How Do I Get My Site's Posts to Rank Well in Google?

[daronch]

I want to build a site with a lot of content, maybe about 100k posts. What is the best way to get them to rank well in Google?

Do I have to build up my domain/page authority to my domain name, build backlinks to my domain name or something else?

 

Thanks

[inlight]

This is a huge topic that encompasses different areas, and building domain/page authority and backlinks are part of the process.

I think first you need to do keyword research to uncover a variety of keywords and their long tail variants. That gives you varying degrees of competition and volume to work with and bring traffic to your website. I assume besides getting good rankings, you also like to get traffic. Be sure to do good on-page SEO, like having your focus keywords incorporated into the title and description. Mike has a great guide posted here.

Getting ranked well on the less competitive keywords is a good start. Sometimes all it takes is a good relevant piece of content, in my experience. Besides providing a positive user experience, I think these also make good internal links to other pages on your website where you are trying to get ranked for more competitive keywords.  For competitive keywords, developing high quality backlinks from reputable websites is needed.

All the best!

[Mike Friedman]

100k pages is pretty ambitious. I hope this is not your first site, and you have a ton of good writers lined up.

I would do a lot of research around silos and make sure you understand them. That is how you are going to want to organize your site. It will help your authority flow throughout the site.

 

 

[daronch]

On 2017-5-19 at 9:48 AM, inlight said:

This is a huge topic that encompasses different areas, and building domain/page authority and backlinks are part of the process.

I think first you need to do keyword research to uncover a variety of keywords and their long tail variants. That gives you varying degrees of competition and volume to work with and bring traffic to your website. I assume besides getting good rankings, you also like to get traffic. Be sure to do good on-page SEO, like having your focus keywords incorporated into the title and description. Mike has a great guide posted here.

Getting ranked well on the less competitive keywords is a good start. Sometimes all it takes is a good relevant piece of content, in my experience. Besides providing a positive user experience, I think these also make good internal links to other pages on your website where you are trying to get ranked for more competitive keywords.  For competitive keywords, developing high quality backlinks from reputable websites is needed.

All the best!

Thanks for the reply. Yes, traffic from google is my main concern in terms of seo. 

So, that is good internal links, good keyword research and content and get good backlinks from other sites? 

On 2017-5-19 at 9:34 PM, Mike Friedman said:

100k pages is pretty ambitious. I hope this is not your first site, and you have a ton of good writers lined up.

I would do a lot of research around silos and make sure you understand them. That is how you are going to want to organize your site. It will help your authority flow throughout the site.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I've had a few small sites, nothing big or even medium sized. But I do have the content all lined up.

Ok, the silo is categories and their parent-child relationship? Should I be doing that all throughout my site?

 

[mki]

2 hours ago, daronch said:

Thanks for the reply. Yes, traffic from google is my main concern in terms of seo. 

So, that is good internal links, good keyword research and content and get good backlinks from other sites? 

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I've had a few small sites, nothing big or even medium sized. But I do have the content all lined up.

Ok, the silo is categories and their parent-child relationship? Should I be doing that all throughout my site?

 

You wrote 100k pages of content?

If this is PLR content or something, could you do me a huge favor? When you get penalized, delete the site, install wordpress, set the name of the site to "Pure SPam" and then set the tagline to " Just another Pure Spam Penalty " example site: http://www.protourgolfers.com/

I'm a little confused. Have you been writing articles for the past decade and just saving them to a folder on your desktop?

[yukon]

7 hours ago, mki said:

You wrote 100k pages of content?

If this is PLR content or something, could you do me a huge favor? When you get penalized, delete the site, install wordpress, set the name of the site to "Pure SPam" and then set the tagline to " Just another Pure Spam Penalty " example site: http://www.protourgolfers.com/

I'm a little confused. Have you been writing articles for the past decade and just saving them to a folder on your desktop?

 

Just because it's 100K pages doesn't mean it's spam. Maybe it is spam in OP case but it doesn't have to be that way for everyone.

There's plenty of public domain databases that can be used to build large quality sites.

