Unranked (not zero) then I take it as given that Google is finding a problem with that page. The next think is to look at the most recent cache date. If it’s more than a week or 10 days old then again I can see it’s not seen with much regard by the big G. Finally I look at its index status. If it doesn’t appear under the pages listed with a site:www.website.com query then that’s very bad. Even if it appears as indexed it may not appear under the site:www.website.com/& listing which strongly suggests it’s being treated as a second class citizen. These techniques along with a good old fashioned hunch are enough to identify the pages that are dragging down your whole website.

How To Deal With Problem Pages

The best solution is to add more content to the page. If you can add enough good quality unique content to a page then there’s every chance Google will treat it with more respect. However there are times when this just isn’t possible or practical.

Can’t I Just Delete The Page?
You could but there’s a chance you could be creating orphan pages in the process. I know it’s rare with modern CMSs and sitemaps but in the good old days it was very easy to leave a page out there on its own, 100% wasted content. Even with WordPress and other CMSs deleting a page or post from your website isn’t a good idea, not only will you lose any link juice that may be associated with it but if your website starts returning a 401 error for that page Google will pick up on it. Bloody hell it’s like treading on egg shells!

The solution I’ve used to huge positive effect is to use the meta robots tag with noindex, follow. This instructs the search robots to not index the page (hey Google I know this aint the best and don’t want you to rank it) but still instructs them to follow any links from that page. In the last 2 months I’ve seen it make a massive difference, particularly on my older static sites that were having major problems post Panda. By not trying to pick up rankings with poorer pages I’ve pulled my good quality pages all the way back up.

How Do I Implement Noindex,Follow?

If you’re working with hand coded web pages then it’s simply a case of adding the meta tag similar to:-

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

If you’re working with WordPress then I’d suggest you get rid off All In One SEO and replace it with Platinum SEO, it’s still free but gives you the option of setting a robots meta tag for each page and post.

Linx Boss is so different to the usual linking methods out there. Services like Unique Article Wizard, Article Marketing Automation, Free Traffic System and My Article Network all require that you provide the content (either you write or outsource) in order to get the links. What starts of as a burst of writing activity can soon grind to a halt as you get bored re-writing the same stuff over and over. Linx Boss does away with this altogether. All it requires is that you specify the page you want links to go to, related categories and up to 4 search phrases to link to your page with (1 primary and up to 3 secondary phrases). That’s it! It literally takes no more than 2 minutes to get going. You sit back and watch your rankings increase…and that’s exactly what happens.

When I began my test of Linx Boss the Google Panda update was very much not in effect in the UK. My sites were still riding high and all was well with the world. You might think it was unfortunate that such a major Google update happened during a test but I think the one thing it shows is just how effective Linx Boss is. My rankings were improving pre Panda and they still continue to improve post Panda. Check out this screen shot for proof of just how well Linx Boss works:-

(Click For Bigger Version)

The bottom 3 results are all for a home page that has massive competition and has had nearly 2 and half months of the Linx Boss treatment. It is the only linking I have used on that website. Look at that one second from the bottom, using only Linx Boss I’ve ranked a page that doesn’t even contain the exact target phrase from nowhere to number 18 in 2 months, against 26 million competitors! The other phrases are for deep pages that I’ve added in recently but the upward movement is still very impressive. If you used this to snipe keywords with less competition you’d be on to an affiliate marketing winner in no time. This isn’t a one off either, I’ve seen similar results across all 5 of the websites I’m using Linx Boss with. Even on pages where I’m ranking 3-4 for my main target search the addition of Linx Boss has been enough to hit number 1 within 4-6 weeks. I can’t tell you just how refreshing it is to find something like this that does what it says. Not only that but does it with so little input from your end.

