Do You Test? This is Huge
Testing is one thing that many of us simply do not do. The make money online niche is so over populated that everybody has a theory and 99% of theories are unproven. Given the level of misinformation the only way to test whether a strategy is effective or not is to try it for yourself. Now that might be a pain but until you can find sources of information that you can trust (not at all easy) it’s the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
To that end I conducted a test over the last three months to see once and for all how important it is to have content on your site versus a bunch of eBay/amazon/affiliate links. This proved very illuminating and also poses somewhat of a dilemma. How come? Well I have proven beyond doubt that Google really doesn’t like ranking pages with little or no content. Build links to content packed page or post and it will rank quite well. Build links to a page or post which contains say a dozen eBay listings and it will not only affect the page negatively but your whole site. I have several sites that have more than enough links pointing to them to rank top 10 but they are down in the hundreds. Google appears to label it an affiliate site (despite links being cloaked) and they really don’t like them anymore.
So where’s the dilemma? Well I’ve been building sites using wordpress and phpBay. I can’t get them to rank in Google (without heaps of content) and I cant get them to rank that well in Yahoo (Yahoo doesn’t seem to like wordpress that much) and as for Bing (well Bing is a big improvement on Live but the jury is still out for me). What’s fascinating is that Yahoo appears to love old style build a niche store sites with little or no content far more than wordpress phpBay.
How much more does it love them? Massively. I have 4 stores in particular that are plain BANS. They have no content, were deindexed by Google more than 18 months ago, have the standard templates and yet they have multiple keywords that rank no. 1-5 and over the last 12 months they have earned over $30,000. I have similar stores built in Wordpress and phpBay that in comparison have made approx $3,000. That makes BANS 10 x more effective.
Can you believe that? And there lies the dilemma. Do you knock out sophisticated stores that take a huge investment of time and money or do you knock out stores using the standard BANS script? I haven’t built a standard BANS store since the beginning of the year. In hindsight that’s looking a big mistake. The best bet? Balance build a couple of BANS stores per month and invest the rest of your time in trying to build stuff that Google will love.
There are all sorts of caveats that I could throw at this article but I’m not going to. You have to prove this stuff for yourself. BANS sites still take more than 6 months to get indexed properly in Yahoo but after that they do very well if you’ve find the right niche. They are quick to set up and if you throw them into the 3 Way Links system they will rank. Yeah Google is going to deindex them after a few weeks but hey $30,000 is a lot of money for little to no work!
Now that was worth reading wasn’t it?
Tagged with: bing • Build A Niche Store • google • phpBay • yahoo
Filed under: Obeservations
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$30k and they’re not ranked in Google! That was worth reading. It makes you think as I always just focus on Google and get really disappointed when sites don’t rank/get de-ranked. Thanks for the reminder that the big G isn’t the only search engine out there!
I am testing this too at the moment.
A heavy content wp site against a straight BANS store with only home page content.
We shall see who is the winner.
But in these days of EPC… a click is a click! Right?
Claire
It certainly made me think. I’m going to make sure I build a couple of old style stores with content on the home page and nothing else and see what happens. It will probably have to be a 6 month test but it will be interesting. And well done on the proper use of Keyword Luv. I’ve noticed most commenters just leave comments on the post about Keywordluv which sort of defeats the purpose!
Tao
I’ll be looking for your results with interest. My BANS sites certainly get more eBay clicks than content laden wordpress ones where the auctions have to be “dug out”. Provided the EPC is reasonable I believe there is still a lot of life in this type of site. Of course it might be short lived if the intergration of BING with YAHOO goes ahead as planned.
Interesting. I’ve got some old BANS sites that are doing OK in Yahoo with nothing more than 3WL pointing at them, hadn’t really considered the opportunities in building more. They usually have 1 – 2 articles on them but nothing on the store pages of note. Actually, they are still indexed by Google and the one with the most content gets about 50% of its (very long tail) traffic from Google. They are BANS 2.0 stores, I have a suspicion that the footprint Google uses for its mass de-indexing is specific to BANS 3.0.
Thanks for the post – it seems like it might be worth dusting off BANS and trying a few stores again. How do you think these basic BANS stores would play with EPN?
Andrew
You make a very good point about the affect on EPN. I think the stores would do as well maybe better from an EPC point of view. However, EPN isn’t keen on content free sites themselves these days. Don’t know why as it makes them more money but thats the way it is.
The biggest risk, if it is a risk (who knows) is that EPN decides it doesn’t like those sites and terminates your account. That statement may scare but does it increase the risk of termination? Again, who really knows.