My 4 Hour Workweek

Given all of Google’s recent changes, I thought it would be interesting to take a few of my good sites that lost rankings, and see if I can recover them.  I’m a big fan of case studies, so whenever possible, I like to document these types of experiments and make them public for all of you to read.

This experiment could ultimately fail, but I think it’ll be a good learning experience for both you and me.  Keep reading, and I’ll dig into the details.

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Being able to make adjustments quickly and pivot when necessary is important for any business, but I think it’s especially important for internet marketers.  On April 24th, Google launched “Penguin“, an algorithm update that targeted “spammy” and “over-optimized” websites.

The initial update was rather shocking to many internet marketers, as most saw their sites disappear from the top search results on Google.  As usual, people cried out about the “end of SEO“, feeling the pain of their lost income sources.

There were some interesting implications to this update in particular, which I’ll explain below.

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With tax season still in motion (but winding down, thankfully), I thought I would share with you some of the best SEO posts I’ve read in the past month or so, given the fact that I have barely had any time to write.

Even when I’m at my busiest points in life, I absolutely cannot get away from reading my RSS reader (Google Reader), so I always find myself with plenty of good content to absorb.  And with all of Google’s recent changes, SEO is as hot a topic as ever, so you should find these posts to be pretty interesting.  I know I did!

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I realize the title of this post sounds like I’m about to try and sell you a product…the good news is, I’m not! I actually just wanted to share with you a quick story about how one of my niche sites landed on the first page of Google and received an ad click without me doing much of anything.

Although I uploaded a WordPress theme and added my usual plugins, this site was ranking on page 1 before I even added the content.

While you can’t plan for this in any way, I thought it might be interesting to take a deeper look at this site and the keyword that it targets to see if we can learn anything…

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As you may have noticed, Google pushed through a major algorithm update very early morning on October 14th.  The past few “Panda” updates didn’t seem to affect me much, but this one definitely took a toll on the rankings and traffic of several of my niche sites.  I just wanted to write a post here about my observations and other bits of information I’ve been reading the past couple of days.

If this affected you too, keep reading, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

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You’ve no doubt heard by now about Google’s recent algorithm change that has been responsible for a significant drop in traffic/rankings for some of the largest article/content collection sites on the internet.  I can’t say I’m shocked.  While there are a lot of well-written articles out there deserving high rankings within Google, there is also a lot of garbage – duplicate, scraped content, poorly spun content, etc.

What’s the true impact of this change?  How is it affecting us right now, and how will it affect us going forward, especially with niche sites?  Let’s try to figure it out…

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Last week, Pat Flynn (from Smart Passive Income) posted, in complete detail, the backlink strategy that pushed his niche site to a #1 ranking on Google.  This epic post was very well received, as it immediately spread around the blogosphere and ignited a massive conversation (currently the post has more than 190 comments).  It’s not any kind of “magic bullet” backlink solution – it’s a somewhat complex, highly effective strategy that can profoundly improve your site’s search engine ranking if implemented correctly.

Although the strategy makes sense when you read it, I figured that it’s probably difficult for many people to grasp the entire process as it pertains to their specific websites – in particular, I think a lot of people might struggle with finding a good way to track the process and backlinks that they create.  I think I’ve designed a effective solution for this.

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When it comes to building a website of any kind, the domain name is one of the most important considerations.  Do you want a keyword-rich domain that works well for SEO?  Or do you want a domain name that is memorable and works with your brand?  Is there a way to have both?  These are the questions you might find yourself asking.  Even if you know the answer, the hard part  is actually formulating the perfect domain name.

On its face, buying a domain seems so simple – type in your word or phrase, decide on your domain extension (.com, .net, .org, etc.), and boom, you’re ready to go.  Unfortunately, it’s not that easy if you really want to achieve astonishing results.  Today’s your lucky day though -  I’ve put together what I think is a definitive guide to expert domain buying.

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