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NSJ Update #4 – The Site is Ranking!

It has been about two weeks since the last update and since then I have started to see some ranking for a lot of my keywords that I am targeting. I am running into some uncharted water because I am used to seeing ranking come in a lot faster but with the new Google sandbox I am seeing delayed rankings. I will cover the sandbox and how I am going to deal with it in this update. I will also talk about my future plans for the site and how I will go about it.

If you missed update #3 can read that here!

Google’s New Sandbox

Now when I say sandbox I am not talking about the old school definition for sandbox. A sandbox used to mean that your site got hit with a penalty and you were not going to rank ever again. This new sandbox is a time period that a new site goes through before it is allowed to start ranking high. I have been doing a lot of research and reading about this topic the last couple weeks and I have learned quite a bit about it.

It seems like the time period is around 30 days before you can start to see some first page rankings. After the 30 days it seems like ranking a site will go back to normal and we can carry on with ranking a site.

My site was indexed on June 23rd so that means around July 23rd I will be out of the sandbox and we will see how my rankings respond to it. This sandbox was supposedly set into place in the last Google update which occurred around May 14th. Since then I have also noticed that my PBN links take longer to take affect. It used to take around 3-7 days but not it can take anywhere from 7 days to 6 weeks.

This just means that we have to be a little more patient and continue to do what I know works. I am not too worried about this new sandbox or the new update.

If you want some more information about this new sand box then you can read more about it from the places listed below –

That should give you a good understanding of how this new sandbox works and what to do. Let’s see how this affected my rankings so far!

First Rankings

I have been using Serpbook to track all of my rankings and it has been great so far. Check out my rankings below!

rankings

 

So far these rankings are pretty good and they are showing me that I will be able to rank in this niche.  You are probably wondering how many PBN links I have pointed to this site and I have listed them below.

dates

 

I have pointed a total of 8 links to the site but like I talked about earlier it takes a long time for these links to take affect on the site. I would say that maybe 5 out of the 8 PBN links are actually helping this site rank. The other 3 sites I don’t think have been picked up by Google yet and aren’t helping the rankings. So with 5 links I have gotten pretty good rankings. The anchor text is never repeated and each PBN links out to three pages on my money site.

Another thing I want to point out about the rankings is look at the far right column on the image that shows the rankings. You will see that these keywords all have a good amount of monthly searches so if I can get first page rankings for these keywords I will have a good amount of visits to my site which means more chance to sell things.

I talked about in the last update that I was going to point some PBN links at the site and see if I was able to get some rankings. So far I would say that I did get the rankings I was looking for and now I can carry on with the next part.

Spending

Previous Spending  – $140

Three 1500 word articles – $100

Total Spending – $240

Future Plans

Now that I know that I will be able to rank in this niche(Even with the sandbox) I can now add content and more pillow links to dilute my anchor text. I will be interested to see after 30 days what happens to my rankings and I will see a bunch of keywords shoot up to the first page. I will continue to add PBN links and see what happens.

I was able to find a great writer for the site and he is currently working on three 1500 word article for me. I was able to get these three articles for $100. So I am pretty happy about the price and I already know the quality is good because I have hired this guy before. He is an expert in this niche and knows what he is talking about.

I will also be looking for a good service that will add some brand links to my site. The site already had a good amount of links pointing to it but I want to be safe and add some pillow links to keep me from getting any sort of over optimization penalty. I am looking at a couple different services but if any of you reading this have a good service that you have used before then let me know!

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a question or comment below!

Read update #5 here!

Comments

8 Comments

Ram

Hi mate,

I found your site from AWI and have bookmarked your site straight away, liking your posts!

I have a question if you don’t mind answering. I started my niche website in February 2014 and it took roughly 3 months to hit on average 150 visitors a day. I see on your new niche sites you hit this amount. I read that this website is set-up on a expired domain, my question is are your niche websites expired domains as well?

