PHPBUILT's Idiot-Proof Guide to Authority Site Building

Two questions phpbuilt

1. I have bunch on articles (120). Those are leftovers of Google updates and not indexed anymore on the search engine. I want to use them again on one site. All articles are from MNS about many different topics. Topics are very very broad, like World of warcraft to protein powders.

Is it good idea to put so different articles on one site? I was thinking I can make very broad categories and use subcategories as main keywords. Is it okay? Also I try to rank only very long tail keywords.

2. Out topic (maybe dumb question). Can Google recognize duplicate content if I take random popular article on popular website and make it to video and read article on it...Maybe google can pull video transcript from video and compare it to original article?

I had a 3-word combo on one of my new sites at 1.6% keyword density and it was ranking page 6 with no backlinks. I reduced the density down to about 1% during my page audit and now the page is no longer in the top 200. Any idea what might have happened here? I'm pretty confused (The page does not have any widgets, related posts, or anything like that on it). It's been about 5 days and the ranking hasn't returned. Should I try increasing the density back up to 1.6%?

Just thought I would share what google is doing with my site, after using the information PHPBUILT shared with us. I know the rankings still really suck, but they are all jumping up literally from the dead! Most of these were NOT FOUND in serpbook just a couple of weeks ago. Also, keep in mind this domain was manually penalized for unnatural links recently (but that has been removed). I am confident that some of my ranking problems are due to over optimized anchors pointing at my home page. When I start building links again I will only be using the domains name, for the most part, to try and dilute the over optimized anchors.

THIS WORKS. I'm rebuilding all of my websites now to make them higher quality before I start to backlink again.

crazedspyker said:

I had a 3-word combo on one of my new sites at 1.6% keyword density and it was ranking page 6 with no backlinks. I reduced the density down to about 1% during my page audit and now the page is no longer in the top 200. Any idea what might have happened here? I'm pretty confused (The page does not have any widgets, related posts, or anything like that on it). It's been about 5 days and the ranking hasn't returned. Should I try increasing the density back up to 1.6%?

Click to expand...

I adjust density on pages all the time, back and forth until I find the best density.

There's a million things going on with a webpage that cause it to rank or not rank ... its hard to say whether one change had anything to do with it. There is, however, a very easy way to verify whether this change made the drop ... change it back and see what happens.

The amazing thing about the keyword density filter, it has no memory. A page can be screwed up for years, you adjust the density and it can instantly pop into results. If your change affected its rankings at all, changing it back will reveal if that was the issue of the drop (because it would instantly snap back).

If I were you though, I'd keep it the same as it is. I like my pages on the underoptimized side ... knowing that when I start backlinking I'll be more on the overopimization side. Instead of changing the density back, find another page on your website and use exact anchor to link back to that page ... that will increase the optimization for that keyword on the page and bring it back.

catwithhat said:

Two questions phpbuilt

1. I have bunch on articles (120). Those are leftovers of Google updates and not indexed anymore on the search engine. I want to use them again on one site. All articles are from MNS about many different topics. Topics are very very broad, like World of warcraft to protein powders.

Is it good idea to put so different articles on one site? I was thinking I can make very broad categories and use subcategories as main keywords. Is it okay? Also I try to rank only very long tail keywords.

2. Out topic (maybe dumb question). Can Google recognize duplicate content if I take random popular article on popular website and make it to video and read article on it...Maybe google can pull video transcript from video and compare it to original article?

Click to expand...

What may be happening.

When you first post an overoptimized article, it will rank for a while. What you consider to be a "google update" is more than likely an overoptimization filter on your pages. What will most likely happen is, if you put them on a new site, they will also rank again for a while ... then drop at a future point because the overoptimization of the page is still there.

What I suggest is putting them all up again, and then editing them all making sure they're not keyword stuffed (keep it to the densities suggested in this thread). A good reason to start a new site is when there are a ton of exact anchors built through backlinks, and you don't feel like balancing those out with new non-exact anchor links.

In any case, put them back up ... reduce keyword densities and other overoptimizations (your internal linking with exact anchors) and they should do well.

Confirmation it works.

been a lurker here for a while, decided to register so I can 'thank' phpbuilt for this amazing thread.
thank you

very useful post my friend,just bookmarked the thread.

Been following this thread from start and implementing your suggestions and seeing movement which is great thank you. Looking forward to your web2 thread.

Received an email from Amazon this morning, think they need to read this thread, the title is
Start optimizing your affiliate site, here is what the suggest.


Content matters. You will also benefit from providing rich content on your site. It is important that you include at least a few paragraphs of copy that is visible to crawlers and full of keywords, which will enable search engines to better classify your pages. Use the keywords you included in your <META> elements, and don't be afraid to use them many times within your copy. But, of course, what you write should make sense and be easy to digest, as readability is vital. You should also display text on your site as text, not as images, which crawlers cannot read. Use <ALT> tags for pictures you do use, so that crawlers can get some information out of them, and incorporate HTML navigation wherever it is possible, even if this means adding redundant navigation at the bottom of your pages.

fernando1954 said:

Been following this thread from start and implementing your suggestions and seeing movement which is great thank you. Looking forward to your web2 thread.

Received an email from Amazon this morning, think they need to read this thread, the title is
Start optimizing your affiliate site, here is what the suggest.


