The Nexus Feed your brain …

Exact Match Domains are they still working well after the ‘Panda’ Update?

Well I set off to find out at the beginning of this month and I suggest you go and read the first part of the casestudy to get the importance of EMD’s, why we should or have been using them and how I setup the experiment.

Where we left off and where we are now

On the 13th of March the rankings were as follows:

And on the 28th of March they were this:

What we can see is that Google rankings have settled down to what it was on the 10th of March once the new EMD had replaced The Nexus’s listing. Further the rankings for Bing (I omitted Yahoo as well B and Y share results now) also jumped up a nice few positions to the top 5.

This seemed by looking at Google Analytics’s ‘Intelligence’ Data to have happened around the 26th where a 48% increase was seen in pages views (and around 27% increase in visits).

You will notice that the article (the one I 301′d over) accounts for 91.4% of the sites traffic, why I bring this metric up? Well it means almost 10% is coming to the videos section which was created using my Automated Video Sites technique , proving 2 things:

1) Dupe Content still brings traffic
2) Automation still works and RANKS for longtail traffic.

Further Rankings

Now when I set the site up; I did a bit more KW research and plonked it in for tracking as well, while I have no data historical data on the KW’s it was nice to see them slowly rising to.

Links!!

Since the EMD went live it has also garnered its own links. Why are links so great especially for a EMD’s ?

Well some people don’t use anchor texts! Which we all know is a vital link ingredient, the benefit with EMD’s is even if they link to you devoid of all anchors i.e. http://domain.tld your keywords are still in there! which is great

Conclusion

Considering that while the the post was on The Nexus it always hovered around 4-5 mark and since the 301 to the EMD the EMD has bounced around from 2-5. Hopefully with some more natural links (as it seems to be getting on its own) it will get to the no1 spot and beat that damn wiki!

Also since the EMD it has also started picking up a fair bit of Long Tail queries to, so +1 to EMD’s.

Caveat

While looking at the results after just a month we can ‘conclude’ by looking at the results that the EMD did have an effect on rankings and bumped it up about 3 spots (and we know how hard it is to increase ranking within the top 10).

The one ‘flaw’ in the experiment was the setup of the Automated function to keep the site updated. The aim of this was to keep the site crawled at least once a week. The issue being it added its own weight to the domain which (unlikely at a month old) could lend some authority.

The counter to this caveat being we were tracking the posts ranking not the sites as a whole and therefore it did not play a part in the effecting the posts ranking.

So to sum up:

1) EMD = Seem to add a little extra push to the rankings.
2) A Targeted site can rank for more longtails.
3) Automated Video Sites can still work.

So keep EMD’s in the arsenal or at the least domain names that contain your main keywords.

Over to you, how are your EMD’s doing? and Will you buy a few for your Arsenal?

(Check out my Resource Page for a  Market Samurai Promo Code and a Namecheap Coupon two vital tools that will help you FIND and SAVE on EMD’s)

Popularity: 1% [?]

I touched upon the importance of Domain Authority and TLD unimportance before and thought hey lets have a crack at Exact Match Domains (EMD’s).

Now i’m not going to rehash what EMD’s are, why they are great and ‘oh so powerful’ as its been done loads of times. Cliff notes version:

• EMD’s Target ONE primary keyword
• EMD’s can take more keyword links as it is its domain name.
• EMD’s have little to no ‘Brand Value’

Due to the points above EMD’s are seen as Gold Mines for Niche Sites and during Niche Research it is an common to grab a EMD on your primary keyword (there are tools that help you find these) as they tend to rank faster.

(Images from SeMoz)

Mr Cutts himself has this say on the EMD v Brand Topic (7th March 2011):

Now if you are still on the fence, let me just give you a bit of color. that we have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, & some people have complained that we are giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. So we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it. – Matt Cutts

So while I recongise from reading (and past experience) that EMD’s work well, though G has been saying possible devaluing them. So then I thought lets give em a shot after the new G update and see if they work still and ofc keep a tally of the results.

The Test

I’ve had one post on the The Nexus that had been getting a few thousand hits a month. This traffic was not ‘on topic’ and was not really monetised in any way.

Though it garnered some natural links to it, a few hundred comments and was stuck on #4 in Google for its primary keyword ‘How to use Cheat Engine‘ and had been stuck on that position for months.

