Following up from the observation in my last post, I decided to test against a domain where I’d bought the hyphenated .com version just over a month ago and the concatenated .org version a week ago. That is word1-word2.com and word1word2.org.

Now since the hyphenated version went live, it debuted at position 125 on google. It quickly dropped out the rankings and has not returned to date. The concatenated version meanwhile has just debuted at 22. That’s quite a difference in treatment!

Okay, so 2 sets of examples is hardly a test, but seeing as I’ve already heard that this is the case from what I believe are reputable sources, I am taking these as first hand evidence. And pretty strong evidence too that hypenated is a no-no.

Oh by the way, regarding my last post, there was a second twit that stole my content. This one posted it up on squidoo. It did rank. I can’t remember whether on page 2 or page 3 but google has since slapped it.

Meanwhile, the original (or at least first discovered of the two twits) has edited out much of the verbatim, and added some category placeholder posts and currently ranks at 27.

So yeah, definitely go .net or .org, else tack on a surplus word before entertaining hyphens if you want google to treat you nice from the get-go.

I noticed something interesting in relation to that site that I referred to that got slapped in Niche Subdirectory SEO Restructuring & Search Engine Slappage

While I believe the first slapping may have occurred due to the restructuring and the need for the google cache to update and flush out the old structure, the site has since been reindexed into the latter half of page 1 three times for the main keyphrase.

After the restructure, the site was already doing well, returning from it’s latest down in the google yo-yo experience. It was on page one, hovering in the latter half of the top ten. Within days it ended up as high as position 5 once google acknowledged a dmoz backlink. Shortly after that it got slapped.

Then after two weeks it returned and was slapped within 24 hours. Then another 2 weeks later it returned for 3 days then got slapped. Then it was back again a week later and slapped within 24 hours.

So if it keeps comiong back and then getting slapped, what’s going on?

Someone at google is manually targetting it? I doubt it, the content is good. I’m quite proud of the site. It’s about the only site amongst all the clearly ecommerce sites that actually contains useful information about the niche subject.

The restructuring? Not anymore, the google cache has updated, the old structure is nowhere to be seen?

Some minor structure tweaking? I have played around with a few smaller silo’d sections of the site that sit outside of the original main structure. Personally I don’t feel this should have had such an effect that I could be returned to page 1 and then slapped.

Too SEO’d? Nah, the SEO techniques used have hardly changed since the site first started ranking and going through the google yo-yo effect.

So back to what I hinted back in the title, incompatible plugins. I had installed All in One SEO and SEO Ultimate. On occasion I can be a plugin junkie, and especially with the site concerned. It was one of my first Internet Marketing sites and I was fascinated with the ease of adding plugins that you could now do since WordPress 7 came out. This site was also the one I’ve expended the most effort on. Anyway, somewhere down the line I had both plugins live – pity that there’s no update trail (or if there is, I’m not yet aware of how to discover it) to allow me to find out when I installed and made SEO Ultimate live. Anyway, the problem with these plugins being used together is that they overlap in functionality, thus creating a functional contradiction that may have been screwing with things like the robots.txt file and other parts of the site when the search engine bots came crawling.

To further support this theory is the fact that I didn’t just get slapped by google, but yahoo and bing as well. Furthermore, I’ve since getting slapped, I’ve started to rank for the domain name without the “www.” prefix on yahoo and bing. The site’s domain uses the “www.” prefix which suggests a problem with the search engine bots interpretting certain information about the site. Why else would it go from indexing the domain correctly, then slapping it, then a few days later reindexing the domain using the incorrect format? Doesn’t sound like a problem with the content to me.

I have since disabled SEO Ultimate as I can’t be bothered to learn how to use it right now and All in One SEO is tried and trusted. If my theory proves correct, I would expect to see a return of my site within 3/4 weeks that will be permanent, rather than looking like some sort of blip. And I’ll be posting the result here.

Article submission to high authority directories are a great way to get an authority backlink. However, be sure that having many links coming from the same directory will not do all that much for your rankings.

2/3 submissions may carry weight, but I’m beginning to wonder whether having more than that is not merely ignored but can actually contribute towards your site getting a slap (i.e. the assumption is that you’re trying to game the search engines ) at least while the site is less than a year old and/or doesn’t yet have a good variety of other backlinks coming in yet.

