Building Resilient Money Sites

[phpbuilt]

If you ask Matt Cutts, or the guys at Moz, or anyone else spewing whitehat gobbledygook how to promote a website, they're programmed to say stuff like "Oh, that's easy! Just create awesome content! People will then link to you!". That actually works fine, for extremely broad topics that have a huge fan-following, such as the SEO industry. Take these guys, writing their SEO blogs -- preaching to an audience who themselves create blogs, who make websites for a living, who live and breathe making links every day, with that type of audience its simple to come up with content and gather links.

What you never hear Matt Cutts and the whitehat gang elaborate on is how to get links for your amazon affiliate or ecommerce website, you know, the kind you can actually make money with. Suddenly, all those people on the internet who are in the same niche as you are your competitors, who wouldn't ever link to you, because they don't want you to rank. In this circumstance, the whitehat decree of "build great content and they will link" simply does not apply.

What you going to do then? I'll tell you! Here's what you'll need:

1) Some super awesome topic that has a HUGE fan following, and it greatly helps if you're actually interested in it.
2) Some super boring yet highly profitable niche.
3) A generic sounding brand that could easily apply to either super awesome or super boring topics.
4) A twitter, facebook, disqus and any other social network you're interested in.

Here's how I happened onto what I'm about to show you. One of my niches happens to be "sex toys". One day I was doing keyword research, and noticed that cracked.com ranked top 10 for "sex toys", because they had written an article "25 most disturbing sex toys".

The point:

- ranking for "sex toys" is big money, 823k exacts per month
- cracked.com has absolutely nothing to do with sex toys, thus relevancy had nothing to do with their ranking
- they ranked solely because of the authority of the root domain

Hope you can see where I'm going with this. We're going to build an insanely popular website. We'll have huge interaction on the site, with twitter, facebook and disqus for comments. We'll then have some links to inner pages, that are not extremely prominent (people won't see them unless they look really hard for them) -- yet your inner pages will rank nonetheless.

My "super awesome" popular topic is anti-war. There are many tens of thousands of people out there who are active on facebook and twitter, who hate war, who have websites and just love linking to people with the same viewpoint. The great thing for me is that I really am against war, so while I'm having fun blabbering about a topic that greatly interests me, I'm also building a super strong commercial website.

Your topic can be anything. Elections are coming up, if you're into democrats, republicans or libertarianism, there's a huge following out there waiting for you. There are also massive amounts of people into sports, etc. The only requirement is there must be a massive amount of people who are also interested in the topic.

Build your social accounts up. Here's what I did. RT.com's twitter has nearly a million followers. With the twitter API, I downloaded every one of their twitter ID's. I narrowed the group down to those with at least 20 followers, and following as many people as follow them by a ratio of .7 to 1. For instance, if they're followed by 100, they need to be following at least 70 minimum (because someone who has 500 followers, but is only following 10 people, that person is NOT going to follow you and there isn't any reason to mess with them). I further whittled down the list by gathering the date of their last post. Finally, I sorted them with how many times they re-tweeted RT.com with the most at the top of the list.

So then I have a list of 900k+, reduced to people who tend to follow, and prioritized by people who like to retweet. If they're following RT.com, chances are incredibly high that they are anti-war and would be interested in my anti-war website.

I feed this list to 20 relatively new accounts, who follow around 100 people per day. Whenever someone follows back, I follow that account with my main twitter account, which has over 40k followers now. Because my main account only follows people who have proven to follow back in the last 24 hours, and because my posts are very popular (so I get lots of natural followers), I don't have to risk my account by following 1k and then unfollowing those who don't follow -- makes my main account secure.

When you're operating like this, its so easy to reach out to other webmasters with similar websites and get links. You get links without having to even ask for them. I'm picking up natural links left and right, as well as being asked to write for Russia Insider and other credible publications and anti-war blogs.

This is what it looks like when you're building a website with great content, that naturally gathers links -- it's as simple as Matt Cutts makes it out to be. However, the site is otherwise unprofitable -- I even tried adsense on it, and a few thousand traffic a day barely equates into coffee money.

So then, you then create a sub-blog (is what I did), that has a different theme and is in a sub directory. In the footer, I put some links, which you can see but they're definitely not emphasized. In that sub blog, I'm writing about various profitable niche keywords. They rank well.