In other words the perfect candidate to see if porting the post to a EMD for the primary keyword would have an effect.

The Setup

During the period I would be building NO extra links to the site at all (or after the period even) so to try and determine the EMD’s power.

I setup the new site http://howtousecheatengine.com on the 01/03/2011 and ported the post over. I did a 301 redirect from the original to the new post.

Between the 5-6th I did a bit of tinkering with on site setup and ported the comments over.

I setup up an ‘video’ section using a method similar to the one detailed in my Automated Video Sites post and set it to post a new video every day to keep the site ‘active’ and ‘spidered’.

Initial Results

After the post was 301′d there was a drop in ranking for Broad match across the board, though the Phrase match jumped up to #2 for Google (which is always a good indication of where Broad match will reappear).

So the 301 was picked up within hours it seems though the site did not appear in the SERPS quite then.

Now if you compare the above screenshot with this one, you will see on the 7th is when the new site appeared in the SERPS in Google and by the 10th The Nexus’s listing to the page was replaced by the new sites which was now at #2 in Google though still suffering from a drop in Yahoo and Bing.

Also a side effect I noticed was that the secondary keyword ‘cheat engine tutorial’ Also saw an increase.

Conclusion

On the 13th of March the ranking for the site were as follows:

Just to clarify what you are seeing the ‘top’ line is for the redirected post and the second is for the domain itself.

The 301′d Url is still bouncing around in the SERPS and seems not have settled, though compared to last week the rankings in Bing and Yahoo are on the rise again.

We also see that the actual domain name has started ranking for the Primary keyword to, appearing in the SERPS in the mid 80′s. Hopefully when it starts garnering some more natural links we can aim for the ‘double listing’ somewhere.

The question is then do EMD’s still work? well in 2 weeks time we have seen a ‘new’ site hit mid 80′s in the SERPS with no link building (though a natural link has appeared) and the 301′d post seems to have bounced up a bit in G as well. The answer? well lets see in 2 weeks time where it stands!

What are you experiences with EMD’s? Are they easier to rank?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Now back in 2005 or so one key way to ‘retain’ link juice to your site or ‘money pages’ was to no follow any external links and in essence sculpt it to the essential pages.

However in mid-2009 Google said ‘wait a min, that wont work now, nofollow means = link juice is just wasted’. Jeff from Perishable Press talked a bit how to deal with Google’s no-follow policy, though while you can use those methods. Here are a few more that may be worth some implementation to help plug some ‘leaks’.

Though First…..

What IS ‘Link Juice’?

Essentially “link juice” is the flow of link power that runs through your website and out of it. Ideally we would want to optimise the flow of it through our site and tailor our links to get the best out of this flow.

Why should we care about ‘flow’? Well in an interview in March Matt Cutt said:

The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well.

This meaning the pages you link to (i.e. number of links per page) effect what gets crawled by GBot.

One Quick indication of your flow can be seen using SEO Doctor a plugin for Firefox:

Link Flow for The Nexus Home Page

Sites are given certain ‘authority’ i.e. a default value. This is then added to and to an extent taken away from by giving and getting links to that site. That is why Domain (and page) Authority should play a role in your link building and why Parasite Hosts linkbuilding is so effective.

So we are happy building links to our site; gaining in SERPs by getting higher Page and Domain Authority. Though are we hampering our efforts? what is leaking links on our site and how can we improve it?

Well read below I try and cover as much as I can on Plugging the Link Leaks in your site.

Canonicalization

The most common ‘leak’ in a site is courtesy of non-canonicalization (say that 3 times fast). Namely have your site on both http://www.thesite.tld and http://thesite.tld. They are treated as two different sites. (Government sites especially always seem to have this issue.)

To fix this issue it is now MUCH simpler then before. Just open up your WordPress Settings and ensure you have the url set there. Doing this will make WordPress automagically redirect http://www.site.tld/post to http://site.tld/post (or vice versa).

I would suggest you also check out Ana’s post on this as the comments have a fair bit of troubleshooting in them.

There is more to be said about canonicalization, but as this guide is tailored to WordPress you do not need to worry about it, as a competent SEO plugin would handle it all for you.

Meta Widget

Now this image will be familiar to a lot
of you. It is the default Meta Widget on all WordPress blog sites.

