Has Your Site Disappeared From Google Results But Is Still Indexed?

May 12, 2011 Seekness 5 comments

During the last few weeks, I’ve seen this all over the place. People I know, people on forums, and even to myself on a few sites. Our pages that once ranked for the terms we were targeting (and the inevitable long-tail search traffic) suddenly seem to have fallen off the face of the index. What happened, why did it happen, and what can you do about it?

Without panicking, let’s go into the reasoning behind this all and talk about the best possible things you can do from here.

I should say first that I know how frustrating it is to see both your traffic and income take a nosedive in a flash. It absolutely sucks, and it’s easy to begin questioning where you went wrong, whether you should change your approach, and whether it’s even worth continuing in this industry. I’ve felt the same feelings too at times and I’m sure I will again in the future.

We have to keep a level head and be as objective about this as we can. When emotion gets in the way of business decisions, we usually end up doing bad things that aren’t in our best interest.  Let’s go into this all some more and figure this out though. We’ll start out with the “Why”.

Why did my sites stop getting Google search traffic?

Before I go into potential reasons, keep this important fact in mind: your site probably took a hit for a combo of reasons, rather than just one. Google is a sophisticated brain whose cognitive skills continue to improve over time. The chances of them penalizing you for just one reason are possible, but not likely. Look at these potential reasons and try to remember everything you possibly can about your site(s). From there, it’s much easier to come up with a course of action to fix things.

Are you deindexed or “sandboxed”?

There are some easy ways to determine whether you’ve been deindexed or penalized (also known as “sandboxed” to many, though this may be something different and longer lasting altogether).

First, try searching for your site in Google with the site: parameter. So, if it’s this site, it’s site:seekness.com . Do the same for your domain.  If results show, you haven’t been deindexed. If they don’t show at all, you have some bigger problems (you can submit a reconsideration request, but you’ll only want to do this if you’ve addressed the underlying issues that caused this).

Next, try searching for your site name with both the domain extension and by itself. See if you show up there. If you used to and no longer do, then you’re also in trouble.

Check your Google Analytics account (or any traffic tracking service you use) and see if the search traffic has come to a screeching halt. See if there’s any search traffic you’re getting. Try to see whether some pages seem to be unharmed, while others have completely dropped off. This is very well possible too, and would be directly correlated to the fact that you were busted on some fronts for violating quality standards, but not all pages failed the test. Try to spot out the differences between the pages still standing and those in the graveyard. It’s also possibly you were lucky and all pages are the same, in which case you’ll still want to address the issue on the “good” pages as soon as possible.

So assuming you’re still indexed but your traffic has plummeted, you’re in the same boat as many people out there. Let’s go into some of the causes now.

Here are some reasons this may have happened:

Your site’s content wasn’t good enough

“How can a computer really judge the quality of my conten?” you ask. Doesn’t sound fair on the surface. But there are plenty of ways they can figure this out. Did you outsource your articles to someone in Bangladesh for a penny a word? What did you expect to get then? Not only are your articles unlikely to be original and unique, but there’s probably broken English with grammar that doesn’t flow. Google can absolutely detect this.

Don’t believe me? Try googling a term like “there is many things”.

The English is obviously incorrect, but what comes back in your results? All “there are many things” listings. Google has the foresight to correct you there. This is one of thousands of possible examples and it was the first one that came into my head as I wrote this. The point is, the NY Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and other high quality, well known publications that people want to read would never fill a page with broken English and searchers most likely won’t want to read it. If you’re outsourcing your articles, you need to go through it yourself and fix up any grammar vulnerabilities. Even if there’s no proof in your mind that this matters, why do you want to subject your readers to it? Do you think they’ll be likely to come back? The same obviously goes for spelling errors, which are even easier for someone like Google to detect.

There’s also the issue of uniqueness and originality. Have you spun your articles to 60% unique and you feel as if there’s no way a search engine can know that you’re trying to game it by repurposing content without directly repeating it? Even if you’re rewriting by sentence, they’re smart enough to know.

If they’re smart enough to translate anything you say into one of over 50 different languages, why should it be so hard to believe they can’t translate the meaning of one English sentence, paragraph, or article, into another form of that English with similar or identical context?

Come on. They have cars that drive themselves in traffic through the crooked streets of San Francisco without getting into an accident (over 140,000 miles logged). You’re telling me they can’t pin down unoriginal content?

