Time for another update. As this post got a bit longer than expected, here's a short summary: Still no real progress, but I'm working on it. None of the keywords shows up in the top 100 results.
1. Google seems to penalize websites that only focus on affiliate content / have too many affiliate links.
- Add one outgoing authority link to each article
- Add 2 informational articles (questions posts) without any affiliate links
I added the outgoing links and one more informational article so far that is already indexed. Working on the second right now.
2. I found some unreadable Asian links in my backlink profile. No idea how they got there.
- Research about disavow tool and try to get rid of them
This seems to work as the links don't show up anymore on SemRush. I just updated the file and added another spammy domain.
3. Poor overall backlink diversity
- I already asked
@stephan about his press release service, waiting for his reply.
As I still didn’t get a reply from Stephan I turned to another service provider:
@PauloPaul immediately answered all my questions and was a great help. His sample report looked excellent. But unfortunately, according to him the niche I’m in is not very suitable for a press release and I'm to look at other options. Maybe the backlink package that
@IamKing offers might be worth a try (at least according to his reviews).
I’m very slowly building web 2.0 and pointing them to the articles. Unfortunately, they are hard to get indexed.
I got some progress here at least. Most of the web 2.0s are indexed by now with the help of elitelinkindexer.com (which was mentioned
here) not sure though if forced indexing is a good thing. Further more I ordered some Tier 2 links from
@eatingMemory which helped to increase their stats.
Here's one of them:
The only thing that I'm worried about now is that the links from the web 2.0 don't show up in the backlink profile of the main site (using Ahrefs or SemRush). But I guess I'll have to be a bit more patient.
Another issue that I was struggling with the past days is that Google omitted some of my pages because they are too similar (if I searched for inurl:mainsite). I did a bit of research and found this article helpful:
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/17778/google-omitted-results/
I changed most of the titles and meta descriptions and it starts to get better. Still have to optimize it a bit though.