Now this widget appears on every single page of your website and in honest fact it is a redundant widget.

In most cases the ‘Entries RSS’ has been replaced by your own Feedburner or aWeber or MailChimp etc feed, or a call to action to subscribe elsewhere. So this is not needed anymore.

For ‘Comments RSS’, most blogs I have come across now have the ‘subscribe to comments’ plugin, so again this is not needed.

The ‘Log in’. Well that’s up to you. I personally just use “http://thesite.tld/wp-admin” as that is the universal Log In screen for WordPress so I would suggest removing it!

Lastly the WordPress.org link. Now if you do want to accredit WordPress you can always add their link to your BlogRoll and for the purposes of this post I would suggest scraping the whole widget to stop you leaking ‘link juice’ to 4 links on EVERY PAGE of your site!

Broken Links

Now that we know each link passes juice, if its dofollow to the site and if it’s nofollow to OBLIVION!!! One other thing that ‘wastes link juice’ are Broken Links.

Now there are two main ways I try and combat broken links and I’ll explain each in turn below.

Broken Links Plugin

The plugin checks for broken links / images in your posts and tells you about them.

Broken Link Dashboard

Nice easy to read display. One word of caution though, because it searches automatically some servers don’t blame game and you get some false positives. So verify if the links are broken by clicking on them to check.

Using Google Webmaster

Among the mired tools that Google provides one is Google Webmaster. It has MANY uses that would require longer posts than this to go through every function and every use, heck may need a book.

Though for the purposes of this post we need to look at ‘crawl errors’ section of the tool.

The two areas we have to pay attention to is the ‘Not Found’ and ‘Unreachable’ headings. (You should check the robot.txt section to, so you can ensure nothing is blocked that shouldn’t be).

I would suggest crawl down to the bottom and download it all as a CSV and go through it.

Errors that come up range from links to deleted pages (in my case tags I deleted) to misspelt links from other websites.

To plug these leaks the easiest way is to setup a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. The essential line would be as follows:

redirect 301 /the-link-that-it-says-is-not-found http://the-redirect-url.tld

Note that you do not enter ‘http://the-site.tld/the-link-that-it-says-is-not-found’ . You take the first bit out, BUT do add it to the end URL where you want the redirect to go to.

I would suggest you redirect it to a relevant post or sitemap so to effectively funnel the link to increase a pages authority.

The RSS Button

The RSS Button is again on all the pages, do you really need it there? Some people have subscription boxes on the sidebar (like I do) or after each post. If you are one of these people then you don’t need this to be present.

Do note though Keep both email subscriptions and RSS feed options available as a fair number of people use RSS readers.

The way to remove the dupe depends in your theme. Though it most likely resides in your header.php file.

My one looked like this:

<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”>RSS</a>

If  this seems a bit techie for you I suggest you get some help. I only know if one techie, whose customers love her, so give Kim a shout.

The alternative is to keep the icon in place but block its crawling by your robot.txt files. Check out the following article for an ideal snapshot of what yours should looks like and some information about  WordPress Robot Rules.

The ‘Home’ Button

Now a lot of people have two links to their homepage from EVERY page. One is generally their header image and the other is a link similar to what follows:

Wassup Blog Menu

The problem with this is that the link from every page has an Anchor Text that says ‘Home’ and as we know the best links should have keyword Anchor Texts, so this needs a change. (Not picking on you Sire just had your Blog open when drafting this).

What we should do then is change the Anchor from ‘Home’ to something ‘better’. Akin to this:

The Nexus Menu

I know not great but hey maybe I can rank for my blog name now :p Though be creative.

To make this change again it is dependant on your theme and most likely resides in your header.php, mine looked like this:

<a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”>The Nexus Home Page</a></li>

Again if your not comfortable doing this yourself grab a techie!

The ‘Read More’ link

I have just started to use excerpts on The Nexus,  I used to get ‘Read More’ written under it courtesy of this tidbit in my index.php file:

<?php the_content(‘Read More’); ?>

Now the Anchor ‘Read more’ Is useless and we are just wasting a linking opportunity.  Now for the majority of the time our ‘headlines’ for the post are keyword optimised. (Yes I know not in this post…I said MOST time :p) so it would be ideal to use them.

