Throughout late 2009 and into 2010 I was building gaming affiliate sites while writing for other affiliates. I eventually got to a point where I was making pretty good money writing poker strategy (enough to make ~150k/year without all that much work), but I always new that my own projects were where the real potential lied. I continued writing for the steady money, played live poker to supplement this income, and continued building my sites. This worked well in that I always had a good amount of money coming in, had a totally free schedule at all times, and was able to start up some new things. I eventually sold off the “main” gaming site I had been building, held onto a few, and sold off the rest over time. Though I felt like I was improving as a gaming affiliate, it was never really something I had a keen interest in. It was more or less something I just fell into and was intrigued by the money but not so much the work itself.

So I had my sites pretty much all sold by early-mid 2011 and was starting to pick up steam with my new sites that concentrated on gold and silver. I was told in early 2010 about a precious metals retailer that was likely going to launch an affiliate program, so I decided to register about 20 domains just in case and put some pages up on a handful of them. Sure enough the affiliate program launched and I was in a niche that was void of affiliates, though there was certainly plenty of other retail sites ranking quite well. I ended up turning these sites into a steady 4k-6k/month and was also doing OK with some of the gaming sites I had left over. Several months later I ended up joining with a partner on two big domains in the same niche and things were going well.

Just as we were about to add a third partner (literally the day after we negotiated a deal) and expand, the affiliate program we worked with pulled out. They cited spam and weaker affiliates as their reason, despite admitting that our own partnership with them was both sound and profitable. We tried to work with them on a custom deal and had spoken to other retail sites about flat rate advertising, but nothing much came to fruition. In messing around with some other companies, we essentially found that it was a waste of time.

By this point in time my partner and I had two decisions. We could toil and earn nothing off of sites with massive potential or we could figure something out. I plotted an idea where we could form our own retail site and send our existing traffic to said site. It was going to be a sizable undertaking, but we knew that it was both one of our only options and an idea with immeasurable potential. This was in the beginning of September of this year.

We were about a month into development when we got crushed by one of Google’s Panda updates. Some sites were unaffected, but our primary ones got destroyed. At this point we had legal paperwork all but taken care of, bank accounts sorted, and we were not terribly far away from the site itself being coded and ready to go. There was no turning back, but this obviously made us quite unsure.

Fast forward to early November and we had everything taken care of. Endless revisions, fixes, and corrections to the site itself in addition to multiple hurdles involved in the overall development of the company itself were finally completed. Since then, things have been going well and we are rather confident that we can make this incredibly big. It’s a long term project, it’s a lot of work, but I am happy to be doing it.

I still own a handful of gaming sites that make a little bit per month, but nothing worth writing home about. I have a virtually infinite list of ideas I would like to implement in conjunction with our existing brand, and I am more enthused than ever about what I am working on. Many affiliates in the past six months have had things go very wrong; I can think of a number of people off the top of my head. To me, the difference between one person and the next is definitely in their drive to keep going. I have also learned that dependence (on any person, company, or anything) is the worst trait for any business to have. The more that you can diversify, be it within a specific industry, into others, or through varied methods of monetization, the better off you will be.

-Online Soccer Betting

Like I said, not a celebratory post, but the past week or two really has me excited about the future. Each of the past three years has been better than the one prior, and I have no reason to believe 2012 won’t show exponential growth in the same direction.

With recent Google updates it is pretty clear that the Search Engine Optimization “game” is changing.

The Internet is evolving and so are the big search engines. The algorithms seem to be changing quite a bit and often to adapt to the new social media driven Internet, and affiliates are going to need to adapt to the new changes if they want to be successful.

Although SEO is mostly guesswork, below are a few factors that I think the search engines (Google) are taking into consideration now a day.

Time On Site, Page Views, Bounce Rate, Repeat Visits

To get rid of spam it seems that Google might be taking a look at how long visitors are engaged on a website. It makes sense to me. Google wants to have high quality and “expert” type websites high in their search results. Spammy sites will have a ton of people leaving very shortly after arriving, while the higher quality sites will often keep people reading and engaged.

