Well, it turns out that my bad week is not quite over.
I mentioned that I had outsourced a web 2.0 package that didn’t quite meet my expectations. I thought I could just clean up the grammar on the articles and be done with it, but as I thought about it I became concerned about the crosslinking. Basically 18 web 2.0 sites had been created with the same article, just slightly spun. By that I mean that a few words in each article had been changed, but potentially not enough to create a unique article in Google’s eyes. All of these articles had a link back to my niche site but also two links to one of the other web 2.0 sites created.
My concern was that all the crosslinking to essentially duplicate content would be at a minimum useless, or worse, somehow earn some sort of penalty and I didn’t want a link back to my niche site to be involved. Perhaps I am being paranoid but better safe than sorry, so I decided to switch things up. One of the sites was a Squidoo lens, so I changed all the links from the other sites solely towards the Squidoo lens and then put a link back to my niche site in the Squidoo lens. The lens was pretty bleak, so I added some content to it also.
So for $40 I basically bought a Squidoo lens with some links. Oh well.
But that’s not all… I went to work on my first sniper-like site and was ready to post the first article. I went back to my keywords to figure out which ones I wanted to add and decided to recheck some of the competition numbers I had logged in before. Well, one of the numbers came back very differently and long story short, my main keyword (which is the domain name) doesn’t have ~16,000 competing sites when searching in quotes but 149,000!!
The competition I had recorded for a few of the related keywords was off, so the best I can guess is that Google was “dancing” and the results the day I checked were inaccurate. Obviously that stinks considering I had already bought the domain, set up the theme, made a header, and had my about page already done. Plus I had written 2 articles.
I decided to go ahead and post the first article and move forward as planned, but I have VERY low expectations. With alot of backlinks maybe I can rank or maybe the planets will align and my keyword-only domain will somehow put me on Page 1, but I won’t be holding my breath.
So I guess the moral of the story is not to do keyword research when Google is on the fritz. Don’t ask me how to know when Google is on the fritz though.
Hopefully next week is better.
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It is so hard to find a good keyword to try and build a sniper site around. I spent two hours last night before I found a good one.
I have had ZERO luck with outsourcing. In fact the quality was so bad on the one project I tried that I was thinking of writing a few articles for others myself. This may help offset the cost of all of the domains I plan to buy in the next 6 months.
I agree, Dusty. It is difficult to find good keywords for sniper sites. And even if you find what seems like a good one, you still may not rank very well or the product may not sell.
If I happen across a good KW here and there, maybe I’ll try a sniper site, but I think I have to mainly stick with building niche sites. It may take longer to see a profit, but I think there is more long-term value.
Yeah, outsourcing is tough. I just don’t have the budget to afford quality help.
I have had this happen to me once too only it was the opposite, it was on monthly search counts. One day it said it got 9,000 searches a month and then a week later when I was reaching keywords it then said only 4,000.
Don’t care about duplicated content, I duplicate the same content on 10 web 2.0 websites, most of them will be indexed by google, it doesn’t matter.
As Yuan says, I’m not sure if duplicate content makes a big difference. I’ve seen the same PLR sites (you know the well known PLR articles) on dozens of sites and they are still indexed, but of course they will not all rank as well….