PHPBUILT's Idiot-Proof Guide to Authority Site Building

crazedspyker said:

I have a question you. Does the over optimization affect the entire site or just the page that's overoptimized? I have one site that won't rank even for it's own title (unless I use quotes) and I haven't been able to figure out why. It's a brand name domain (tried moving to a new domain but same results), roughly 35 pages of unique content, ordered about 10 real guest post links for it.

The only thing I can think of is that I might have overused internal links (although I vary up the internal anchor text too). This is the only site I've built this way and the first time I've encountered this issue (the site was created just to test Leith's style of siloing).

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Let me tell you something, its soooooo easy to hit the keyword stuffing filter. Even though I wrote this guide, I can't just write articles and have them 100% escape this overoptimization thing automatically. I write 10 articles and 4 of them won't rank because of overoptimization, so its easy to hit the filter. Its really tough because you try to hit that sweet spot, because you have to mention your keywords and I've been SEO writing for a very long time and inclusion of keywords just comes naturally for me.

The penalty is both page-related and site-related. Its page related in that, as I explained in the guide, you can get your page to rank by changing it and then (if it would otherwise rank at #40, but its not in the top 1000 because of overoptimization) ... after you edit it, it pops back to #40 if you did it right.

But its also sitewide, because pages that rank for their terms give stronger internal backlinking. So whatever pages that #40 ranking page links to will now rank better because its a quality page now. That's why its vital to audit your site and correct these issues, if a page doesn't rank then its dead weight.

Amazing post. I'm in the process of making my own Authority site and I'm glad that I'm following the same strategy . I had doubts about ranking without backlinks and your cleared it .

Now, to the questions

1 - If I get it right, for social part, you create accounts and use it to like your own articles and also comment them.

2 - I prefer using pages over posts while structuring my sites. I also prefer to Silo my sites as much as I can. Homepage-->Silo Pages---> Article Page and a lot of interlinking

3 - Would you prefer writing 2500 words about one keyword covering its all long tails ( Wikipedia style ) or dividing them into 3 articles for the sake of the reader ?

4 - I would love to hear about the outcome of this authority sites. When to expect income return, How much ?

- I know it depends on a lot of variables.. But for 50 articles written in one month and monetized with Adsense. This would be 3 - 5 articles per day?

- Another example, How much does it take to hit 100$/day .. with the same example enough

Or just let me how do you calculate your earning and the timeframe you set .. When you add your Ad block .. etc

While optimizing my site a question came up I wanted to ask. Do the keywords in the website's page title, meta keywords, and meta description factor into the keyword density of the page? If so, how many often would you recommend using a keyword in the meta keywords section?

Right now I have it in there three times for specific long tails, such as "keyword," "buy keyword," "city keyword." Should I cut those out?

Lastly, I'm not running this on Wordpress, would I have to manually ping my site on Google to have it updated? Or would the crawler get to it anyway?

Thanks.

I am currently in the process of adding google authorship to my authority site. Do you have any recommendations for making sure the picture of the author will show up in SERPS, besides having the code properly inserted on the page?

Great guide phpbuilt.

BTW, do you build majority of links to homepage or do you build majority of links to the Article page?

Thank You

Hey read your awesome blog post.

But I have something interesting and looking for qualified people to take a look.

Basically, a few very large sites use these "shit" links to rank for extremely competitive keywords.

I am wondering how and where are they getting these built?

Got a skype? I think you might find it interesting.

I can't pm you my skype :S shits full after post

waiting with baited breath for your next article on creating a high PR blog network..

any idea when we can expect this?

KHer0 said:

1 - If I get it right, for social part, you create accounts and use it to like your own articles and also comment them.

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Yes. Your site needs some social interaction. Its extremely weird to have a blog that accepts comments but has zero -- so I create Gravatar accounts and make comments on my own pages. Each gravatar account is hooked up with a Google+ account, twitter, pinterest -- I'll get more into that in a future post, but these accounts will individually post images from my site on different pinterest accounts, they'll retweet, comment on posts in their individual Google+ accounts, etc.

KHer0 said:

2 - I prefer using pages over posts while structuring my sites. I also prefer to Silo my sites as much as I can. Homepage-->Silo Pages---> Article Page and a lot of interlinking

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That's fine. A silo infrastructure should keep keyword injection from the template at a minimum.