I am guessing that this may only play a small role in the rankings because high quality web pages can provide a detailed answer to a search query, resulting in the searcher leaving the site after finding their answer.

I have a few suggestions for increasing your visitor’s time on site, page views and decreasing your bounce rate.

The first thing to do would be taking advantage of interlinking your articles. Don’t go too crazy with interlinking, but anytime you have a article relevant to a phrase used in an article on your website you should be linking to it.

Another tip is linking out to similar articles at the bottom of each article on your website. Something like “If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy…” would do the trick.

Lastly the most obvious suggestion is to write quality content. If your visitors enjoy what they’ve read they will keep reading on. An example might be one of the sports betting strategy articles that I had Jim write for my main site. The content is unbelievable to the point that I’ve had users thanking me and asking for more. The reader gets to the end of the article and wants more immediately. As you can see in the article I have a link to three more articles by Jim at the bottom of so that the user can continue on.

I’m unsure how much these factors play into the rankings, but it only makes sense that they do.

Social Media Presence

Facebook and Twitter are absolute huge these days. Although links from Facebook and Twitter may be no follow I am pretty sure that Google recognizes these types of links. If someone clicks through from Facebook.com or Twitter.com to your website Google should be able to register that information.

Google is giving Brands a boost in the SERP’s and a lot of the websites who are using Facebook and Twitter are brands. If you are getting visits from these social media websites you may be seen as a quality site, authority site, or a brand, and may get a boost in the SERPs.

Even without the possible search ranking factor, I highly recommend affiliates building up a social media presence for free (or paid if you choose) traffic.

With Facebook create a “fan page” and under the “info” tab have a solid write up about what your company/website does. The more content here the better, and then include a link back to your website.

With Twitter you can create an account using your website name (or as close as it as you can get) and then include a quick description of your website and put your URL in the website field.

You can’t ignore Facebook and Twitter forever – they are becoming the most visited websites on the web.

Page Load Times

With what seems like half of the world browsing on 3G mobile networks it seems as if Google is going to give fast loading websites a boost in the SERPs. Nothing is worse then searching for something on your smart phone in Google only to have the page take way too long to load.

Google wants their visitors to be happy, and slow loading sites do not make for happy searchers.

How do you make your website load faster?

Ensure you have clean code (if you are like me and aren’t good at knowing what is clean or not ask someone on the forums), limit your plug-ins if you’re on wordpress, limit the amount of images used on your pages, and using caching if you can.

I’m not an expert with this stuff, but you can search the Internet and find some good articles on how to make your website load faster.

Although nothing is certain in the SEO world, the factors mentioned in this post are most likely used by Google and other big search engines, and affiliates will need to adapt to ensure good rankings and the end goal – money in the bank.

First, the problem…

My site had previously been ranking somewhat decent for its primary term, but it wasn’t driving insane traffic or anything. I would say it was getting around 500-600 uniques per month. There were some longtails and other random traffic, but definitely nothing worth writing home about. I was hoping to get to work on expanding it and driving more significant traffic when the site suddenly vanished from Google search results altogether.

Now, onto analyzing the situation and looking for possible remedies…

I had no idea what was wrong, so I just hoped it was a temporary glitch and that it would be back in a few days. Much of the advice I initially received was heading in this same direction, which led me to ride it out for a few weeks. Needless to say, this didn’t do me any good.

An interesting twist…

Out of nowhere, the site suddenly jumped back into Google, ranking just as it was prior to the fallout. I was hoping that it was settled and that it could be chalked up to a Google mystery, but this was hardly the case. The site would end up dropping from search results a few days later. This pattern would repeat itself until the solution was found. The site would be in Google for 5-10 days, out for 5-10 days, and so on and so forth. This was important information because it all but guaranteed that the site was suffering from an automatic penalty induced by Google’s algorithm as opposed to a manual penalty.