I would definitely suggest getting a techie for this as each theme has its unique pattern here and we don’t want to break anything. Saying that you will have to replace it with something along the lines of:

<?php the_content(‘<?php the_title(); ?>’); ?>”

Contact me / About / Privacy Policy / Partridge in a Pear Tree

Having a look at many sites you see that they have an About Page, Contact etc etc. Now the Hardcores would advocate to force these links on just the home page or add ‘Contact’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ etc as a link from your ‘About’ page so to restrict the Site Wide link  leak.

I however would say in the technical sense, yes it would be efficient to do this HOWEVER as a Blogger and a reader I would want these links to be easily accessible.

An example being many a time I have entered (90% I think) a Blog on an internal page and if I liked that post I would then hit the About Page, get to know more about the Author or Blog and possibly even contact him.

In regards to the Privacy Policy, if you are selling or have affiliate links on this / a post you have to let clients who come directly to the one in question that you are tracking them.

So to plug this leak what we do is noindex these pages. They are not directly relevant to your sites content so do not need to be in the serps.

This can easily be done with in the ‘edit post/page’ area in WordPress. Most SEO plugins give you this function, it will look something as follows:

Meta options in WordPress

Just hit ‘No Index’ and save the Page/post and your golden.

Archives

In my humble opinion like Meta information this is not needed on a website. Very rarely have I noticed people browsing the site via Monthly / Yearly Archives.

They are just a waste of space in your sidebar, leaking juice site wide again.

Archive Drop Down

Though this is not just a ‘link juice’ waste it can also be duplicate content, plus throw in pagination. and we have leakage! I’ll discuss a fix for this under the next heading.

Categories / Tags

You will see on every site that tags and categories appear on every single post. So every post links to at least 1 category and 1 post. i.e. it passes some ‘link juice’. What we need to do then is maximise their potential.

Now some advocates say pick one and noindex/nofollow the other. I disagree. I think you should pick your tags and categories carefully so when all this juice starts flowing to them the actual tag and category pages will start ranking.

As with tags your theme hopefully instead of giving the full posts provides excerpts for the posts. So not creating duplicate content and providing a link back to your related posts.

Pagination

Pagination creates urls like http://thesite.tld/category/page1 etc etc.

The problem with this is ‘link juice’ that should or could stay in one location is divided further. The quickest method to fix this is to get rid of pagination from comments, hompe page, archives, categories and tags.

For categories and tags the easiest way is to use this plugin by Maxblogpress. It allows you to set a different number of posts to display at different areas.

different post per page setting page

Set the amount so all your posts for each tag / category are displayed on one page and you are good to go.

The benefit of this is that every post in that category / tag will link back to that ONE page and that page will then link back and re distribute the ‘Link Juice’ throughout that page.

To remove pagination from the Homepage it a simple process of removing the code from your index.php. Mine looked like this:

<ul>
<li><?php next_posts_link(‘PREVIOUS POSTS’) ?></li>
<li><?php previous_posts_link(‘NEXT POSTS’) ?></li>
</ul>

again if you are not to techie ask for help.

In my opinion pages are not needed, as new posts will be on front so crawled via that and old pages are embedded via your category and tag pages. Not to mention your html / xml sitemaps. (you do have those right )

For comment pagination go to Settings > Discussion in your WordPress Dashboard and make sure the following is unselected.

This will keep all your comments on one page.

Conclusion

The above I hope are a number of areas in which I personally feel effect the flow of ‘Link Juice’ throughout your site. It may be overkill, it may not be a full list (if you have more let me know!), I know for one I have purposely avoided the loss of ‘Link juice’ via comments.

Some Further reading on the topic:

Link juice flow control – How posts with more links can be used to ‘power’ less linked posts.
Site structure for SEO – How to set up your site with SEO in mind (helps retain the juice).

Concluding thought, A WordPress site that is setup with SEO in mind and ‘flow’ is controlled within that site, throw in some good links and it is a VERY powerful SEO base for any project.

So keep in mind that ‘Link Juice’ flows from Off Site SEO, arguably the more important factor to your strategy as without incoming links, your site wont have much ‘juice’ to distribute!

Comment Below and Gets some Link Juice From Me

As a reminder to people who use CommentLuv to build links make sure your feed is setup correctly so not to loose ‘link juice’ that way . (The post is a bit dated but its still something to check in your settings in Feedburner/Feedproxy).