Make what you say original. If you don’t know much about the subject, don’t just search for an Ezinearticle and rewrite it in your own way. Maybe you’ll get lucky by doing this, but a year or two from now, you may not be as lucky as their search technology shapes up even more (and you know it will). If you don’t know the subject well, research the topic until you have enough interesting findings and insights to share. Or hire a proven expert who already does.

Start building things with the big picture in mind and aim to create things people will want to read. Matt Cutts has said many times that this is what they’re looking for, and if you play on their team, you’ll be a winner as the basis for their algorithms continues to move in that direction.

What about the scrapers and other poorly crafted sites that still rank, you may wonder? Stop worrying about them and do the above instead. They’re temporarily lucky, and their day will come if it hasn’t yet.

It became obvious that you built pages just for the sake of ranking

Is every link path of yours the exact keyword you’re trying to rank for?

hxxp://site.com/keyword-1/
hxxp://site.com/keyword-2/

etc.

Bad. You probably generated the keyword ideas from Google’s own keyword tool, so it couldn’t be easier for them to run your site’s link paths up against the keywords in their tool. If there’s a high enough correlation between the two of these things, they’ll know what you’re up to. Instead, go with titles that include the keyword but say more than this too.

If you run searches these days, you should see that lots of the top results no longer have the keywords in their link paths the way they used to. I don’t have any before and after for measurable effect, but search out a term that you’ve been following in the past. Notice how the results have changed.

The same goes for titles too. Don’t make it obvious, and absolutely don’t make your titles exactly the keyword.

Don’t stuff the page with your keyword either. The days of including it in the first and last paragraph, and a handful of other times throughout the article are done. LSI reigns supreme these days and they can identify what your article is about solely based on contextual keywords and phrases they’re able to identify based on the words contained on your page. It’s the premise that Adsense, related searches, and other modules are built on.
Your backlinking strategy got you into trouble

There are a number of signals that could have caused a flagging on the backlink front, but this could have easily landed you in the doghouse. Here are some of the potential causes:

You’re using a service that was sniffed out

If you’ve been buying links, using software or a service that mass submits your content (even spun) and backlinks to dozens or hundreds of sites or directories, there’s a good chance this may have gotten you into trouble. Not only have some networks been detected and devalued, but certain linking patterns have been identified to the point where it’s obvious that you’ve been the one building your own links. Some of the signs related to that will come in the potential reasons to follow.

All of your links pointed to the same few pages

Did most of your links point to your “money pages”? Worse yet, did they all point to your home page and neglect the inner pages? Did they only link to inner pages and none to your home page? Whatever the case, there are plenty of ways it could look unnatural and these patterns could easily blow your cover. A real website with real links from real people will have a wide distribution of links pointed at random to all kinds of the site’s interesting pages. So even if you don’t care about driving traffic to some pages, you’ll want to spread the links around if you’re building your own.

Anchor text was way too similar

If you’re trying to rank for “dog training videos” and 90% of your links have just that as anchor text, it simply isn’t conceivable. Even if a few say “dog training video” or “videos on dog training”, it still isn’t enough.

Look at a recently popular article on a mainstream website and reverse engineer it all. Try to see what their backlink profile looks like because that’s exactly what Google is looking to simulate on sites that truly rank naturally. If their article is about the 2012 Presidential Election, for example, you’ll see all kinds of anchor text pointing to this article. Even stuff like “this article from the NY Times”, “check this out”, a piece by (author name), “this couldn’t be more wrong”, etc. Look at some of the pages I’ve linked to above, and my anchor text. That’s how people who aren’t internet marketers. link to things.

You have to mix your stuff up if you’re building links. The days of even needing 40, 50, or 60% of your anchor text matching your exact target keyword are done. A natural looking page will probably be at something no higher than 20%. If you have backlinks with a majority other anchor text, this won’t hurt you – it’ll look natural. Trust that Google will know what your page is about and they’ll do the rest when people search for a certain keyword. On a related note, more variety also helps to increase your long-tail search traffic.

Low quality backlinks or not enough variety

This is another place where people slip up. They’ll get all of their backlinks from some profile packet, blog comment blast, article directory submission service, or something else that yields a uniform backlink pattern. Again, this is very detectable since something that naturally became viral or cited as an authority wouldn’t ONLY be linked to from the same types of places. You can be sure there’s a variety filter built into Google’s algorithm, and if you’ve grossly manipulated the variety principle in any way, your links will be devalued at best, and penalized at worst.