Here's one example (link below) of public domain content and this site gets a lot of traffic. Granted it's only 5K pages indexed but that's not important.

• coinmarketcap.com

...and damn the association of articles with every thread posted on IM forums. I get so sick of that nonsense on WF, now it's here. Why does everything have to be an article with IMers? I don't get the fascination outside of spamming ezine for backlinks in 2005.

 

Op, do like Mike said, setup a silo site structure.

[mki]

9 hours ago, yukon said:

 

Just because it's 100K pages doesn't mean it's spam. Maybe it is spam in OP case but it doesn't have to be that way for everyone.

There's plenty of public domain databases that can be used to build large quality sites.

Here's one example (link below) of public domain content and this site gets a lot of traffic. Granted it's only 5K pages indexed but that's not important.

• coinmarketcap.com

...and damn the association of articles with every thread posted on IM forums. I get so sick of that nonsense on WF, now it's here. Why does everything have to be an article with IMers? I don't get the fascination outside of spamming ezine for backlinks in 2005.

 

Op, do like Mike said, setup a silo site structure.

That site has 7k linking domains and they're legit links. There's multi-million dollar businesses with substantially less links then that. I know what you're saying but that site is not the best example. Basically any ecommerce store is a better example, in many cases, Walmart/Amazon uses duplicate content and they rank, and little tiny stores do it as well by aggregating the duplicate content from a few sources. Also: That site is generating a bunch of unique images (images are content...)

As far as article spamming: it doesn't really work, I have no idea what the fascination is, but you will get a pure spam penalty. You're still going to have to figure out a way to chop and mix the content up somehow (Example: Inserting related article headlines in the body), rewrite the titles, and spin the content in a way where it actually adds uniqueness and is still readable, then inject totally unique content in to each page.

As I've said a few times, there's differences between the query types. Trying to rank on an informational query with duplicate/spun content is pretty difficult since Google evaluates LSI relationships to serve results. Even with unique content, the results can be pretty abysmal if the content is low quality and sometimes it just doesn't rank well anyways. A solution to this problem I found was to add length to the content. Personally when I encountered this problem, I would polish the page a bit and add length and like magic, the article would move up dramatically in Google. I used to think it was the content length, but now I realize, it's probably uniqueness, not length.

If you want to give this a whirl, I'll ftp you 500k PLR articles, but I assure you, they've all been posted to Google 100+ times and unless you have something new to bring to the table, it's not going to work. If you post them as is, they will get put into the supplemental index, and if you mix them up to work around that, at a certain point, you will get slapped.

Since "Content is Content"; I'll suggest a few things that could work. Taking public domain images that are related and generating collages, automatically searching for related videos on YT and inserting them into the content, hand writing new titles, creating new and complex markup (Like I said, try generating a bullet point list of related articles and inserting it into the body), link to different fake author accounts which have unique bios, and generally aggregate as much as possible: automatically scrape related tweets, links, news links, comments, pinterest pictures, and any other data you can think of.

After that, you'll have yourself a database of spam. If you shoot links into it, hopefully Google won't notice. If it's 25k+ pages, they probably will.

Stuff I've seen work in the past: Random tag clouds (spam blog days), QR codes, and mashing Q&A into the content.

In the case of a store, it works, because it's a thing. It's not an informational query. And it won't get penalized because the intent of the searcher is not informational. The relationship between (brand:product) is pretty strong and in many cases just having that in the title/h1 tag is enough for a low competition product. Also, if they type brand:product:model-number/sku/mpn/barcode, the union between those keywords is so narrow, that duplicate content is fine as well. For an informational query, the union between (best:high:protein:shake), not only is the intersection wide, but each keyword has millions of results, simply put, you have no chance to rank on that keyword without high scores for on and off page, Google will rank spam above you as long as the phrase is in their h1 tag. The competition for that keyword is dramatically larger then you think it is, since you're really competing against every page that has similar words on it. So: best,great,tasty,wonderful:high,great,huge:protein,meat,muscle:shake,smoothie,blend; so yeah, get annihilated... If you have low authority, Google will probably not rank you at all, or it will rank unrelated content that happens to have any of those 4 words on the page. Google won't do this for a product, since microsoft:office:keyword is a specific thing, there are no synonym replacements with strong relationships.