Popularity: 4% [?]

As we know links are the ‘life line’ of a site especially a Niche site (unlike PR as you can see The Nexus’s PR has dropped from PR5 to PR2 over the last 18 months of minimal posts and traffic is still growing). So we have to make every link we make count.

The Problem is now and again the site where you have your link or built your link is not in the SERPS yet. Which is common if you are using Social Bookmarking or ‘Profile’ links, and an unindexed page is worthless!

Well I found this cool website that help in this process Linkicious.me. I have been trialling it for a couple of days (at the time of this post) and I liked it so much it is on my resource page now. So lets hear their pitch.

Linklicious Pitch

(click to enlarge).



What it essentially does is shorten the links using a service like bit.ly and creates rss feeds to those links.

It then publishes the feed on a directory and ‘pings’ them so spiders come a knocking.

Why is pinging every single link important?

We make RSS feeds to group together our links so they are easy for Google to find. Unfortunately Google typically crawls less than 10% of the links in RSS feeds because those feeds aren’t deemed very important. With the premium services we also ping each individual link so Google crawls every single link. Once they are crawled, Google knows about your link and you get credit. If your links never get crawled, Google never knows about them so your time/effort/money is wasted!

Why do I need a service like this?

You spend a lot of time and money building links. Low value links (like forum profiles) tend to be overlooked, with Google finding less than 5% of them. That means you are wasting 95% of your time and money! This service packages your links together into tidy RSS feeds, launches them on a schedule you can define, then tells Google to “COME AND GET IT”! If you are going to the trouble of making links, use this service to make them count!

Sounds good but does it work?

Well pictures speak better then words so click below!

LinkLicious Results

So yes it does work! and for a casual webmaster (like I am) who does not spend much time or does not have much time to do link building or just doesn’t have a large portfolio of sites then the Free version is more than adequate and as you can see works very well.

So give linklicious.me a try you have nothing to lose!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Since men have been about there have been beards and since there have been beards men have tried to tame them! May it be because you need ‘that look’ for going out or work. or because your other half has said no more kisses until you sort it out!

So what I tried to do was grab three ‘leading’ products and give them a test over a period of 12 weeks. Here is what I found. (warning HUGE post).

The Trimmers

BaByliss For Men 7855U I-Trim Stubble+ Trimmer

This trimmer I picked up for about £50 from Argos when I started working full time. Dubbed the ‘UK’s leading Stubble Trimmer’ I had to give this one a shot.

Key Features

Allows you to set a length between 0.5mm and 15mm going up in 0.5mm

A foil attachment for ‘tidying up’ the edges and neck’

Quick charge giving you ’3 min of use on 5 min charge’ (or 90 min charge for 30min use

Advanced blade technology with electro-chemically sharpened blades for sharpness and durability

3 Year Guarantee

BaByliss For Men 7890U i-stubble Trimmer

The Newer kid on the block by Babyliss. This I picked up for about £38 from Amazon, Was keen to try this ‘improved’ version after having the old Babyliss for about 1 yr.

Key Features

0.4 -5.0mm going up in 0.2mm

Advanced blade technology with electro-chemically sharpened blades for sharpness and durability

A ‘Floating Head’ that moves to the contours of your face.

90min charge for a 45min use or a Quick Charge of 5min giving you use for a full shave,

3 Year Guarantee

Philips QT4050 Turbovac Rechargeable Vacuum Beard Trimmer Plus With Contour Following Comb

This is the leading ‘alternative’ I could find and picked it up for about £38 from Amazon, and the vacuum function had be intrigued.

Key Features

1 – 18mm going up in 1mm lengths

Built in vacuum

Contour following comb

Maintenance free blades

8hr charge for 50min use

2 year Guarantee

How I am going to test

I will be using the trimmers in turn twice weekly to keep it at my desired beard/stubble length (varying between 2.5mm and 3.5mm depending on area). I will be following the procedure in the videos below and will be keeping an eye on the following factors:

Price: Is it worth the price? or is a barber cheaper?

Blades: How good are the blades? and how easy can they be set to desired length?

Ease of Use: How easy is it to pick up and use? is it heavy? how does it feel in your hand?

Battery life Does the beard trimmer have a fast charge option? How long does a full charge last?

