Finally, a part of life where being thin isn’t better anymore!
I’ve been spending some time reading about the interesting world of niche and “authority” sites lately. I never would have delved so deep if Google had never laid the smackdown. Everybody kept talking about the latest carnage, so I just had to pay attention. The idea is to create a site that focuses on a target keyword to start earning some advertisement revenue while doing little to maintain after launch. There are probably millions of sites out there with just a couple of posts waiting to be found.
I actually love the idea of kicking back and doing nothing to make money. But darn it, it took me 13 years of saving, investing, and waking up at the crack of dawn to be able to do nothing! Our niche site friends were able to make some nice coin in just months, if not days. Genius! I respect anybody who puts in the effort to arbitrage inefficiencies in a market. They are much better than those who sit at home complaining why they aren’t rich while doing nothing about it!
I can barely keep up writing for two or three blogs a week so I was scratching my head when I met folks who have 20, 30, 75, and even 200 blogs! To start, isn’t that a crap load of annual domain registration fees to pay? What about the process of updating sites one by one? Brutal! As it turns out, almost all the content is outsourced, and there isn’t much new content once the initial posts are published. The hope of having an exact domain site, or even a partial domain site to attract Google’s attention with little content flew out the window.
LEARNING FROM THE CARNAGE
It’s horrible to lose income after spending so much time working on a site(s). Many webmasters have reported a 60-70% drop in income overnight. Google is a sharp, double-edged sword that allows us to flourish or flounder when their algorithms dictate. I really do wish the best for everyone who have been adversely affected by the latest Penguin, Panda, EMD updates. The amount of power Google has is truly concerning.
Let’s put together a list of things we need to do and understand in order to minimize our risks of disappearing.
* Write thick, meaty, juicy, content. Thin content is out, thick content is in. Say it with me! If you have a problem with being overly verbose and repeating yourself over and over again, you’ve ironically found yourself in a good situation! Now all you’ve got to do is write more succinctly. In this ADD world, not many people can read a 1,500 word post in one sitting. However, if you are desperately looking for help via search, you can’t get enough! Think about the last health scare you had. When you searched online, how awesome was it to read something that went on and on about solutions to your potential problem? How frustrating was it to consistently see thin posts with no substance? Search traffic is huge. Cater to it as you get into the immediate stages of blogging. Don’t forget to include your voice.
* There are no sustainable shortcuts. It’s very tempting to assume that all you have to do is register a domain name that has some keywords you’re targeting, publish a couple posts, repeat over 100 times and voila, big bucks! The problem is, Google knows everything, and my friends at Google tell me this everytime we battle on the poker table! If you are Google, your job is to provide the best content on the web for a particular search phrase. There’s only so many results that can show up on page one. If bad results show up frequently enough, users are going to switch to Yahoo or Bing (hope these guys do better!), and Google will start losing advertising business. Take the shortcut mindset and throw it out your window. You might end up wasting way more time trying to take the easy route than if you took the hard route as many webmasters recently discovered.
* Realize the reality of your writing. Everybody thinks their writing is great. The reality is, we’re probably much worse writers than we are, myself included. Read any page of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to realize how limited our skills are compared to the greats. The best way to find out whether you are resonating with your readers is by discovering which are your 10 most commented posts, and which are your 10 most visited posts by search. These posts are the intersection of potentially good writing and good recognition. See what you did right with these posts and continue iterating along these lines.
* Introduce multi-media content. WordPress makes it easy to add videos, graphics, and podcasts. Given Google owns YouTube and Google+, it wouldn’t hurt to add such items. Experiment with what works. Work on your strengths. If you have a horrible voice, forget podcasting. If you can’t shine for the camera, forget video. Focusing on your core competency is important for any successful venture.
* Build a brand. When was the last time you wrote a value proposition for your site? It’s important to build a brand to stand out from the crowd. Financial Samurai is a personal finance site geared towards a higher income group looking to reach financial independence sooner rather than later. Yakezie is a personal finance network that is focused on community service. What does your brand say? Google deemphasizing exact match domains for sites that have deep contact on the particular search subject.
* Push on through to the other side. I firmly believe most people who fail give up too soon. They aren’t able to push through the initial slow growth phase. I used the Alexa toolbar as a way to keep me motivated to breakthrough 200,000 my first six months whenever nobody gave me the time of day. It was just me and my girl Alexa encouraging me to not stop. Now I’ve got a portfolio of a thousand posts that will continue to bring in traffic and revenue for years to come without having to do anything. Use whatever it takes to help you on your path. Google and the likes will continue to adjust their algorithms to bring traffic to the best content on the web.