This site gets all the signals that a real and popular website would get. Not only diverse links, but real interaction on disqus, which is used for the comments on the site -- it also gets real retweets and facebook interaction from highly credible social media accounts. All this stuff is the magic juice that checks all Google's boxes and makes for an incredibly stable site.

There's another advantage to this as well. I have large networks of web2.0s which also link to the site. Because these links blend in with other highly natural links, they're safer (even though I'm making the links myself). Furthermore, because the topic is anti-war, my free blogs are not getting moderated or taken down. They all link to my main site, and though I'll occasionally slip in a link to the money site, because the overall theme of the blog is anti-war -- I'm sure any moderator doesn't actually read long enough to see the money links. Compare this to making a commercial blog with affiliate links, which do happen to get a higher level of moderation on various free blog sites.

Theoretically, there would be the disadvantage that the money portion of your site is not relevant to your main site, or the links that the main site gets. This doesn't seem to matter! There is enough credibility created by your site being legitimate in all other areas, that you can rank for off-topics and it doesn't seem to matter. Google is more trusting of internal links, so most of the juice being filtered from your legit pages to your money pages remains.

Make sure your site is brandable if you do this. However, you don't want your brand to give away what the site is about. Something like "Meebo" or "Awesome Info" ... something that works whether you're writing about how democrats are going to win or lose next election, or if you're writing product reviews, it works with either. This is very important, because as you get popular, people will actually start searching for your site. This is an important branding signal that will help your site gain a ton of credibility with Google ... and when that time comes, you don't want your brand to be "Widgets Reviews", because your popular topic fans are not going to fall for it ... it takes away from the credibility of your site and leaves you brandless.

That brand will apply to both your popular topic, as well as your sub blog about products ... you're putting your product blog under the brand umbrella of the main site, this will let those inner product pages rank well.

This is the direction I'm mostly headed for money sites in the future. It's my attempt at trying to make a more stable business model, where I'm not worried whether my site will be ranking a week or month from now. In reality, its not any less legitimate than Google ranking cracked.com for sex toys.

 

[bizzmill]

great info... something worth trying.

I noticed something similar recently where an authority site published an article that had my keyword in it and that article was ranked above my site for that keyword.

 

[CowboysNation]

Nice share Op!

This Is Golden Information.

 

[asap1]

Nice little read

 

[drew32091]

I'm very new to Internet marketing, I was just wondering how you make sub pages with different themes? And in short, what do you do with these sub pages? I didn't understand to well.

 

[Black Man]

Google is more trusting of internal links, so most of the juice being filtered from your legit pages to your money pages remains.

 

[mindmaster]

Phpbuilt is back.
OP thanks for the guide. I already have a few twists that I'll try.

 

[Ch3Mik]

Amazing reading, OP. In fact, that's the way I tell people how I would do it. Build trust, build engagement, use umbrella brand if possible. It's all about Marketing

For engagement, we have metrics (people who RT and/or Fav content from certain users and/or certain hashtags and their following/followers ratio is between 0.8 and 1.4 etc, etc) (numbers on my head)

For trust, some quality posts and some padding ones, ads free site (at start), some lost-cause or controversial content (that will generate rumble and comments)

And for family branding, we got subdomains

Best of luck!

 

[mindmaster]

What software are you using for twitter?

 

[Aske_senteria]

thanks for sharing this awesome info. worth reading

 

[phpbuilt]

What software are you using for twitter?

I just wrote a series of PHP scripts that access the twitter API (didn't call myself phpbuilt for nothing lol). Like here's an example that pulls in data of my followers, 200 at a time. Sorry didn't document it, didn't think I'd be releasing it ... but maybe it'll make sense to someone.

<?php$hostname="localhost";
$username="secret";
$password="secret";
$connection = mysql_connect ($hostname,$username,$password);
mysql_select_db("twitter");


function buildBaseString($baseURI, $method, $params) {
    $r = array();
    ksort($params);
    foreach($params as $key=>$value){
        $r[] = "$key=" . rawurlencode($value);
    }
    return $method."&" . rawurlencode($baseURI) . '&' . rawurlencode(implode('&', $r));
}


function buildAuthorizationHeader($oauth) {
    $r = 'Authorization: OAuth ';
    $values = array();
    foreach($oauth as $key=>$value)
        $values[] = "$key=\"" . rawurlencode($value) . "\"";
    $r .= implode(', ', $values);
    return $r;
}


$url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/list.json";


$oauth_access_token = "secret";
$oauth_access_token_secret = "secret";
$consumer_key = "secret";
$consumer_secret = "secret";