KHer0 said:

3 - Would you prefer writing 2500 words about one keyword covering its all long tails ( Wikipedia style ) or dividing them into 3 articles for the sake of the reader ?

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Articles get love until they rank. They start at 400ish words to 1000 words, whatever came naturally -- putting more effort into more difficult keywords. I'll add content to pages that don't rank well, and I'll leave them alone if they rank fine (even if they're only 400 words).

The thing is -- the more words you have, the easier it is to bypass getting "filtered". More words seems to give your page an ability to accept more direct backlinks with exact anchor text. So as you are auditing your site, add to the content of a page if it needs it.

KHer0 said:

4 - I would love to hear about the outcome of this authority sites. When to expect income return, How much ?

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This entirely depends. Entirely. You can have two websites sitting next to each other, both have content that is just as well written, just as many pages, and the first one might make 10 times more money than the second one -- just because the products it focused on give 10 times more profit when they sell. Though I don't do alot of adsense, that would equate into how well you picked your keywords for how much money advertisers want to pay to have an ad on your type of page.

Monetizing is a big deal. I fight for every visitor I can get -- simply because I know with my business model, the keywords I hit, the products I sell ... if I get a visitor from Google it's worth around 15 cents to me with the niches I chase after and the profit I expect from the products I write about (regardless if they buy or not). If I get 100 visitors its $15 in my pocket. 1000 is $150. Thats what it averages out to.

That's not outrageous for product-focused ecommerce type sites. The traffic is worth more, but its harder to get. You should know what the traffic you get is worth, calculate it out -- it'll inspire you to work hard for your traffic.

KHer0 said:

- I know it depends on a lot of variables.. But for 50 articles written in one month and monetized with Adsense. This would be 3 - 5 articles per day?

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Again depends on your niche, and I don't do much adsense -- I prefer to focus on products. If you're chasing after adsense you need a lot more visitors to make money.

KHer0 said:

- Another example, How much does it take to hit 100$/day .. with the same example enough

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You asked the same question 3 times in a row, worded differently

Nobody can predict for you how much you'll make. You'll only learn by doing it and then refining your processes.

Regarding section#2 when looking if your keywords are in the top 200 do you check each manually? Search the term and just scroll through the first 10 pages? or is there a program you use to check this?

sampo1time said:

Regarding section#2 when looking if your keywords are in the top 200 do you check each manually? Search the term and just scroll through the first 10 pages? or is there a program you use to check this?

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I'll write 10 articles and in 2 or 3 days I'll go to Google and 1 by 1, I'll manually type in the unique words in the titles of the articles I wrote. That includes both the keyword I want to rank for, as well as some unique words I put in the title. If any of those articles isn't ranked top 20, I know it is penalized and I re-edit it. I do this manually.

After that I'll take whatever articles I wrote from the previous batch that failed and I'll search for the unique words in their titles and re-edit them if they're still overoptimized.

All that is manual. Doing 10 or 13 manual searches isn't that big of a deal when you're making sure your articles are indexed properly.

Long term though, I use software to track where rankings are. I made my own scripts for this, but there's plenty of software out there for tracking keywords, try serpbook.com.

Can the unique word in the title be the brand name of the site? Or is that too unique and destroys the whole purpose of checking for over optimization?

I have a query..is it a problem if all my posts and pages have titles that consist of the site name in the end?
page1 title | site name
page2 title | site name
etc

i've cut down the kw density, but it still doesn't appear anywhere after 2 days. I guess it's not just the density but alot more other metrics involved.

phpbuilt said:

Buy authority sites from a service? You mean buy the expired domains from a service? Yeah I do ... I'll be writing a post all about it. I buy domains for my own network and I've worked with several SEO services who buy expired domains. That's not something I can easily explain in this response, I'll be writing a full 5000ish word post about it soon enough.

For my own personal projects I write my own articles, and I write my own tier 1. But I've managed blog networks and I hire out content too -- I don't prefer doing that though. I've also worked with SEO companies who have auto generated their blog content -- so I've got a lot of experience with it, with both aged domains and freshly bought domains.

Writing comes easy enough for me, the original post was 5000 words and it probably took me 2 hours to type it up. A properly made authority site is valuable enough to do it myself -- that way I know its being done right and it'll be a money source for years (or flip it for many thousands).

