Ask The Plumber – January 2012

by on January 19, 2012

I received this “Ask The Plumber” question from Adrien the other day:

Hi Electron Plumber,

Your site is really full of REAL and HONEST advice. I simply love your site! Thanks for creating so much original, unique and wonderful content, especially the great link building service!

I have 2 questions:

1. I have tried Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker. I have tried the firefox rank tracker plugin by SEOBook.com. I have tried Scroogle.org. Unfortunately, they never show the exact same result! So do you have any recommendation for rank tracker tools? Both free and paid ones are okay.

2. After the Great Link Building Experiment, I have 1 single question on my mind: why don’t we just build links with BMR? Ranking on the first page in 5 weeks is certainly a good result! Will you recommend it? If not, what other things should be done apart from just submitting posts to BMR?

Thanks. I am so glad I have found your blog. Hope there are more high quality blogs like yours on the Internet

Adrien, great questions.

For the first one, I generally use the Firebox rank tracker plug by SEOBook myself.  There are a bunch of rank trackers out there and you have to take all the results with a grain of salt.  You will generally see different results based the following variables:

  1. Who you are logged in as
  2. Your physical location
  3. Which Google server you happen to connect to
  4. The rank tracker you are using
  5. If the result returned “special” results like videos or shopping items.

Really the only way to minimize it is to use a single tracker as an anonymous user from the same location each time and double check a few ranks manually.  Honestly, at the end of the day tracking your rank in Google is NOT the best metric to focus on.  Focus first on how much traffic you are getting and how much money you are making!  I have one site that floats around #6 to #7 in Google for the keyword I’m focusing on but is #1 or #2 ranked for many other keywords around that main keyword and gets a bunch of good converting traffic.

For the second question, BMR worked really really well really really fast for the site I built.  Better than I ever expected.  But now almost a year later, it’s no longer ranking first and has been passed by the UniqueArticleWizard site.  So far in January the UAW site is beating the BMR site 2 to 1 in profits.  And I haven’t done any more link building since last October and no cross linking the sites at all.

So it seems while BMR has the initial kick, UAW appears to have all the staying power and is FAR less work since you can use spun content.

As you’ve probably read elsewhere, the key is to diversify as much as possible.  Use more than one link building service, keep building links manually, submit to social media sites, etc.  Hit it from all sides and vary your keyword text for the best results.

{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

Jacob January 19, 2012 at 6:54 pm

Hey Electron plumber. This website vacuumcleanerbest.com , appears to have the same penalty as my website. Could you tell me what you think is going on. Did the website you used BMR on have a very diverse link profile before you started building links to it. I have 2 websites that both appear to have the exact penalty like the one listed above. The effected page does not show up anywhere close to #1 when a unique sentence is broad searched in google.

I have other sites that are using BMR, and they only have links from BMR, i don’t understand what happened. One day all the keywords i was targeting were one page one, and the next they have all moved to positions 334, 378, 423, 488, 546, 632, 679, ect up to as high as 850. I don’t understand what could have possibly caused this penalty.

El Plumber (admin) January 19, 2012 at 7:19 pm

Jacob, not sure what penalty you’re talking about, probably something from a different article. Yes, I only used BMR on that one site. The most common cause of this type of penalty is backlink diversity. Too many keyword stuffed low quality backlinks and not enough natural looking backlinks and you’ll get slapped down.

For some ideas on how to fix it, check out this article on how I got out of the Google Sandbox..
For a list of other possible reasons, see my big list of Google penalty reasons.

Adrien January 20, 2012 at 11:01 am

Hi El Plumber,

Thanks for your detailed answer! Yes I agree with you about focusing on money and traffic instead of rankings.

Perhaps UAW + BMR is the only link building tools one need! Thanks again for the great link building experiment you have conducted!

Adrien

Adrien January 20, 2012 at 11:10 am

Hi El Plumber,

May I ask you one more question?

It seems that you are more inclined to monetizing with affiliate rather than Adsense. I can see that you have done a lot of case studies about affiliate sites. However, my question is about my Adsense site: http://www.ewhatvitaminsshoulditake.com

It is now sitting at #4 for the keyword “what vitamins should I take”. Daily traffic is about 90/day. I got about 10 clicks per day but the problem is the CPC is shockingly low. Sometimes it is less than 10 cents. I feel so frustrated about it because I have invested some money on it for its articles and link building.

Is there anything I can do about the CPC? If not, should I try out affiliate marketing on that site? I have no experience of affiliate marketing before. Can you give me some advice?

Thanks for your great advice and generosity.

Adrien

Arts February 21, 2012 at 9:32 pm

Hello there i really appreciate what you you do regarding Amazon New Affiliate users
I would appreciate more if you can give me directions where should i put my WEBSITE which service offers GOOD TEMPLATES wordpress? Joomla ? etc?
With joomla is difficult to embed links any ideea on that?

Thank you so much

Jerry April 13, 2012 at 1:38 pm

Did any of the sites that you used in your backlinking experiment get penalized after the recent de-indexing of blog networks such as BMR?

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