I have been buying PBN with PA 25+ and DA 20+ and have roughly 40-50 pointing to my site and finally hit top 5 for my keyword, just bought some web 2.0 links as well. All the PBN are pointing to the homepage, to rank my long tail keywords that have roughly 1000+ searches do I point new PBN links to those pages to see increases? or pointing new PBN links to homepage fine?

I have roughly 30,000 words worth of content written for my next niche site don’t want to make the mistakes I made on my first niche site so hope to sponge in all the information you have 🙂

Thanks,
Ram

Josh
Josh

Hi Ram,

Glad you have found my site and like it! To answer your question yes I did use expired domains for my niche sites. I really like using expired domains because it seems to give some nice ranking boost.

Personally I don’t like to try and rank my homepage so I can’t really answer that question. I like to create topic pages for each group of similar keywords and rank those inner pages. I do point some links to my homepage but most are pointed to the inner pages. Look forward to seeing you around the site and good luck with your sites. If you have any more questions feel free to email me at [email protected]

Ram

Hi mate,

Thanks for the reply.

I surely will be sticking around I am interested what articles you have in store!

I’ve always wanted to try building a niche website on an expired domain name, I’ll keep any eye open for a good brandable domain name for my next niche site.

I see, I have done it the other way round I think I’ll have to buy some more PBN links and point them to my inner 1,500+ articles hopefully boast them up a bit as so far homepage is only ranked high. I appreciate your help bud, looking forward to your next post 🙂

Thanks,

Ram

Josh
Josh

Good to hear my friend! Good luck with your site

John

hi Josh,

this might be off-topic but i’d like to know if you experience this too. my daily visitors now are on 120 to 130+ but the problem is that i still only have 18 orders in total for July …there are are 348 amazon clicks …. what do you think is the problem here? why people are not ordering the products?
another is do you have daily orders ? or there are days that none even with 120 daily visitors?

Josh
Josh

Hi John, that conversion rate is pretty low but that could be a lot of reasons. I think your problem is that the items that you are selling are really expensive. But that isn’t a real problem because the low conversion rate is balanced out with the high ticket items. So you can get away with these low conversion rates because your commission is really high. I wouldn’t worry too much about it and just try and focus on increasing traffic to the site.

As for your other question, I usually get around 5 or 6 orders daily but sometimes as many as over 15. But I am selling cheaper items than you so you can’t really compare. I hope that this helps you understand a little better and cleared some of your questions up. Feel free to ask any other questions you have!

John

hi Josh,
Thank you for clearing things out..yes the products im selling has high price. by the way something really went well after i make some changes. and i believe this one caused my problem – its the header image height and picture. I remove the entire header image and this happened.

by the way this is the same message i emailed to Doug Cunnington …. i just post it here right away, hope this is okay.. ive been emailing Doug of the same problem. i edit some words..
———-
Doug,
My goodness, i just cant believe what happened, i was so worried there were no orders, it was only 18 orders, then another 2 units so 20 orders in all… i was checking some of other niche sites and realized that their header image height is below 100px and some dont even have a header image, i was so hesitant to take it out cause i really design it well, i love the look of it.
1. I finally took it off thinking that 1 product picture (header image) keeps showing even if im opening other related products in my niche site pages. Some orders are totally not related to my niche site..
2. I place the compare table on the homepage and on above the fold
3. conversion 11.78%
4. only 7 expired domains
5. traffic still on 120 to 130 daily visitors… (as of now it reached 161 visitors)

July 17 to 18 Doug, i cant believe my eyes, after making bird nests for my parakeet and small pond for my new fighting fish, came in another 29 (it was 27 ) orders total earning (if all are shipped) $1,980.77 x 0.06 (my rate for that day) = $119.84 earning.. (my rate now is 6.5%)

wow just wow Doug, but i think its the removal of header image that really helped a lot .. check the price and numbers of unit …
—-
sorry my english is not that good, im filipino…
that really surprised me Josh… i should have removed that header image long time ago…

Tracy

Hey John, I have a question for you.
I hope you don’t mind me asking this.
Are you staying in USA now?
How do you ship the items that you sold?

Thank you!


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