HOW BAD DO YOU WANT IT?
I’m willing to bet anybody that if they publish over 3,500 words a week of focused, original content for 152 consecutive weeks their sites will get at least 2,000 pageviews a day while earning $1,000 or more a month online. Search engines will love your useful posts that can solve people’s problems for years to come. Your authority builds to the point where trust flourishes. You might get to the point where you no longer are scared of losing everything from Google, because you provide so much value.
There’s a new Yakezie Challenge through New Year which encourages Challengers to write over 5,000 words a week. The idea is to fight our laziness during the holidays, put in the effort while others are playing, prove those who call us “lucky” wrong, and reap the rewards in the future when our posts get picked up by search. We aren’t writing for the sake of just writing. The content shall be purposeful, helpful, and focused around our expertise. If you’re interested in getting thick with content, you can find the 5,000 Word Yakezie Challenge right here. I’ll be highlighting the Challengers accomplishments in the New Year!
Looking to learn how to start your own profitable website? Check out my step-by-step guide on how to start a blog. It’s one of the best things I did in 2009 to help earn extra money and break free from Corporate America!
You did get this spot on and I can completely relate these points to what happened to me! I thought I was lucky but in fact I was doing what I usually do: I was ‘overworking’ things (none of the animal updates affected me adversely). Which means that I have juicy content (won’t accept even guest and sponsored posts that are not meaty), never took shortcuts (always saw building my blog like building a house – you don’t start from the roof; and certainly don’t decorate before finishing the walls). Only two months ago I said that I am a writer (and I publish loads in academic journal, have co-authored several books etc.); don’t believe I’ll ever say that I am good or great – this will stop me striving for improvement. And it seems I am past the dip. So let’s see what happens next.
Glad you’re part of the Challenge Maria. Let’s see how things go indeed. I’m sure you will do well!
“Content is king with Google” and I’ve always said quality over quantity is far better. Im personally not that confident about my writing which hampers my efforts, but I try to write at least 1,000 words per article and write 3 – 4 times a week.
From what I read the website value grows the more we write which gives it the authority the more people come to it. I’m currently taking part in the Yakezie challenge and moved from 2million on Alexa to 350,000. My goal is the get under 200,000 before the 6 months is up.
Content has always been king with Google, but there have always been a lot of websites that know how to manipulate their sites to succeed. They play on the edge and most of them will get caught. I just remember when some of the biggest content websites got hit with Panda and they didn’t know what to do. They were producing 100 articles a day, but they were all worthless at best. I don’t cry for them. I have to focus on my content and online marketing techniques.
I’ve never heard of “spun content” until this EMD update happened a month ago. Apparently, there are people or software that can write a post 500 different ways quickly!
How the hell does one produce 100 articles a day? It’s amazing!
I’m SO glad Google finally caught up with those people that used outsourcing and content spinning along with multiple layers of web 2.0 websites created solely to create links back to their “important” revenue generating sites. Reading about that sort of thing just wanted to make me hurl. The sad part is, there was a lot of good people doing these things too because as soon as one person uses these grey areas to get ahead and trounce you in the search rankings, you have to do something similar to keep up or perish … or wait for Google to finally get with the program and punish these suckers.
Thing that irks me is I have an exact match domain but I’ve never written anything other than thick content. Because my domain is exact and my market is smaller (Canada), I’ve received the short end of the stick from Google because my site appears to be over optimized because natural links that come into my site look unnatural to Google and highly focused on a small set of keywords.
Just can’t win! I’m the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater it seems.
Hi Mate,
You saying that HowtoSaveMoney.ca got hit by the key words “how to save money”? Were you ranking especially well for this term in the first place? The good thing is, you’ve got thick content and should rank with money other keywords no?
70% drop in some folks traffic is a lot, but I guess it could have been worse at 100% of search traffic.
Yup I used to rank in the top 1-3 (in Canada) before Panda hit. Things got worse when the EMD update hit. Main problem is my backlink profile sucks because I’m terrible at building backlinks.
Therefore, without a lot of random backlinks to water down my backlink profile it is very easy for my site to look over optimized especially because many of my natural links contain the “how to save money” keyword.
Now I have trouble making it onto the first page for any keyword related to saving money and at one time I was dropped completely out of the top 100 (content scrapers were ranking higher for my keywords than I was). Not only that but they penalized all my search terms. I lost over 80% of my traffic from Google, which at one time was quite substantial. It has never really recovered. I’m still down about 80% from where I once was and its been a long time now.