How to trim a beard

Step1 Let the trimmer do its thing!

How to trim a beard – Finishing off

Step 1
You have to get washcloth and wet it under some warm water.
Step 2
You lay the warm washcloth on the face so the heat can open up the pores.
Step 3
Take your razor (I suggest Gillette Mach 3 ) by hot water,  follow  the grain of the face.
With your neck area never shave upwards, you can get ingrown hairs!!
Step 4
Once all done dry up by LIGHTLY padding our face and put on some aftershave ( I use Nivea For Men After Shave Soothing Balm )


Conclusion

Price Price wise the trimmers range from about £33 – £40 with Phillips being the cheapest and the BaByliss For Men 7855U I-Trim Stubble+ Trimmer being the most expensive.
Though as compared to a barbers trip (about £10 each trip). I think even at the most expensive is worth the small jump in payment especially as the Guarantee for the BaByliss is 3 years compared to the Phillips 2 it doesn’t edge them out the game.

BaByliss 7855u: 3/5
BaByliss 7890u: 4/5
Phillips: 4/5

Blades All three trimmers had ‘self maintaining’ blades and some oil to keep going (though It was not really needed).

In regards to the setting lengths; as you can see by my earlier specification I had a ‘length’ in mind which I had decided on after a lot of trial and error and error and error.

In this test the 7890u was the best especially as the ‘micro tuning’ available allowed me to do the ’5 O’clock’ stubble look with ease. The Phillips however came in last due to the least variation allowed.

BaByliss 7855u: 4/5
BaByliss 7890u: 5/5
Phillips: 3/5

Ease of use The Phillips was unique here as it had a built in Vacuum to take care of hair flying around which was an issue with the BaByliss models. However the vacuum didn’t always ‘catch’ all the hair and while it was fine when I trimmed even once a week, if I let my beard grow a bit more I had to empty it a few times.

In regards to the ‘comb’ the BaByliss 7890u was the best, it worked perfectly with the ‘contours’ of my face with the Phillips coming in a close second.

BaByliss 7855u: 3/5
BaByliss 7890u: 5/5
Phillips: 4/5

Battery Life The Initial charge of the BaByliss was longer than the Phillips though the ‘Quick Charge’ and general ‘Full Blast’ The Babyliss 7890u came out on top.

BaByliss 7855u: 3/5
BaByliss 7890u: 5/5
Phillips: 4/5

Overall

BaByliss 7855u: 13/20
Phillips: 15/20
BaByliss 7890u: 18/20

While The Phillips Vacuum function was VERY useful the extra precision and better Battery life of the BaByliss 7890u made it my Beard Trimmer of choice. Though if you need less precision I suggest you go for the Phillips.

WINNER 18/20

Runner-up 15/20

Popularity: 1% [?]

Shocked at the title? Thinking i’ve gone nuts? Thinking the pressure got to me? Or I took cukoo pills this morning?

Well I’m RIGHT!

I’ve mentioned this before in an earlier post on characteristics of a good link my exact words were in fact:

In regards to .gov and .edu, im going to say in matters of TLD only no. They do not matter. A link for them is good yes, but only because those tlds are seen as ‘authority’ and garner loads of backlinks. So the authority passing from them is greater then a normal tld.

So in this post I just wanted to build on this topic a bit and just share some insight from the SEO Experts in the field.

Domain Authority and Links

There are ’3 main’ things we have to keep in mind Page Rank, Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Page Rank matters only in passing really, what we are after when we build links is Authority. This is why low PR pages can rank higher than you and why pages from High Domain Authority Sites can rank higher quickly.

A few Videos from Matt Cutts and SEOMoz dwelling deeper

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust & Authority from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Another nail in the coffin

Pictures talk a lot better then words at time; so here are a few.
(OpenSiteExplorer.com used for data)

.edu vs .com

.gov vs .com

Conclusion

Well as you can see The Nexus is mediocre in terms of Authority (nearing the 50% mark ! ) so a link from me will be of ‘some’ use but not to great. However looking at both the .gov and .edu in comparison to PerishablePress you can see that a link from Jeff’s front page would be worth ‘A lot’ more than the .edu and a bit more than the .gov.