[Mike Friedman]

23 hours ago, daronch said:

Thanks for the reply. Yes, traffic from google is my main concern in terms of seo. 

So, that is good internal links, good keyword research and content and get good backlinks from other sites? 

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I've had a few small sites, nothing big or even medium sized. But I do have the content all lined up.

Ok, the silo is categories and their parent-child relationship? Should I be doing that all throughout my site?

 

Silos are a little more complex than just that. But yes you are going to want to do it throughout most, if not all, of the site. And you can have silos within silos that are within other silos. It can get as complex as you want or need.

[yukon]

5 hours ago, mki said:

That site has 7k linking domains and they're legit links. There's multi-million dollar businesses with substantially less links then that. I know what you're saying but that site is not the best example. Basically any ecommerce store is a better example, in many cases, Walmart/Amazon uses duplicate content and they rank, and little tiny stores do it as well by aggregating the duplicate content from a few sources. Also: That site is generating a bunch of unique images (images are content...)

As far as article spamming: it doesn't really work, I have no idea what the fascination is, but you will get a pure spam penalty. You're still going to have to figure out a way to chop and mix the content up somehow (Example: Inserting related article headlines in the body), rewrite the titles, and spin the content in a way where it actually adds uniqueness and is still readable, then inject totally unique content in to each page.

As I've said a few times, there's differences between the query types. Trying to rank on an informational query with duplicate/spun content is pretty difficult since Google evaluates LSI relationships to serve results. Even with unique content, the results can be pretty abysmal if the content is low quality and sometimes it just doesn't rank well anyways. A solution to this problem I found was to add length to the content. Personally when I encountered this problem, I would polish the page a bit and add length and like magic, the article would move up dramatically in Google. I used to think it was the content length, but now I realize, it's probably uniqueness, not length.

If you want to give this a whirl, I'll ftp you 500k PLR articles, but I assure you, they've all been posted to Google 100+ times and unless you have something new to bring to the table, it's not going to work. If you post them as is, they will get put into the supplemental index, and if you mix them up to work around that, at a certain point, you will get slapped.

Since "Content is Content"; I'll suggest a few things that could work. Taking public domain images that are related and generating collages, automatically searching for related videos on YT and inserting them into the content, hand writing new titles, creating new and complex markup (Like I said, try generating a bullet point list of related articles and inserting it into the body), link to different fake author accounts which have unique bios, and generally aggregate as much as possible: automatically scrape related tweets, links, news links, comments, pinterest pictures, and any other data you can think of.

After that, you'll have yourself a database of spam. If you shoot links into it, hopefully Google won't notice. If it's 25k+ pages, they probably will.

Stuff I've seen work in the past: Random tag clouds (spam blog days), QR codes, and mashing Q&A into the content.

In the case of a store, it works, because it's a thing. It's not an informational query. And it won't get penalized because the intent of the searcher is not informational. The relationship between (brand:product) is pretty strong and in many cases just having that in the title/h1 tag is enough for a low competition product. Also, if they type brand:product:model-number/sku/mpn/barcode, the union between those keywords is so narrow, that duplicate content is fine as well. For an informational query, the union between (best:high:protein:shake), not only is the intersection wide, but each keyword has millions of results, simply put, you have no chance to rank on that keyword without high scores for on and off page, Google will rank spam above you as long as the phrase is in their h1 tag. The competition for that keyword is dramatically larger then you think it is, since you're really competing against every page that has similar words on it. So: best,great,tasty,wonderful:high,great,huge:protein,meat,muscle:shake,smoothie,blend; so yeah, get annihilated... If you have low authority, Google will probably not rank you at all, or it will rank unrelated content that happens to have any of those 4 words on the page. Google won't do this for a product, since microsoft:office:keyword is a specific thing, there are no synonym replacements with strong relationships.