Never participated in any grey hat or black hat SEO techniques either … not even close.
Are you starting to look at YouTube and Google+ more? Will we see some videos from you soon?
Definitely considering it. I need to practice first though. In the meantime, check out the new, relevant Youtube video in the post!
I used to get mad thinking about all of the algorithm changes and such but there’s no point in getting upset because they are never going to stop and I don’t like staying mad. Maybe I think I’m a better writer than I actually am like everyone has a tendency to do, but I think the vast majority of my posts aren’t considered thin or low quality. It would suck to have a 70% drop overnight, yikes!
Your posts are definitely high quality Sydney, so I would never worry. You should see some of the posts I’ve seen on these niche “authority” sites. It’s ridiculously laughable. But, if they can make some money during the process, then more power to them!
Thanks Sam! Yeah, it’s almost frustrating that sites with such bad content have been making so much. But poor content isn’t sustainable!
First off, very cute dog!!
Now onto this serious Google stuff. I’m with you totally on the fact that content is king. Even though I don’t consider myself a good writer, generally my posts are anywhere between 800-1200 words – up to 4 times per week. Probably about 10% of my articles are between 1200-2200 words. Sometimes I just can’t shut up!
What makes me laugh is some blogs that are very focused on promotion of others through 1-2 weekly roundups, and 1-2 sponsored posts and maybe at best one solid post that was written barely hitting 1000 words. I personally lost interest, and don’t really care for it.
As much as our niche (PF) is dull most of the time, there are ways to keep pumping out solid posts. In my opinion, everyone starts off in good faith to blog to help others, then the focus shifts to earning $$$, and that’s when content starts to fall off.
I’ve said it before, and will say it again….I’m comfortable with my income, and if I add up all the hours I spend in a given week over 3 blogs, my hourly rate works out to roughly around minimum wage. But I still keep going! Why? I enjoy talking money, writing to express my voice/opinion, and to me personally money will always come second. The day I lose the passion to write/learn, the day I’ll give up blogging, even if it means thousands of dollars left on the table. When the passion is gone, the work produced is half ass!!
*Sorry for the long comment :)
I hear you Eddie. It’s sad when some blogs start flooding their editorial calendars with sponsored posts as soon as they get a Pagerank. Once in a while is fine, but every week really gets old. Bloggers lose their voice, and this is a post I have pending in the queue here.
Good luck on your journey!
I have to say, I’m having a lot of fun with this 5000+ words/week challenge. I’m finding that it’s actually not very difficult to let myself write that much. The difficult part is then critically editing my writing to make sure I’m not just rambling for thousands of words, but actually saying something with every word.
Glad you are enjoying the Challenge! Makes it easier when other people are involved, helping keep you motivated doesn’t it?
I started out with 500 words posts, but I have been making an effort to be more verbose and in depth lately. Now my posts are around 800 – 1,200 words long. It takes more time, but I think it will pay off later. I’ll try to write 1,500 words articles more often, but it’s pretty draining for me.
I’m not going to lie, making my posts on If You Can Read, You Can Cook “thicker” is going to be tough for me. My recipe posts, I’ve sometimes written an intro paragraph and then just posted the recipe. Total words ~100. But it is definately the longer posts there that have gotten the most Google love. Your 5000k word challenge pushed me this week to put more work into it and I wrote this week one of the few recipe posts that the Yoast plugin didn’t nag me about being too short.
3500 words per week for 152 weeks? Is this going to be the second tier of the Yakezie Challenge?
3,500 words for 152 consecutive weeks is just what I think anybody can do if they want to make potentially sustainable living off the internet. At that rate, $1,000+/month is pretty easy imo. Make do 10X that as well!
The good thing about this challenge is that I tend to write longer articles about things that I am passionate about. I’ll start writing and suddenly I’m at 1k words. The shorter articles are generally things that I am not as passionate about, or I just don’t feel like writing that day.
I lost about 20% of my search engine traffic after the last Panda update and really couldn’t tell you why, but instead of focusing on trying to figure out the numbers or b*tch and moan about it, I’m doing exactly as you said, building deeper content, making sure the content I have is properly laid out and optimized, and trying to learn every day about how to be a better blogger.
Sounds good MB, and I’m pretty confident you will be rewarded 6 month down the line. If you aren’t, and if we aren’t, then there is seriously something wrong with Google!