First attempt at fixing the site proactively…

Instead of sitting around and waiting for the site to fix itself, so to speak, I decided to go out and get listed in the Yahoo directory. This came as a suggestion from a few PAL members and others who suggested it in private. $300 is a lot for a one year link in any directory, but I figured it was more than worth the relatively small investment in the grand scheme of things. The site did end up showing in the SERPS a few days after I made it into the directory, but this was nothing more than a coincidence that coincided with the usual in and out patterns that it had been experiencing.

Trying again, this time with a new approach…

The next thing I tried was cleaning up the site in order to have a less “salesy” tone, as suggested by RR among others. I re-wrote the homepage entirely, de-optimized the title tags, and just about anything else I could to let Google know that I wasn’t a spam site. Despite eventually changing almost every page on the site in one way or another, I couldn’t find a solution.

A last ditch effort…

At this point I had all but given up, figuring that the site was more of a hassle than it was worth. Since I had just about nothing to lose, I decided to toss around 15 pages from the site that I didn’t consider all that high on the quality scale. Though I didn’t really think this was a viable solution, I figured that it couldn’t hurt.

Because there are no last ditches…

I originally planned on just selling the site if this didn’t work, but I refused to give up on it. I received the best advice, in that it worked, from one of the best SEOs that I know. No one here knows him, I will never share some of the great tips that he has given me, but he found the remedy to my problem. Along the lines of the de-optimize route that RR and SB suggested, my friend told me to toss the bad anchor text I had across the site. I had been linking to all of my articles, site wide, repeating one particular word in virtually every title. I cut this out, lightened up on the heavy anchor text, and the site popped back into Google. It actually went in and then back out, but a day later it stuck and it has been solid for awhile now. The traffic actually returned about 2x better than before, which was certainly an added bonus.

I am more than glad that I stuck with it and was ultimately able to get this site back to where it should be. While I hope that I never have to deal with something this frustrating again, it definitely taught me a lot more than it cost me.

Here is a screenshot of the Analytics that I installed about a month and a half before it was fixed. This does not cover the entire period, but it is enough to paint a picture of what was going on. You will notice the in and out patterns, a sharp spike, a sharp dive, and then steady traffic from there on out.

Sites

I have been working on a number of different sites. One of them is a project that I have been working on for awhile about buying silver bullion.

I have a handful of gaming sites that I am working on as well. The first site is a sports betting site, the second is a Caribbean Stud site, and the third is focused solely on live poker. I am trying to keep a steady focus on a particular set of sites while also diversifying as much as possible. The ultimate goal is to run around 20 different sites, but they all need to be high quality and driving steady traffic. Needless to say, the more you are working on, the harder it is to ensure that everything is as good as it can possibly be. I am aiming to really create the best websites possible in their relative niche, which is never an easy thing to do, even with a site about how to buy diamond earrings. I am on my way with most of these, but it is still going to take a lot of time, effort, and money.

http://www.totalgamingreview.com/

Racing

Outside of affiliate work and things like that, the races have started back up. The first race at Lincoln was on Saturday this past weekend, though there was supposed to be one the week prior. They cancelled the first race prematurely and it turns out that they probably could have run it anyway. It doesn’t matter now, I suppose, and I am just happy that the season has started again. I went to Florida in February for the Dirtcar Nationals at Volusia Speedway, and I am heading out to California in a few days to visit Silver Dollar Speedway in Chico, California. I hope to hit a number of new tracks this year and in the future. More and more, though, I have been thinking about what I will need to do in order to start racing myself.

That is about all for now and I hope that this post will suffice until I can get things situated with this site. I plan to get the lengthy post about identifying, experimenting, and ultimately fixing the recurring problems that I had with Google for what seemed like an eternity. It was certainly a frustrating experience, but I definitely learned a lot of things along the way that I otherwise would not know about today.