Of course there are a few restrictions with Linx Boss. First of all it is by no means cheap, $147 a month gets you a 5 domain subscription. This allows you to add 5 domains into the system, each domain can have unlimited pages added to target but you are given a maximum of 1000 links a month (200 per domain). You might think this isn’t a lot but the fact the results speak for themselves should be enough. You’ve got to keep in mind this system isn’t about huge numbers and Google penalties. Also, with even a little keyword research it’s not going to be hard to pull back $147 in income (one of my Clickbank accounts has gone from making $20-$30 a day to over $70 from the extra traffic from these rankings). If $147 a month seems like a lot of money you migt be best off staying well clear. It’s also worth noting that you can roll domains in and out at your leisure, you’re not stuck with the same 5 domains for the length of your membership.

The other restriction is in terms of quality. DO NOT try to add crap websites to the Linx Boss system. You need decent quality websites with original content. Your MFA scraped junk isn’t going to get accepted so don’t even waste your time. It isn’t some sort of miracle system, it works by pointing good quality links at good quality content. The owners are very proud of what they’ve built and I don’t blame them one bit for having high standards.

That’s about it really, Linx Boss is certainly the best $147 I spend each month and if you want to give it a go you can sign up here. Yes I get a commission if you do signup, but yes it still absolutely works. If you’re already using it I’d love to know what sort of results you’re getting?

ps I really wish I could have gone into more detail about how I use Linx Boss and how I’ve set things up but I’m sorry, it really is as simple as I say above. You literally add a URL, select some categories and chuck in your keywords. There is nothing more to it.

Edit:- I’ve had a couple of e-mails from people wanting to see more proof so here’s a screenshot of another of the websites I’m testing with Linx Boss, you’ll notice this one is going after higher value keywords but the level of success is just the same!

(Click For Bigger Version)

As you can roughly see from the screen shot above the number of searches my website is appearing in the search results for has increased. I know it doesn’t look much but if I take the last 5 days from before I took over to the last 5 days recorded the average daily figure increases from 140 impressions to 232, that’s about a 60% increase in the space of 2 and a half weeks. I haven’t done any link building and I’ve only added 1 page to the website. I think a 60% increase for those little changes is quite good? The amount of search traffic the site gets has increased as well but only by about 10-15% (I’m on target to hit just over 700 unique visitors this month), I haven’t had the time to go through and optimise all the page descriptions yet. Everytime I start it something else crops up and I only get a couple done. It is on my to do list this week before I take a weeks break so fingers crossed.

The other result from my changes has been that Google has now found more broken links. This comes from Google crawling more pages so I’ve got a list of about another 24 errors to go and fix, once that is done there should be some further improvement in the above stats.

Once I’ve got the foundations sorted out I can looking at a content posting schedule, some serious link building and decide on what I really want the site to be. On the positive side of things I’ve already had my fist Poker referral from the site who has made me £52.76 so far this month. A long way to go till the website is paying for itself but a pleasant surprise all the same.

Broken Links With Webmaster Tools

This is one of my favourites features of Googles Webmaster Tools. It allows you to see where somebody is linking to a page on your website that doesn’t exist. Those links can be both internal or external, either way though the links are pointing at something that is turfing out a 404 error. This is bad in 2 respects, first of all the search engines hate being pointed at content that no longer exists, it’s just about enough to stop them crawling the rest of your site. Certainly if you get a reputation and don’t have good inbound links expect very shallow crawling. The other downside is that I don’t know many users who stick around when presented with a 404 error. This is especially true if you don’t have a nice 404 error page that perhaps gives them some alternative pages. Page views are almost as important as unique visitors. When I checked on my new website there were literally hundreds of links pointing at pages that no longer existed.

The easiest way of dealing with this is to 301 redirect the missing page to one that does exist. Depending on how much time you have the ideal solution would be to redirect it to the “best fit” page on your site but if you’re in a rush then I’d just send them to the home page.

Once those 301 redirects are setup the search engines are happy and it’s no more error screen for potential visitors.

