Yesterday I posted about how we could use the -950 penalty to our advantage to find cheap sites to buy. Today I made arrangements to purchase one using this technique. Mind you… I’m yet to figure out how to get a site out of a 950 penalty because I haven’t yet had reason to try. But now I have one to play with and am going to blog about whether this avenue proves rewarding or a complete failure.

What I purchased was a site in a very competitive niche that is lingering in -950 land for virtually all relevant search terms. It only has about 65 pages indexed in google and only about 300 backlinks pointing to the domain. Most of the backlinks look like they are a part of an old reciprocal link exchange attempt as the site has a handful of “resource” and links pages. It isn’t the general type of site that I purchase since the domain is only 3 years old with no DMOZ or Y! directory listings. Frankly I can’t see how the page is respected enough by google to be in the result set in the first place given these factors, but it is… although in 950 land.

I contacted the site owner expressing my interest and asking about revenue. The owner indicated that the site hadn’t been making much the past few months. (obviously). I then made him an offer of about 20x’s monthly revenue and he accepted. Paying 20x’s current earnings isn’t a technical bargain… in fact it’s pretty expensive until I mention that the price was slightly over $1,000 and leads in this niche pay about $15 per lead. With that background it’s a pretty good bargain to get a site that is in the base keyword result set - although penalized, hasn’t made an effort to expand into the less competitive long-tail, generates some revenue currently, and can give my other sites in the niche backlinks from within the base keyword result set. Heck, for the backlink value alone it’s worth the price.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. First I’m going to point some deep backlinks from this new site to my main site in the niche. Next I’m going to redesign the site and clean the code up without adding new pages. I’m going to attack the -950 problem by first looking at the reciprical link pages. I’ll probably “no follow” them at first and if that doesn’t work just delete the pages. I think those pages might be a major part of the problem. Next I’ll gradually get a couple of high quality links pointing to the homepage, add a little fresh content to the existing pages, and take a fresh look at internal navigation and anchor text. Again, the goal of this first round is to just get the site out of the penalty.

This site is never going to be a page 1 result for the base keyword in this niche. However, I think I can make it page one for a ton of long-tail terms once its out of the penalty box. If that’s the case it will pay for itself with a couple days of revenue. Will it work? Who knows, but it seems like a pretty good gamble to me. I’ll keep you updated on whether it sinks or swims.

Some of you might have heard about what is being called the “950″ penalty through the forums at webmasterworld.com. Essentially it is a penalty that moves sites that ordinarily would rank much higher to the bottom of the result set. It seems that some entire sites are hit while others are hit only for certain keywords or pages.

The consensus of a continuing 11 part thread is that the penalty is some form of over-optimization penalty. People report sites going into and out of the penalty on a regular basis. However it has proven to be a penalty for which there is hope to escape from if you own an affected site. Sites subject to the penalty still return as a part of the result set, but simply don’t rank where they otherwise would due to the penalty. The most common reports of success involve “de-optimizing” internal linking structure or improving the quality and diversity of inbound links and anchor text.

Identifying the affected sites takes a little guess work because not all sites listed near the bottom of a result set are there on account of the penalty. Some are there as a result of their ordinary ranking. Identifying sites where only a few pages are penalized for certain keywords is extremely difficult as a result. However, identifying sites where the entire site is subject to the penalty is fairly easy and should be the focus of your attention.

To find these sites simply set your search preferences on google to return 100 results per page. Enter one of the main keyword combinations for your targeted niche and go to the last page of returned results. Scroll down to the area of the area of the last 50 results and you will find sites potentially hit by the penalty. Identify a couple of sites that look like quality domains that might be there because of having optimized for the keyword too aggressively. Visit some of the sites and identify other pages of the site that should rank for keywords in their page title. Search again for those other pages and go to the end of the result set and see if the site is there for those queries as well. Do this a couple more times and you can be fairly confident that entire site is subject to the penalty.

A few other things that you can be confident of are: 1. The site owner isn’t making any money from organic google referrals (read: potentially cheap) 2. The site owner probably doesn’t understand the cause of the problem and probably isn’t even aware that the site is suffering this penalty 3. The site probably is an older site with a little bit of respect from google which is why it gets included in the result set 4. The site probably has a fair number of backlinks which probably have some age but might simply be too focused.

Put all of these factors together and you probably have identified a site that hasn’t been making the webmaster much money lately and that is ripe to get good rankings again with a little bit of work. Your chances to rank with one of these sites is much better than with a brand new domain, and with a motivated site owner, probably not that expensive either. Go deep sea fishing and pick up a bargain.

I haven’t really noticed much in my main niches but according to the RankPulse chart today, this appears to be the biggest day of SERP shakeups on Google since early June. What is a little strange is that I haven’t seen much unusual commenting about changes today on the Webmasterworld Google Board. So not quite sure what is going on at the moment, but in the past I have found RankPulse to be a decent weather vane.