The idea does sound plausible to me as I have seen a mass of posts on the same topic appear under various author names all published over a course of days, if not the same day. I’m talking double digit submissions here.

This can serve a purpose though – swamping out the directory makes you look like the expert on the topic (or a freak, or an obvious salesman trying to push a product take your pick), and should drive a significant quantity of traffic to the target landing page.

So if you’re going to write articles for SEO purposes, use multiple submission sites. This should go without saying, but I got a bit lazy and couldn’t be bothered to sign up for other directories, squidoo, hubpages etc.

I also wanted to quickly get to platinum status in ezine articles – but I only ended up as Basic Plus after the first 10 articles were submitted as I did get a few articles flagged. I guess I am further than most people by getting as far as I have without outsourcing.

(In fact I’m just listening to an interview with Chris Knight in 2008, and he states less than 15% of the ezine articles members at the time have submitted more than 10 articles. Furthermore, to gain authority over your niche, you should write 25-250 articles. For better SEO of your own website, you may wish to spread submissions between several directories to leverage the variety of backlinks coming from different authority sources.)

Now I’ve only just recently submitted an article to squidoo and another to hubpages, which may have helped with the latest re-ranking menti0ned in y last post. I say these new sites may have helped with the re-ranking as I can see that yahoo has counted them, but the links do not appear in google webmaster tools, therefore I don’t know for sure that google has seen these and taken them into account.

That said, if page rank updates are ongoing, but are only made public periodically, then there’s no reason why the same too could not apply to counting links before they are publicly mentioned in webmaster tools.

Finally, remember, it’s one thing to get a link, to get a relevant link is another. Publishing to article submission sites is one of the best ways to get relevant backlinks as the websites that republish the articles should be related to the subject matter that your article is about. If you’re lucky enough to get a site with some PR republishing your link, then that’s even better.

So there are three good benefits from article publishing, squidoo and hubpages publishing:

1. High authority do-follow backlink (assuming you are submitting to a directory like ezine articles)
2. Trickle of Traffic (unless you write about a really hot topic(s) with a compelling reason for people to click through to your link then you can expect to enjoy at least 1 or 2 visits per day/week depending on quality and/or quantity of articles  and the demand for the subject matter of the article(s).
3. Article Directories only: additional backlinks. As some article submission sites offer republication rights to the public as a condition of authors using their service, and as the public in turn are expected to include your personal resource text with the article with dofollow, then you start getting free backlinks from sites relevant to your subject matter.

   Squidoo and Hubpages only: you can earn money directly from these platforms. I gather some people have created good income streams from hubpages in particular, but obviously you will have to submit a load of popular and in demand pages to get to that level.

Okay, after the latest yo-yo, where my site went from top of page 2, to slowly slipping down, then getting pushed down to the hundreds, it’s then came back to the late 50s, then the 40s, then when I thought maybe it got fresh slapping action, I found it had got re-ranked onto the bottom half of page 1 – YeeHaa.

Well actually, after the constant yo-yoing, I’m not feeling too confident that I’m staying there, although perhaps this time I may very well be. I have engaged in some link building attempts. They haven’t all come through yet, but some have.

My ezine-articling appears to be paying off well too. I am getting a trickle of visits daily AND I am starting to get backlinks from sites publishing my articles. Now I was glad to be getting the little trickles of traffic while the site was new and getting battered and bruised all over the shop while google algorithms (and staff?) decided where to put it. It kept me from despair.

I’m a beginner right, I want to see elements that this can work as quickly as impossible. Yes, I believe this can work. And I believe I can do it and become very successful at it. But like most things there’s that learning curve and initial uphill struggle to get through.

When you seem to be doing well, and then get a slap, then come back and get slapped again, you obviously don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Getting some referrals from others sources such as ezine articles, accompanied by a few adsense clicks or affiliate sales helps put a little silver lining on the cloud of uncertainty.

So I think launching a site with article submissions is definitely the way to go when launching a new site unless you have an effective means of driving traffic from the get-go lined up. However, that said, spread out the articles between different directories. More on that in another post.