Outbound Links With WebCEO

Now we’ve sorted out the broken links pointing at us it’s time to sort out the broken links we’re pointing at other websites. In an ideal world we don’t want any links coming from our site pointing at content that isn’t there anymore. WebCEO can help with this. It has a cracking little Website Quality tool that flags up all sorts of problems with your website, from missing title tags to images without dimensions. The report we are interesting in is the “Broken External Links” report. When I checked I could see 13 broken external links – this is low. Kudos to the previous owner. To fix these it’s just a case of going back through the posts (WebCEO provides a list of pages that contain the broken link) and editing them. It could be the best 10 minutes you spend on your website this year

At this point we now have a nice solid linking platform on which to build new content. New content is great. However, if you’ve bought an old website don’t ignore the existing content. The new improved webmaster tools has a brilliant feature in the “Search queries” option. It allows you to see how many impressions your website is getting for a keyword compared to how many clicks it is getting. IF you see a search getting hundreds of impressions and no clicks I’m willing to make a bet with you. I bet you that the author didn’t write an optimised meta description tag. With WordPress and any number of SEO plugins it’s too easy to leave the description to autopilot. This is why your search result isn’t getting clicked! Your description is the same as your advert in Adwords, make it compelling and relevant. I know Google may ignore it sometimes but not giving them the option of an optimised description is just chucking traffic away in my book. So that’s my next job, it’ll take a while. No longer than keyword research, writing and link building new content though – and I suspect the results will be a little quicker. I’ll report back in a week or so with how I get on.

Jumping back to the more recent past and at the beginning of this year I decided to wade into another niche that I saw had potential for massive affiliate earnings. I had done all my research, bought a brilliant domain name and have to date spent close to $2000 on content for it. In other words it’s been a significant investment. There is very little in the way of advertising in place at the moment but the traffic stats I’m seeing show that the niche has some obvious potential (no I’m not going to share it). However things seem to have hit a plateau. There seems to be a limit to the competitiveness of the search terms that I can successfully rank for. I’m not getting anywhere with the real big hitters – I don’t mind, I expect this with any new project.

Are you still there, I guess this isn’t making much sense yet? This is where it does get interesting though. In the past 6 weeks I’ve started to use my 2003 domain, I started to just post random ramblings related to my other domains and linking back. After FIVE posts my domain sprung a PR2 on the Google PR checker. I’ve done no linking to it. I then wrote a keyword targeted article about my new niche and posted that to it, linking back to an article on my new website. See if you can guess which one is currently ranked number 2 in Google for the target search phrase and getting in excess of 600 unique visitors a day? Is it the new website, all about one general subject, cracking domain name, good link profile, loaded with unique quality content. Or is it the 1 article on my junk domain that was left with nothing but a WordPress welcome page and now contains a random selection of my brain farts? If it was the first then there wouldn’t be much point to this post

I’ve always been a firm believer in the sandbox effect, I never expect much from a new site for at least the first 12 months. You have to dig deep and carry on working on it in the belief that you will eventually get the rewards for your work. It’s clear to me now that Google really is heavily weighting the variables that can’t be played with in the latest incarnation of its algorithm – one of the hardest to manipulate has to be domain age so who can blame them? I should state that this 1 ranking isn’t exactly a lucky one-off either. Just about everything on that old domain does very well, so much so that I’ve now started using another old domain I had sitting around as well. It will be interesting to see if it works the same for sub domains.

There are 2 lessons here. One is that I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have registered domains from donkeys ago and have never done anything with them, if this is you then rather than leaving a holding page with some PPC ads on them you really should think about taking advantage of Google’s current weighting on domain age.

The other lesson is that you are seriously going to struggle to outrank an old domain with a new one. It might be best to start getting into the mindset of planning for what you want to build next year, or the year after now. At the very least register the domains and get a few miles under their asses.

I stopped recommending Free Traffic System when I noticed some large discrepencies on the content they’d accept from free members compared to the junk content they were pumping out to blogs. If you’re looking for a Free Traffic System Alternative then I’d recommend either Article Marketing Robot or Unique Article Wizard.