$query = "SELECT * FROM mycursor";
$result = mysql_query($query);
while($r=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    if($r["next_cursor"] == '0'){
        $query2 = "DELETE FROM myfollowers WHERE mypurge = 2";
        $result2 = mysql_query($query2);
        $query2 = "UPDATE myfollowers SET mypurge = 2 WHERE mypurge = 1";
        $result2 = mysql_query($query2);
        $query2 = "UPDATE myfollowers SET mypurge = 1";
        $result2 = mysql_query($query2);
        $cursor = -1;
    } else {
        $cursor = $r["next_cursor"];
    }
}


$oauth = array('cursor' => $cursor,
               'count' => 200,
              // 'include_user_entities' => false,
               'oauth_consumer_key' => $consumer_key,
               'oauth_nonce' => time(),
               'oauth_signature_method' => 'HMAC-SHA1',
               'oauth_token' => $oauth_access_token,
               'oauth_timestamp' => time(),
               'oauth_version' => '1.0'
             );                    
                        
                
$base_info = buildBaseString($url, 'GET', $oauth);
$composite_key = rawurlencode($consumer_secret) . '&' . rawurlencode($oauth_access_token_secret);
$oauth_signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base_info, $composite_key, true));
$oauth['oauth_signature'] = $oauth_signature;


// Make requests
$header = array(buildAuthorizationHeader($oauth), 'Expect:');
$options = array( CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $header,
                  CURLOPT_HEADER => false,
                  CURLOPT_URL => $url.'?cursor='.$cursor.'&count=200',
                  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
                  CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false);


$feed = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($feed, $options);
$json = curl_exec($feed);
curl_close($feed);


$twitter_data = json_decode($json,true);


foreach($twitter_data AS $key => $value){
    if($key == 'next_cursor_str'){
        $next_cursor = $value;
    }
    if($key == 'users'){
        foreach ($value AS $key2 => $value2){
            if($key == 'users'){
                $id = $value2["id"];
                $name = $value2["name"];
                $screen_name = $value2["screen_name"];
                $description = $value2["description"];
                $followers_count = $value2["followers_count"];
                $friends_count = $value2["friends_count"];
                $statuses_count = $value2["statuses_count"];
                $allfollow[$id]["name"] = mysql_real_escape_string(@$name);
                $allfollow[$id]["screen_name"] = mysql_real_escape_string(@$screen_name);
                $allfollow[$id]["description"] = mysql_real_escape_string(@$description);
                $allfollow[$id]["followers_count"] = @$followers_count;
                $allfollow[$id]["friends_count"] = @$friends_count;
                $allfollow[$id]["statuses_count"] = @$statuses_count;
            }    
        }
    }
}


$q = array();


foreach($allfollow AS $key => $value){
    $q[] = "INSERT INTO myfollowers(id,name,screen_name,description,followers_count,friends_count,statuses_count) VALUES($key,'$value[name]','$value[screen_name]','$value[description]',$value[followers_count],$value[friends_count],$value[statuses_count]) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE followers_count = $value[followers_count],friends_count = $value[friends_count],statuses_count = $value[statuses_count],mypurge = 0";
}


foreach($q AS $value){
    $result = mysql_query($value);
}
if($next_cursor != ''){    
    $query = "UPDATE mycursor SET next_cursor = '$next_cursor'";
    echo $query;
    $result = mysql_query($query);
}

I have separate scripts for finding people who retweet a certain person so I can poach their most active followers, remove nonfollowers, etc.

EDIT: I'm going to teach people how to manhandle twitter using php someday, just not yet. I'll post a full series of scripts when the time comes, just need the chance to organize it and there's other projects that are screaming for attention first.

 

[braindebug]

Isn't essentially using an expired and brandable domain with good link profile as a money site the same thing?

 

[myopic1]

Your code is elegant indeed, the fact that you're in IM and not coding commercially (I assume) suggests to me that you make a lot of money indeed.

 

[phpbuilt]

Isn't essentially using an expired and brandable domain with good link profile as a money site the same thing?

The question is whether Google applies full credit for links that were acquired prior to a domain expiring, after it has been re-registered. IMO, that depends.

Google isn't stupid. Anyone can check whether a domain has expired in the past. Google has extensive graphs of when links were acquired.