One thing that I think gets overlooked on affiliate sites is the ability to change offers presented to the visitor over the course of a session - or even subsequent sessions. After a visitor has been presented with an offer a couple of times the chance to convert that particular offer drops considerably. The visitor obviously isn’t finding that offer attractive.

Rather that write that visitor off as one that isn’t going to generate revenue, you should consider changing the offer to try again during the same session. I currently do this on my leads sites but the origins go back to when I was selling products a few years ago. Back then I had noticed that most buyers had placed a product in their shopping cart within 3 page views of landing on the site. Those who hadn’t put anything in a shopping cart within that time frame probably weren’t going to end up buying anything. Now this isn’t a scientific conclusion and was probably based on the fact that I wasn’t a price leader in the market. It also might be affected by how informational your pages are. I would guess that the more informational your site the more pageviews you might get on average prior to a purchase.

But for me the three page view rule worked pretty well for my setup. My solution was to start offering a coupon or discount after 3 page views. Essentially I was trying to pick-up the price shoppers who might still be hanging around. I was also sure to make the discounts accessible from the beginning of the session, but it wouldn’t have been immediately obvious and thus most shoppers didn’t find the discount unless they were looking fairly hard. But once they had been on the site for awhile the discount would become more prominent in hopes I would have a better chance of converting these lingering visitors. There is no question that this technique increased my conversions.

Today, when most of my revenue is generated from lead generation, I still haven’t forgotten that lesson about changing offers. My sites are far more informational now and visitors will stay through more page views while being constantly exposed to offers in the niche. However, if they have viewed several pages, or even leave the site and later return, I am serving them different offers throughout the visits. Of course I start with my most profitable offers, but if they don’t seem inclined to click on an offer after 3-4 page views, I try a different one that might be of more interest.

This really isn’t difficult from the programming side and is something you should consider. Get some statistics from your site about your page view to lead conversion rate over the course of a user session. You will probably find that after several page views by a visitor your conversion rate falls. If that is the case, try something else to catch their attention.

I view it about the same as fishing. If you have cast your line into an area where you know there are fish but aren’t catching any, don’t sit there all day doing the same thing over and over. The fish obviously aren’t attracted to your bait. Change bait and you just might get a bite.

Like most of you, I spend the majority of my time finding ways to generate traffic through search engines. Lately I have been spending more and more time thinking further down the line about my ultimate goal. In the past my goal was always to have the top positions in search engines for my targeted niches. But I’m starting to think the goals should be a little higher.

When we fight for search engine or PPC positioning we are in direct competition with other sites and offers. It’s a constant battle against both the search engines and our competitors. But what if we actually had a brand that even our mothers knew to type-in to get what they wanted within our niche? Isn’t that the ultimate goal? Doesn’t that essentially eliminate most of our competition? Doesn’t it remove the control that search engine algorithms have over our destiny?

To me it is a no-brainer. While I will continue to fight the search engine wars in order to generate my day-to-day income, I am spending a lot of time learning about the economics of traditional advertising platforms such as radio, television and newspaper in order to attempt to ultimately create a brand that people will recognize and type-in. I’m not talking about a brand that the internet addicted among us will recognize. I’m talking about a brand that your mother will recognize. So far I have concluded that it is certainly possible if the economics of your niche are favorable.

Essentially there are two types of offline advertising for internet sites. 1. Advertising that attempt to create a brand so it will be in your conscious when you need that product, and 2. Advertising that is designed to elicit an immediate response by the consumer (visit my site shortly after seeing my ad). The work at home ads we see on infomercials where they are promoting a website like 36getrich.com are of the “direct response” variety. The good part about offline advertising is that it is actually possible to do both at the same time if you have the right product, message, and medium. With the right strategy you may be able to build your brand through repeated exposure while at the same time turning a profit through the direct response angle.

I’m not suggesting that tomorrow you should run out and spend a fortune to get visitors to type-in the domain of your free jokes site or anything. What I am suggesting is that you take a hard look at your various niches, become familiar with the economics and scalability of offline advertising, and at least consider setting a future goal of having a brand able domain that my mother will be inclined to type-in when she is looking for a product in your niche.  Think about it.

I’m always talking about the value of buying old sites. The most common question in response is “how do you find them?” Of course there’s a million ways to find them such as searching outdated directories (Y! Directory falls into that category and DMOZ is about there too) or checking the Wayback Machine. One of my favorite is to browse through the Yahoo directory as it existed in 2001.

But the easiest way that I have found for generating large lists of old sites in your niche is to first visit a handful of sites created pre 2000 and look for graphics that would have been common back then. Examples include the free stat counter graphics at the bottom of pages, award logos or certain animated gif’s that were popular back in the day (remember the guy holding the “WELCOME” sign?). Then, I’ll search Yahoo for all links pointing to the old link counter site or award site along with my keyword.