When we are after ‘juice’ from the site we are not after its pagerank, no that can be a indication of authority yes but what we are after is an Authoritative link. A link that will say ‘Hey Google look i’m a respected site, I think this site is good too! look i’m linking to it!’

The reason why people say .gov and .edu sites are good because well look at the data from the .gov. It has a HUGE number of links from few sites, yet those sites are passing on authority to it because of their own high authority. Meaning because of the number and type of links .gov and .edu sites get they are generally high Authority sites and THAT is why they can be worth their weight in gold.

So when you are link building keep the links diverse and keep DA in mind. (SEO for firefox / SEmoz toolbar can show you this).

Popularity: 1% [?]

It’s a New Year…about 11 days in by the time this post goes live! We all have made goals, plans and objectives of what we wish to achieve. So without further ado and to hold myself accountable !

Personal Pursuits

Languages are a MUST have on the business world! the more you know the more useful of an asset you become.

Goal 1

Arabic is very poetic language and with growth still strong in the middle east and a fair chunk of the worlds wealth there I hope to start learning Arabic in 2012.

Arabic Calligraphy

As the alphabet and some phonetics is very similar to Urdu (Which I am Pro-efficent in) I think this should not be overly difficult to pick up. Coupled with the fact I can read the language already, due to the familiarities with Urdu I hope by 2012 to complete Book 2 of the Madinah University Syllabus. With a Private tutor set and a 2hr lesson  every Sunday I feel I can achieve this goal.

Goal 2

With France just a spit throw away and having studied French oh so long ago I think it is time for a brushup.

So grabbing my old French G.C.S.E textbook, and some past papers (courtesy of friendly teachers) I hope to repeat, revise and revisit. With the goal of getting through the book. as well as score consistently high on the exam papers before Summer this year.

Goal 3

Just a year of being a desk jockey and being short of time to do any physical activities i’ve started to notice that i’m getting a bit chubby! (though thankfully i’ve been the same weight for the last 5 odd years even on a diet of junk junk and more junk! – something that REALLY cheeses of all my females mates and family!).

Even though I have been training at home for 2-3 hrs a week I need to shift it up a gear, and stay consistent. So from Monday 10th January I along with two mates will be taking up the Bodybuilding.com 12 week challenge. Following a strict diet plan and workout regime.

Online Goals

Goal 1

Passive Income! During 2009-2010 I sold of all my online assets (the last of my Automated Video Sites went in Q4 of 2010).  So my goal for this year is that by 2012 have $500 per month of passive income.

My attack plan is as follows:

Promote my old hub on Plans For Sheds hopefully help it in the rankings a bit, it is more or less nowhere! it gets a trickle now and again though income wise…think its made $20 is 16 or so months.

My aim is to make it hit no.1 for its main keyword ‘Plans For Sheds’. It is sitting on position 28 at the moment so a fair bit of work to do!

Step 2 is to create Niche Sites (of course). I will be focusing on sites following the Golden Rules and detailing my progress is here.

I will be also 301′ing some of my ‘useless’ posts from here to a hubpage with the same content. So ‘how to use a cheat engine’ and ‘mafia wars items’ which get a LOAD of traffic but are not adsense monetised will hopefully get me some cash.

Goal 2

Posts! I have been very haphazard with my posts here so I will be trying to get one out every fortnight … a USEFUL one hopefully!

Goal 3 MY EVEREST

My goal is to get no.1 for a competitive term. Namely Rank my Resources page for the keyword Hostgator Coupon.

Why that term you ask? well just look at the data below.

You can see that it is getting a decent amount of exact daily searches (217) 90+ CTR for 1st position is expected. Meaning about that many people are looking for a coupon for hostgator hopefully because they are or are about to buy a hosting plan from hostgator.

Putting it a different way we have (we hope) 217 POTENTIAL BUYERS looking for the coupon daily. Now taking my past experience on board and diluting it with what others have written and some wishful thinking. If I get a 1% conversion rate every day (once i’m on no1) I should be getting 1 sale a day. With the Hostgator affiliate programme this would mean $50 a day or $1500 a month! which is almost my salary!

How i’m going to do this?

Well my strategy will be slowly revealed in further posts. I just hope it works because its going to be tough to hit no.1 and then stay there.

P.S. Any ‘help’ appreciated

Over to you

So what are your plans, aspirations and goals for this year? what is YOUR Everest?

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