Rule of thumb never just count on Google for traffic. Yeah its great in the beginning but sooner are later you should have your traffic diversified like a stock portfolio. I completely agree that longer evergreen content is the way to go. Talk about something and make it worth sharing and commenting on. Dont just SEO the article to death hoping to rank.
Sam, I had to smile. I am in the camp of “one blog is more than enough!!!!!” I don’t know how the others do it!!!! That said, in my youth if an idea didn’t pay off in a short while, I was apt to sign off. I vowed not to do that with my site. The results are definitely paying off!!! No success comes fast without lots of ups and downs. Like Tomas said, I do some SEO, but there is just too much investment, saving, and spending information I want to share.
Wait, so you’re not down with having 200+ blogs at once?! :) I didn’t know how they did it until I read they outsource EVERYTHING! How do you build a connection with your audience if you outsource everything? You don’t, and Google Gods start crushing.
As a relatively new blogger (~6months) I don’t worry too much about search engine changes and the like. I just try to write interesting content! I just noticed the other day that my google PR went from 0 to 1, a big milestone for me :) As a percentage of visits, my search traffic is low. My direct/email/referral visitors stay on the site longer and read more posts than those that come from search engines. At first I didn’t really pay attention to my word count but after reading about this challenge and all of your experiences I think I’ll try and raise the bar a little.
Yep, definitely don’t worry too much about SEO at first. Build your community first. Then, start experimenting with your posts and so forth. Baby steps!
[…] – Surviving Google updates is one thing, but did you know that thin content is out and thick content is in? It’s the wave of the future according to this article, and I […]
I strongly believe that content writing has to be aimed at providing value to your readers. With that said, I try to write less posts(800-1000 words) compare to other bloggers, but I try to write quality content. It takes time, but I know that I will do well over the time.
The question is, what is quality? It’s very subjective. Hence, a big constant on determining “quality” is post length, at least in Google’s eyes. Proper grammar and punctuation is a standard.
I am glad that Google has finally figured out a way to weed out blog posts which have spun content and those posts that does not have enough information in them. I tend to write long, long long posts.. nothing shorter than 700 words.. HOwever, I don’t think my problem is writing.. I think I have a marketing problem. I’m going to spend more time networking to see if my blog can get more traction.
I’ve already moved toward “less posts but more words” per week. It happened at the same time Google hit some of my sites (and increase ranking for some others!). I’m still not convinced it will work out but I have nothing much to lose write?
I don’t know if it’s the case for all sort of keywords, but the keywords I lost ranking for are now showing a bunch of general article published by big media instead of showing highly focused and relevant content published by my blogs and other blogs. At least, I see that not only my blog was penalized for those keywords!
On the other side, I don’t think that giving more power to media machines is a good idea. The reason why blogs are so popular is because people want to read from “real people”.
[…] some behind the scenes tasks done on projects. I’ve also been trying to keep up with the 5,000 word challenge over at the Yakezie network. One of my goals is to write more in-depth posts, but it’s a struggle balancing home, work, […]
At this point, I am still writing about things that are important to me and some do tend to get quite long. I don’t know about 5000 words. Three 1000 work posts a week is about all I can handle right now, but maybe I can ramp it up in the upcoming year. I’m also trying to do some guest posts each month for larger sites. We’ll see what happens.
I have no idea what Google wants and how to do it well, it looks like the rules are constantly changing so I prefer to focus on writing what I like as well as possible and hope for the best!
It’s not just the amount of content that you are putting into your blog posts, but also the amount of on page content that you have for a page on your site. This is especially important for those who own e-commerce sites
I just wanted to thank you for this article. Since reading it I have been trying very hard to write more in depth posts rather than just trying to put something up. And I really think that my writing and topics have improved. Thank you
Realize the reality of your writing is a good start but not being able to write at a scholar level isn’t always a bad thing. Personally, if I read a post that is cluttered with words that I have never seen before then I quickly get bored and the back button gets pressed.
The same goes with articles that are 4 pages long. I don’t get the point of people writing such long articles when people tend to get bored easily when reading online. I myself will take much more away after reading a 500 well-written piece then I will with a 1500 piece full of text that has been added to “beef up” the article.
Found this post checking keywords for thin content as I wrote about wanting to tell google to ignore my thin content pages. Yes they have reason to exist for the readers.I fear that my other thick content pages have been penalised perhaps because of these hotel listing pages that have duplicate blurbs you find across the other hotel sites. Sometimes duplication makes sense to the reader. Timetables on trane platforms for example.
The blog post is here
http://badtoilet.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/does-google-punish-a-domain-because-of-a-few-pages-of-thin-content/
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