Just stay tuned, my next post will be about web2.0s and then I'll explain about blog networks after that.

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OK thanks will be looking for your next threads.

One more question for you.

What settings are you using on "All in One SEO Pack" like for "Page Title Format" do you leave it at "%page_title% | %blog_title%" ?

waitier said:

i've cut down the kw density, but it still doesn't appear anywhere after 2 days. I guess it's not just the density but alot more other metrics involved.

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Skype me if you want me to check it out. Skype is phpbuilt

ch8878 said:

OK thanks will be looking for your next threads.

One more question for you.

What settings are you using on "All in One SEO Pack" like for "Page Title Format" do you leave it at "%page_title% | %blog_title%" ?

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Really only thing I do with All in One is click noindex/follow on categories. I don't change tags because I don't use tags. I don't modify anything else, so yeah my page title format is what you described.

It should be noted that the blog title is my brand name, not an EMD (though sometimes it has a keyword in it). If you have an EMD and your blog is named after the emd -- its really easy to trip the overoptimization penalty. In that case I'd probably remove the blog title from pages.

I don't like to use EMDs anymore, I like to come up with quirky and odd names that are memorable and brandable ... but they do contain a keyword if its easy to make it brandable.

Boy o Boy, This post is treasure. Thanks alot man you definitely scratched it all.

I was also wondering about the density and duplication but was not sure if it matters and how to properly manage it, but you show the way clearly.

One question though.. Will this duplication & density also matters on ecommerce site ... like suppose i have shoe site... and it has multiple section Nike shoes, camel shoes, sheplers shoes, etc ... and each sub section have different styles & colors i.e. Nike Red Shoe, Nike Jaguar Shoe, bla bla, Sheplers Long Shoes, Sheplers short boots, Sheplers cowboy shoes..... I guess you got the point.

So should I categorize them as you said giving example of fancy widgets as Shoe main section ... then Nike, Jaguar, Sheplers and in sub section ... red, long, short, etc etc .....

I was only thinking that It can give more value as longtail if someone would be searching for sheplers Long Red Boots. Whats your thought on it considering an ecommerce site.

Also I am anxiously waiting for your next mother of all web2 post ... for blog network. Really looking forward to it and hope you don't keep us waiting for too long.

_Chip_ said:

I have a query..is it a problem if all my posts and pages have titles that consist of the site name in the end?
page1 title | site name
page2 title | site name
etc

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That depends on what the site name is.

If the site is "bestfishinglures.org" I'd be cautious of using "Best Fishing Lures" as a site name. Then you can't really name an article with either fishing or lures or it would look like this "Where can I get Fishing Lures Online | Best Fishing Lures" (on url) bestfishinglures.org/where-can-i-get-fishing-lures-online. That whole thingie mentions fishing lures four times in powerful on-page SEO places (title and url) ... that puts the page dangerously into overoptimization already from that alone.

c4cancer79 said:

One question though.. Will this duplication & density also matters on ecommerce site

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Ecommerce sites are no different than blogs when it comes to overoptimization. By default, they usually fail basic SEO by using a significant amount of duplicate content from product descriptions, and containing little by means of other types of content, other than keywords injected for categories, subcategories, etc.

But, there's a reason ecommerce stores are set up the way they are. They provide the best customer experience. People aren't trying to read that much when they're shopping, they want pictures. If they're looking for a specific product they already know they want -- they don't need to read anything about it.

The bottom line is that blog content ranks better -- but ecommerce stores convert better. I've done a lot of testing with this ... if I have people check out directly from my blog the orders are usually less than $100. If I get them to the store, they add products and the orders average over $100 typically.

So here is what you do.

Keep your store awesome and have it be a wonderful shopping experience, and forget about SEO on it if you have no other option than to display duplicate content. Personally, my store is nofollow/noindex and I prefer Google doesn't even know its there -- because if it knew I had a ton of duplicate content on my domain it might penalize me.

Then I create a blog that supports the store. One by one I identify the keywords I want to rank for -- and when someone shows up via SEO, my primary goal is to get them off my blog and onto the store. I don't cloak 301 redirect someone arriving from Google, but pretty much 80% of what they could possibly click on takes them to my store.

That's the way I do it, and I feel its the most productive and successful way of doing it.