Here it is in practice (not the best example, but you will get the point). Lets first check the section of the Yahoo Directory from 2001 to find hit counter sites that existed in 2001. Then simply do a backlink check on Yahoo to find all of the sites that link back to the hit counter. Take this query as an example. If you want to limit results to sites that mention your topic, just insert your keyword in the query. Since the old fashioned hit counter went out of style several years ago, you can assume that the vast majority of sites linking to the hit counter are pretty old and that the webmaster might have lost some interest in the site and isn’t paying much attention to keeping it current. (Read: “Cheap”)

Then comes the hard part… chasing down a site owner with outdated whois info and with no contact information on the page. But that’s a post for another day.

If I have a pet peeve with affiliate managers it’s those who fail to acknowledge that a competing program might be better in some circumstance. I know that the AM’s job is to convince me to use their program, but when they lose credibility on one of their offers it tends to make me lose trust in their other ones.

This week I had an AM call me asking why I wasn’t using their offer in one of my niches. I started by telling him that my current program was paying me twice what the AM’s program pays. His response was to tell me that he’s positive that his converts better than any others in the market and that I would make up the lower payout per lead on a higher volume with their better converting offer. I then told him that I was using the exact same end merchant as their program but that I was direct with the merchant while they were apparently one or two layers further away. He then decided to try to convince me that his program has better creatives and would still result in higher payouts.

Attention affiliate managers… at this point in the above conversation, you have just lost all credibility with your affiliate for your entire network of offers. Now I’m going to be really skeptical about any other offers you may have that look promising. Stop while you are ahead - admit defeat - and live to fight another day.

I spent years living off of affiliate programs on CJ, Linkshare and other networks. In fact for a long time I didn’t know much else existed. I would get a feel for the types of offers in a niche, test some, and move horizontally across the network entering a wide range of niches. When some worked, I was content with my affiliate selection for that niche since I didn’t know better.

Today virtually all of my affiliate revenue comes from in-house programs in a limited number of niches. This change occurred when I started looking deeper and deeper for programs in my niches. Usually there are all kinds of in-house programs in virtually any niche that pay better, have better reporting, better communication, better integration, and quicker payment than the networks. Of course this isn’t news to most experienced affiliate marketers, but one that’s easy to fall victim to.

I still head straight to a network when I ‘m testing a niche. However if the test proves successful I then fully investigate all possible sources of affiliate programs within the niche before focusing on another one. If you are looking for ways to find these hidden programs, simply do a search for some of your target keywords, then start clicking on all of the affiliate sites in the PPC ads and determine who the affiliates are getting paid by. You will probably find a few that you didn’t know existed.

While I’m on the topic of my crappy link networks, here’s a tip to help you keep your cover. Generally the intention of a spammy site falls into one of two categories: 1. Page Spam or 2. Link Spam. I call crappy pages created at a high volume for the purpose of ranking (like MFA sites) page spam, since the purpose is to draw visitors to the page. Link Spam pages are those where you create sites for the purpose of getting links indexed.

When I find myself having to create bad sites for the purpose of generating links, I try to make it look like a poor attempt at page spam rather than link spam. With all of the recent hype about reporting paid link sites and link spammers, I like to keep my cover for any human visitors who are checking backlinks to my sites, while still getting the linking results I desire.

To do this, I create sites that look like their purpose is to draw clicks to affiliate programs. Thus a visitor is just thinking it’s a bad attempt at trying to spam search results rather than spamming links. I then link to several high quality sites within the niche in order to make it look like the links are there just because I’m following SEO advice about having high quality outgoing links to improve rankings. However, I don’t want to really pass juice to these competitor sites, so I do “no follow” on those links. I then place the link to my own site in the middle of the high quality “no follow” links, but I “accidentally” misspell the tag on the link pointing to my site as “no folow” or something similar.

So far it seems to be working. The search engines simply ignore the misspelled “no folow”, yet to a human who is reviewing the page it looks like a simple programming typo rather than a link dump. Thus the human thinks I’m just a bad page spammer rather than a crafty link spammer.

While I’m usually looking for quality links to point to my sites, there are times when I feel like I just need a little extra juice of any type pointing to certain pages. I have a network of sites I have used for this purpose in the past but I was always looking for a way to be able to throw my links across a high number IP’s with distinct registration information that could not easily be identified as a network. It was also important that I be able to use PHP in order to automate a lot of the site creation work.

Enter the Free PHP Hosting sites. Of course free hosting has been around since the geocities days, but these are different. It’s free PHP hosting - generally on a subdomain of the host. Granted, they aren’t the world’s highest quality links, but getting deep links to your internal, long-tail pages from 100 different IP’s with little effort is worth something. Plus, you don’t have to mess with buying domain names, hiding your registration information, paying hosting fees, or all of the usual headaches of making a link network look like its not… a network.