This was stated back in 2009: http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811

Several years ago, Google sparked some concerns when it said that buying an established domain name meant that links to that domain before the purchase were effectively lost. In other words, say someone bought a domain today that was registered in 2003 and which had built up hundreds of links over the years. All those links were effectively slapped with an invisible nofollow tag, passing along no credit. But links from after the purchase date would accrue credit.

In 2009 it was "several years ago" ... now some 8! years later are we to believe that Google hasn't gotten any better at what they do?

Matt Cutts said:

There are some domain transfers ( e.g. genuine purchases of companies) where it can make perfect sense for links to transfer. But at the same time it wouldn't make sense to transfer the links from an expired or effectively expired domain, for example. Google (and probably all search engines) tries to handle links appropriately for domain transfers.

And this from Cutts more than 6 years ago:

The sort of stuff our systems would be designed to detect would be things like someone trying to buy expired domains or buying domains just for links.

Last year I spent over $10k on over 1k expired domains, on over 1k class-c hosted IP addresses. Wish I hadn't. Part of the reason I disappeared last year is because Google made me a newbie again, I decided I wanted to take a break and spend some time with my 3 boys. I had to figure it all out from scratch again. I have methods I'll be posting sometime soon ... but pretty much you can figure that if I've been laying low, Google spanked me pretty hard and I needed to regroup.

I'm not a big fan of using expired domains anymore. Even if someone could convince me they're doing fantastic with expired domain PBN's, and they avoided the huge shakedown of PBNs last year, that's not to say Google won't toast them on their next update.

I just sense the direction Google is going. I'm having success with freshly created web2.0s that receive social signals and are done right. No worries about DNS, registrant ownership overlaps, footprints are much easier to avoid, you get them fresh links with social signals ... my rankings don't even fluctuate anymore, they just steadily go up ... its fantastic. My bets are on social signals and creating great content that gets shared by real users, gets natural links ... then supplement that with your own web2.0s. Monthly hosting bills are much lower too which is nice, and if it all goes boom there is less loss of investment.

 

[braindebug]

1K PBN?wow!Was it totally deindexed? What about your moneysites? Were they penalized too?
I can see your logic but unfortunately I can't produce great content (not native) nor buy it yet. So, on the website I am working right now (amazon affiliate), I am just trying to fake authority.
I am mostly focused on links, though. I am happy with my results till now since it's my first ever website (didn't even know how to host it) and after 3 months I have about 80-100 highly targeted visitors. But, I see potential for a lot more so I want to try to avoid future penalties as much as I can.
I have sent some social signals on 2-3 pages but not on tier1. Do you only build social signals to your tier1 or do you build links too?
How many socials do you build to your tier1? Is it more like in the hundreds or in the thousands?
How many articles do you use for fresh web 2.0s?
I am really looking forward to your upcoming guides!

 

[riyajr]

As always.. Golden thread..

 

[scoobyrobert]

Nice share op... Great info in there!

 

[lagger]

Welcome back phpbuilt, you and your knowledge has been greatly missed.

 

[myopic1]

Really great share by the way, lately I've shared you sceptiscim for expired domains and in an attempt to make them more relevant and 'new' I've been employing a tiered system comprising of new web 2.0's and social signals. I have a few questions about what you shared...

1. You mentioned that you build the money portion of your site in a subdirectory, as Google treats subdirectories as separate sites, did you mean that you were linking from the footer of your anti-war site to this subdirectory?

2. If you're attracting natural link so readily, what is the purpose of the tier 1 web 2.0s that you're building?

3. You mentioned that you build 'fresh links' and social signals to the 2.0's, would you elaborate on this part?

Cheers.

 

[fc-dh]

Isn't essentially using an expired and brandable domain with good link profile as a money site the same thing?

That is exactly what it is, i would ratter buy 2/3 TF 50+ domains and build them out then go true the whole thong that OP just written up (which was a great btw), that is way to much work for what you're trying to accomplish here, getting your PBN deindexed sucks but imho you clearly made a mistake when building your PBN (setting of a manual review) if your PBN consist out of real sites, build with different platforms, with every domain a different WHOIS, different nameservers you should be fine, the only time i got deindexed is when my PBN looked like a PBN.

I understand that OP is reluctant now to expired domains and everything that goes with building PBN's and he has a work around that is (imho) tedious but interesting nonetheless. (often in IM it is the tedious shit that makes the money)

@OP are you going to start this from a fresh domain or are you going to buy a domain on a auction with a backlink profile and some authority?