I’ve added enough content to the site that it should be time for me to start seeing a little bit of organic search traffic. Or so I thought.
According to StatPress Visitors, I’m getting about 100 hits per day, but I don’t think I’m getting any organic search (from Google) traffic at all, at least not that I can locate for keywords I would have expected. I checked some of the keyword phrases that I thought would show up in search — and I’m not in the top 10 pages of Google for any of them. Which means that I have no idea how the 100 visitors I’m getting each day found me — or why they are bothering to visit this site.
I am #1 (at least right now, both in Google and Bing) for “morsch money secret scam“, which I found a bit of a surprise. That means that I’m not actually de-indexed, despite evidence of a negative SEO campaign against this site. That appears to be the only keyword phrase for which I rank anywhere need the top.
I have done very little backlinking, mainly because I doubt that it is effective anyway. But somebody has found my site. After all, I keep getting spams from SEO companies offering to “help” me with getting the site ranked in Google.
The illustration at the top of this post is where most of my backlinks are from. While I could expect a few from the UK, the appearance of Libya on that map is prima facie evidence of a negative SEO campaign. I seriously doubt that there is anyone in my target audience in Libya. I did some searches for backlinks to this site, but of over 200 backlinks, essentially all of them are from PR0 sites.
The link from the article I did for EZineArticles a couple of months ago doesn’t show up at all in the Google Webmaster Tools, but I’ve heard that EZineArticles is not as effective as it once was, and Google may be just ignoring them right now. Granted, I have not done an exhaustive search, simply because I don’t think that any of the paid tools for backlink discovery are worth buying.
Which means that it’s time I started phase two of building out this site. Actually, I thought the new mailing list and subscription slide-in was “phase II” but so far, I have had zero sign-ups, which is another good indicator of negligible organic traffic. I think it is unlikely that I would have 100 visitors/day for a week, and none of them would sign up for a newsletter with announcements of step discounts on popular IM software. I have had a few clicks on one of the ads — and even one purchase, so *somebody* is finding me, but probably not for the keywords I would have predicted.
So, what is the new phase II? (Or maybe more accurately, phase two-and-a-half) If you have actually read some of the articles on this site, you will probably have already guessed — paid traffic. There are lots of ways to do paid traffic, so I will be doing some split-testing to see what works best.
BTW, I am not surprised about the negative SEO attack. I was expecting it. This site is an exact match domain (EMD) name for a very highly-searched term, which means that my competitors probably found it the first day it was up. Negative SEO is so cost-effective that it’s practically a no-brainer, especially if you are not hampered by ethics.
And I strongly suspect that few people in the “Make Money Blogging” niche are hampered by ethics.
If phase two (and a half) doesn’t produce the desired results, I have yet another plan in the works. More about that later — if I need it.