Article Marketing Robot costs a one of payment of $97 (5 day free trial available) and is only for Windows PCs. Whilst article submission doesn’t have the weight it used to it is still effective and I use it a lot. Article Marketing Robot in particular works extremely well in gaining large amounts of links from respected directories with ease. It’s also very nice to see a one off payment for a linking tool!

Unique Article Wizard is still effective post Panda, it’s still one of the best article syndication networks out there and a lot more affordable than most at $67 a month. Do not even try to compare UAW to My Article Network and Free Traffic System, it’s in a different league.

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I’ve tried a lot of “build back links and get traffic” systems in the past, it’s not very often I find one that actually works. It’s even less often I find one that works yet is 100% free. Free Traffic System is one such rarity!

Try The FREE Traffic System (For Free )

Would it surprise you to know that I’m currently spending over $250 a month just on testing backlink building services? The reason I do this is simple, if you can find one or two that really work for you then they are absolutely worth their weight in gold. Even though people bang on about social proof the reality for internet marketing in 2010 is that backlinks are still the best way of increasing rankings, increasing traffic and all things being equal – increasing your income. Believe me when I say that $250 is a drop in the ocean if you can find a system that can help deliver quality backlinks .

Most of the systems I’m trying at the moment are based on the idea of publishing blog posts (or articles) over a wide network of blogs. You write an original article, “spin it” (this means providing several alternatives to make each article unique) and the system then drips your posts out to blogs in the network. There are a number of paid variations on this theme out there. This is good old fashioned link building on steroids, and as far as I’m concerned totally white hat. The only time this gets iffy is if you’re spreading out duplicate crap across a poor quality network. This definitely isn’t the Free Traffic System.

Key Points Of The Free Traffic System:-

1. Get Up to 60 One Way Back Links Per Article
2. No Need To Submit Your Own Blogs To Use
3. Very High Quality Network
4. Free Really Means Free With This

I stumbled across the Free Traffic System after seeing it recommended on several forums. My gut instinct was to try a paid account ($37 a month special offer) as this would give me the chance to compare and contrast it like for like with the other paid services. Common sense did hit home and instead I opted to put a couple of articles out there on the free network. I was instantly impressed.

The Free Traffic System offers all the functionality of the monthly paid membership services, the interface is as professional as any of them. It also takes about the same amount of time to spin an article as the others (30-40 minutes for me). Because it’s a free system they are very strict on the quality of the articles (perhaps even more so than when other paid services), a minimum of 450 words and it has to be good quality original stuff. If you’re just going to spam cr@p then don’t even bother trying, you’ll get nowhere. It took roughly a day for an artcile to get approved for me, again this is right up there with the other systems.

The proof is in the pudding with these link systems, has the Free Traffic System helped improve my rankings? Absolutely. My spun articles have been slowly dripped out to a number of sources (several with decent PR) and I have noticed a shift in my rankings within days. I’ve managed to go from page 3 to page 1 of Google for my keyword target (wasn’t using any other systems to promote this 1 page). Sure it wasn’t a hugely competitive search phrase BUT the fact of the matter is the Free Traffic System has had a positive effect. It’s a little known fact that even half a dozen links can make the world of difference. Of course I’d need more links if I was chasing something really competitive but the fact that the system has had a positive impact puts it above a lot of the competition. Once you know it works it’s just a case of how much you want to use it. The Free Traffic System is going down as one of those link building sources that I’ll be keeping.

If the price of using these types of system in the past has put you off then the Free Traffic System is a great way to get started. In fact scrub that, it’s good enough to stand up on its own two feet as a system you should use even if it was a paid service, something I’ve now upgraded my account to. Whilst spinning an article may seem like a lot of work I’d suggest you stick at it, it does get easier with practice. Even if it takes an hour to do a really good job you’re still getting a lot of relevant, quality back links for only an hours work which is impressive.