Content matters. You will also benefit from providing rich content on your site. It is important that you include at least a few paragraphs of copy that is visible to crawlers and full of keywords, which will enable search engines to better classify your pages. Use the keywords you included in your <META> elements, and don't be afraid to use them many times within your copy. But, of course, what you write should make sense and be easy to digest, as readability is vital. You should also display text on your site as text, not as images, which crawlers cannot read. Use <ALT> tags for pictures you do use, so that crawlers can get some information out of them, and incorporate HTML navigation wherever it is possible, even if this means adding redundant navigation at the bottom of your pages.

Click to expand...

I'd give them a pass on bad SEO advices since the company earns 11 figures per year.

Well, I could use a help here. I am kinda struggling with the site structure. How do you people do it if you have sites with 100+ pages? It wasn't that much of an issue with 30 page websites, but now it's getting out if hand.
Here is an example and I hope that some of you will point me in the right direction. I would be really grateful.
Let's use an example keyword "widgets" (Captain Obvious to the rescue).

Level 1: Home Page
Static page targeting the main keyword "widgets", obviously. Article of around 800 words long. That's the easy part.
Interlinking to level 2 pages is relatively easy here if you have under 10 categories. You can write unique few sentence long excerpts for each category under the main article and link them to their respective pages. But if you have 20 categories? How do you link them from your home page beside menu? 20 excerpts on a home page would look beyond terrible. Cause I can't wrap my head around this.

Level 2: Category Pages
Each targeting different keyword, blue widgets, red widgets, black widgets etc. A few hundred words of unique content targeting those keywords, sure, that's easy.
Linking them back to the home page isn't the issue here, but again. How do you link them to level 3 pages, if you have like 30 level 3 article pages per category page? This is impossible to do via unique excerpts like in the case of home page, because it would make the page impossibly long, plus you would need to adjust your keyword density everytime you add an excerpt there.
It would be easy if I didn't want to rank for these level 2 keywords. I would just use some category page with noindex, but that would still look pretty ugly and hard to figure with 30 excerpts there.

Level 3: Article Pages
Pages targeting keywords like "best blue widgets", "most awesomestest blue widgets", "blue widget review" etc. Linking these back to the level 2 category page is easy. Should I interlink these only with other Article Pages within the specific level 2 category or anywhere I want? Like best blue widgets with red widgets reviews etc.?

I hope that you guys are able to figure out what I wanted to say here. Thanks for help.

Basically, I am just asking about how to structure and interlink the site and where is the interlinking necessary for juice flow. How do you make sure, that the link juice will flow from home page, even to the 3rd level pages? Cause it's pretty impossible to intelrink everything with everything both ways.

Hi PHP,

thank you very much for this helpful thread! Timing of this thread couldn't be better, as I just started to work on my next project, which should be authority site. So I started implementing all your advices straight from the beginning and I think I'm starting to see first results

BTW, do you know this tool - whatsmyserp com/keyworddensity.php ? What do you think, how accurate are their results, compared to quirk plugin?

PHP,

Thanks again for this great thread.

A plugin I like to use is one made by SEO Quake:

http://www.seoquake.com

It is great for analyzing all of the keywords/words that you are using on the page. Often my articles are "stuffed" with related keywords that do not add to the quality of the article, and I am sure that I am setting off Big G's keyword filters.

With this plugin, you can have it give you the keyword densities of single words, 2 word, 3 word, and 4 word combo's. It opens a new tab in firefox and gives you the report. It is very easy to see which words you are stuffing and which words are repeated in your content.

What does it mean when a page ranks for "tiny red widgets" better than "tiny red widgets for the home"?

The title and h1 of the page is "tiny red widgets for the home." (and not mentioned anywhere else in the content or sidebars)

Should the title and h1 tags be different?

Could this be some kind of overoptimization caused by the YARPP plugin because it shows the anchor link "tiny red widgets for the home" on every related post to this page?

On my XML Plugin, should I also remove categories from it?

blacat said:

OP refers to the body value.
1 word should be less than 2%
2 words should be less than 1.5%
3 words and above should be less than 1%

Click to expand...

What you extactly mean by it? Please let me know if I'm right/wrong. I will give one example:
facebook - should be max. 2% density
free facebook - should be max 1.5%
free back accounts - should be less then 1%
I'm correct?

abcva said:

What you extactly mean by it? Please let me know if I'm right/wrong. I will give one example:
facebook - should be max. 2% density
free facebook - should be max 1.5%
free back accounts - should be less then 1%
I'm correct?

Click to expand...

Yes. That's it.

phpbuilt said:

I start usually with a 400 page article. I target a 3-word keyword at 1.5%. I submit it and it only comes in at 50 when I was thinking it'd probably be 30. I go to the page to "tweak" it ... wondering why it didn't rank.

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Isn't it recommended to use < 1% density for a 3-word keyword?

Take a bow PHPBUILT :clap2: I doubt I will read a more informative and useful article on SEO in 2014.

abcva said:

What you extactly mean by it? Please let me know if I'm right/wrong. I will give one example:
facebook - should be max. 2% density
free facebook - should be max 1.5%
free back accounts - should be less then 1%
I'm correct?

Click to expand...

Yes, you understood it correctly.