 

 

 

It's not about unique content, heck every single large font site on the web has the exact same content, only one ranks #1 for each keyword, the rest trail in the SERPs. No slaps. Yes, there's money in the niche.

I've copied pasted a public domain book from Google Books, did a silo on the book chapters, outranked Google Books with their own content. I'd do the same with your PLR pages but I'm not interested in unnecessary work just to prove what I already know.

The Bitcoin site, perfect example, no articles, public domain data, banking money. I should copy the idea.

 

[mki]

20 hours ago, yukon said:

It's not about unique content, heck every single large font site on the web has the exact same content, only one ranks #1 for each keyword, the rest trail in the SERPs. No slaps. Yes, there's money in the niche.

I've copied pasted a public domain book from Google Books, did a silo on the book chapters, outranked Google Books with their own content. I'd do the same with your PLR pages but I'm not interested in unnecessary work just to prove what I already know.

The Bitcoin site, perfect example, no articles, public domain data, banking money. I should copy the idea.

Are you talking about duplicate content conceptually or the way Google handles it?

Edit: If Google handled duplicate content they way many people think it does, it might as well always just "I'm feeling lucky" in a paid placement. There would be no reason to return a list of results.

I just checked the font sites and there's no duplicate content. There's no duplicate content on the bitcoin site either.

Conceptually similar content is competing content, not duplicate.

I assure you: this article is going to be pretty difficult to rank.

Spoiler

Click Fraud

If you're using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called "click fraud". But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished?

Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.

There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google's AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.

One of the most complex is through the use of so called "hitbots". These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).

Google's AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.

Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and they're prepared to do so for just $0.50 an hour.

Of course, there's a problem with this mechanism. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.

To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What's even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

And don't think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.

In fact there's so much that if search engine companies don't increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging.

Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there's certainly room for a lot of improvement.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other's links (which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they click such links.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google's AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.

There are some means of protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud.

If you Google any competitive target keywords, Google will return spam and unrelated nonsense before that article shows up, like I said

Usually, Google won't even display the duplicate content in the SERP as well.

If you mash two unrelated concepts together, it works:

Google -> underworld of computing called click fraud

works.

Note: I have SERPs set to 100 results per page.

So, if you Google, "adsense click fraud" the first result is (in the 80s)

http://www.netprofitincome.com/click-fraud-adsense/

They got it to work by inserting a link to related content, like I said.

As you can see in any SEO data tool, that site is doing really well. SEMRush reports zero average monthly visits. /Mindblown

If you check the supplemental index, there's dozens of pages buried.

The site with the most authority is earngurus.com and it only shows up in the supplemental index.

I assure you, unique content does not behave that way in Google. I have a bunch of domains with unique content and no links and they actually get some traffic. (I used to think that aged them and it doesn't.)

I used to screw around with this a lot, all you need to do is have content that is exclusive to that page. Content is anything, links, words, images, videos, files, anything. If Google thinks, that content is what people are looking for, it won't bury it. A unique sentence or unique h1/title tag is adequate in some cases, especially when, that's the keyword.

But, if the content IS the article and it's duplicate, it really doesn't perform well. You need a lot more links then if it was unique.

To work around that, see what I posted above. I have spam projects where I did something and it did work. But it's pure spam, I'm not denying that.

I know you're a believer that all that matters is links, which I agree to a certain extent, but I've played around with content a lot and can usually get content to move up without adding links, especially in the case where I feel the content is under-performing. The main culprit is likely that the keyword density is too high, so adding length does help and that's yet another possibility as to why I have experienced "adding length to content makes it go up in Google." I admit, I don't know exactly why it works, but every time I took a piece of under performing content and added length, it went up, usually dramatically, say page 4 to page 2, targeting keywords that were reasonable for that page's authority.

[bfields]

I would say know what niche you're going after and the type of topics being produced. I'd also use long tail keywords and use them in your URL, H1 and H2 tags, title tag, meta description and throughout the content itself.