Overall then the Free Traffic System gets my thumbs up approval. The Free account is just that and offers full access to the system with no obligations.

Sign Up For Your Free Traffic System Account Here

(The above is my review of the Free Traffic System based on my own experience. There will be affiliate links in the review simply because they have an affiliate program and I’ve found the system to work. If they didn’t have an affiliate program then I’d still say it’s a great system. If it was crap I’d not bother linking to it at all, I’d also make it more than clear that I thought it was not worth your time)

Sooo…if we have a lot of followers then that means a lot of followed links heading to our Twitter page and high page rank. The average Twitter profile with more than 500 followers seems to have a page rank of 4, some of the bigger names are much much higher. The good news is that these pages also rank in the search engines. Just do a search for John Chow and see what the second result is? This is what we can use to our advantage to pull in some killer long tail keyword traffic.

Once we have the keyword we want to target all we need to do is create a twitter profile as that phrase. Now if the phrase you want is longer than 15 characters just use part of it (the beginning is best if available). Straight away this gives us the phrase in our URL – bonus on-the-page SEO! From now on every tweet we do on that profile needs to relate to our term in one way or another. In some of these Tweets include a link back to your content. If you’ve had to use a shortened version of your phrase as your profile name then make sure to use the full phrase as your name and include this phrase in the majority of your tweets.

The next stage is to find some followers, we absolutely need as many followers as possible for this to work. In the past this may have been difficult but now there are plenty of reciprocal follow services out there. I use TwitterFollower. Within days you should easily be able to get a couple of hundred followers. Remember that we’re not looking for traffic from our followers, all we want is a chance at a followed link from their profile. It takes no time at all for the link juice to start flowing and for your Twitter profile to start ranking. Of course people going to that page from the search engines are likely to follow one of your links out to your real content. I’ve seen upwards of 60% CTR using this method.

I know this post is going to upset a lot of people who have been using this on the sly for a while. I also know that there are a lot of internet marketers out there who just don’t “get” Twitter, I hope that some of you find this post useful?

ps Forgot to mention, you’ll need an e-mail account for each Twitter profile you create so make sure you have them ready first.

How you define your own idea of value for money is really up to you. As you can see though neither set of stats really blows you away. I’ve paid for advertising at JohnChow.com several times (see this post for an example) and to date I’ve been less than overwhelmed.

But, and here’s the thing. John Chow is not really interested in what his advertisers do and don’t get out of paying for advertising, his whole blog is simply designed as something to capture email addresses and push prospects down a sales funnel in order to get affiliate commissions. There’s nothing wrong with that but just don’t get blinded by the big number hype when there are certainly more cost effective ways of getting traffic for your blog.

My Blog Business Model from John Chow on Vimeo.

I did however set up an account for my daughter. It took a little while but now she has become hooked, not only that but every day she seems to gain more followers, many from people all over the world. This has had a really positive effect on her blog (can you see where I’m going with this yet?). Am I really stupid enough to ignore something that could be so beneficial? Nope.

In the end I’ve settled on this Twitter client. It lets me update my status from the comfort of my PC (where I spend all day, every day anyway) and doesn’t use any of my screen.

I’ll be updating whenever the notion hits me, however if there’s one thing I really don’t want my Twitter account to become it’s nothing but an endless list of TinyUrl’s to my posts and web pages. There are enough social bookmarking tools out there, no need to trash Twitter in that way. During the day I come across plenty of interesting things (great keywords, link opportunities, affiliate programs etc etc) and it will be those and my general day to day crap that I’ll be Tweeting (can’t get used to that word). So if you want to follow me you can find me here:-

http://www.twitter.com/PRBarlow

I was going to go for some cool username, but got fed up with the “already used” notifications so just went with my name instead.

If you want to leave your own Twitter usernames in the comments then please feel free. I’ll check out each and every one.