Monthly Archives: February 2012

Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.

How long has everyone been telling you that Google loves blogs? Months? Years? Well, it’s true, and I wanted to share an experience that helps reinforce that truth to you.

The Blog That Resurrected My Rankings

I had a site devoted to a particular type of exercise equipment. The site was in the top 7 results for its keywords in Google for over six months. Unfortunately I had server problems and the site went down for a few days. Google crawled the site constantly because it was well-linked, and so big G knew instantly that the site was down. Since it stayed down for a few days, Google must have decided it wasn’t coming back up, and its rankings plummetted.

After the site did come back up, it reappeared in Google, but this time on the third page (ranking 25 – 28 for its keywords, on average). Its original page one rankings just wouldn’t come back. I shrugged it off as a lesson learned and basically forgot about the site.

Early last week, though, I was testing a tool I’m creating that helps you write and post blog posts to WordPress blogs super fast. I decided to setup a blog on the site that lost its rankings, just to test it out. I made a bunch of blog posts (they were post-dated so they would show up slowly over time), and sat back to see what would happen.

To my surprise, over the weekend my site jumped back onto page one for its rankings. I hadn’t touched that site in months, and now it’s ranking better than it ever was — at #4 for 3 great sets of keywords. This, of course, has spiked my AdSense earnings for the site.

Another nice benefit of the new blog is that the blog itself is getting some additional traffic from Google, even though the blog does not have any external links directly to it. Google is applying the authority of the site itself to the blog. Since the site is well-linked, the blog is given a bit of “trust” by Google and is appearing in the search results as well.

Scraper Sites Can Help You Rank

On a related note regarding blogs and traffic, I’ve recently setup a blog that automatically creates a bunch of posts each day based on a variety of keywords. This blog is a test for a larger idea I have in mind, and the test is working great, with the blog having achieved more than 12,000 unique visitors in the last 5 days. The vast majority of the traffic has come from Google.

As part of that same test, I setup a second, similar blog that does the same kind of thing. Despite the second blog actually having more content, it has (so far) received no joy from Google at all (it’s not even indexed yet).

The difference is in the scraper sites that are referencing the content. The keywords that I’m creating content around for my successful blog is a scraper magnet — hundreds of scraper sites are auto-posting content from my own blog to theirs, and giving a reference link back to my blog posts to try and make it more legit.

How do these scraper sites know about my brand-new blog posts so fast? Because the blog is indexed by Google’s blog search, and many scraper sites scrape results from that blog search to post to their own blogs. They also scrape many other blog search engines, and since my blog pings those search engines when I make a new post, the blog’s content gets picked up and spread around fast.

Those links from these automated scraper sites have resulted in my blog quickly gaining hundreds of backlinks from all over the web, and that means great rankings for the pages of my blog.

The second test blog I setup, however, has not attracted the scraper blogs and so hasn’t even been indexed in Google yet. It might seem strange that scraper sites can help you rank, but if they link back to the source of the content, they really can.

Trackbacks Are Your Friend

On a final note, I recommend setting up your blog to automatically post trackback links to the blog posts that you link out to. If you’re not familiar with trackbacks, it’s a simple concept: any time you link to an external blog post from within your own blog post, your blog posts a “comment” to the blog post you’ve linked to, letting the readers of that post know about your own post referencing it.

Now, not all blogs will approve your trackback link, but many will, and I’ve received literally thousands of visitors from a single trackback link appearing on a popular blog. So make sure you setup your blog to automatically post trackbacks to the blogs that you link out to — it can often result in a flood of traffic.

Have any more great blog-related traffic building ideas? Care to share your opinion about this post? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

Source: Seo

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