Rate of backlinks was unnatural

Did you hire someone on Fiverr for a Scrapebox blast that lasted a week and got you 400 backlinks, only to halt all efforts afterward? You have to be very careful about this, because it will land you in trouble more often than not. If your site is well aged and already has a wide variety of links, it may be able to withstand it, but it’ll generally hurt you to go about building links at such a rampant pace. Especially if your site is new.

Unless you’re in a highly competitive niche (ranking for highly competitive terms would call for another article altogether), it shouldn’t take nearly as many backlinks to rank for a term as you’ve been conditioned to think. Less is more, especially if it’s done at a steady pace where some of those are higher quality ones.

What To Do From Here

These are some of the most likely culprits that may have caused what you’ve experienced, but there are obviously other things that might be responsible for your downfall. The bigger question becomes what to do from here? Do you throw in the towel and move onto another site, or do you fight it out and try for redemption? This is a decision that you’ll have to make based on the time you spent on this site and the revenues lost vs. the time and cost involved with replicating your efforts on another project. I can’t answer that question for you since each situation is uniquely different.

But let’s go ahead and assume that you don’t want to give up. What can you do to maximize the chance that things get back to “normal” one of these days?

Here are some things you may want to consider doing:

Keep On Writing More Articles

Lots of sites I’ve built have been “set and forget” sites where I go into the site with a very narrow and specific plan. I’m targeting a certain set of keywords (sometimes even just one) and write the bare minimum article quantity required in order to achieve that goal. The site may thrive for months, without the need for any updates.

But this also gives Google the impression that you no longer care about the site. How many great sites stay fixed with the same number of pages for months and years? Not many, and that’s exactly why adding some fresh content to your site could win it some goodwill. Try to keep the updates steady and regular if you’re serious about making an effort.

Clean up your existing pages

Have you been guilty of keyword stuffing, making blatantly obvious SEO titles, and providing content that most readers would consider pretty generic? If you’ve done any of those things, you may want to go back to the pages that may have landed you in trouble. Be honest about your site’s quality and intent and tweak what’s already there.

I once had a site that listed all of its categories on the homepage. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had about 50 categories that all had the site’s main topic (i.e. “finance”) in the category names. How do you think Google’s going to feel about a site that has the same word repeated over 50 times on its homepage? Even if your intent wasn’t to keyword stuff, you may have done it inadvertently. Go back and look to see if this (or anything like it) may have been the case somewhere, and clean it all up.

Privacy Policy, Contact Us, About Us

Make sure you have a privacy policy, contact information, and an “about us” page on your site. These are all the mark of a legitimate site that genuinely has a real intent to serve and interact with others, and the lack of these things (especially a privacy policy) could result in a penalty.

Take some ads off your site

You may very well be guilty of ad overload, and spiders are wising up to these things. If they realize that EVERY single page of yours is stuffed with affiliate banners, a few Adsense blocks, and/or Amazon affiliate links, they’ll quickly realize that you’ve thrown this site up merely for the sake of generating revenue via one of these methods.

While every site deserves to make some income, there are different ways to go about it and an overload of ads is known to degrade a website’s quality and bother visitors – which shows that you may have little regard for your user experience. Google is all about favoring sites that provide a great user experience, so keep these factors in mind, as they may be ruining yours. Get that huge, obnoxious Adsense block off the top of the page that may even mislead your users into thinking the links are pages on your site. Cut down on the ads that aren’t performing and keep more of them below the fold. Hell, get rid of all of them for a bit. After all, your site stopped getting traffic so you don’t really have much to lose.

Work on getting some higher quality backlinks

Less is more these days, and some backlinks from higher quality resources could help to get your site back on track. I can offer no proof of this, but I’d have to imagine that if the NY Times ran a piece on your site’s niche with a link back to your site as a valuable resource, you’d be back in Google’s good graces before you knew it.

Try to reach out to Webmasters in your space and offer to write guest posts. Don’t go for link exchanges, as two way links are very old news and won’t help you out in any way. But slow up the pace of backlinks and focus on getting a few seriously high quality links. At worst, these links will bolster your status in Yahoo and Bing. At best, they’ll get you back into the bigger index.

Write to Google

I would only advise doing this if you’ve seriously taken some measures to fix up your site and haven’t seen results after a month or longer. If you’ve really gone through things and cleaned them up, you may want to consider taking this route if nothing else has seemed to work on its own.

Here’s a link to their reinstatement request page. It may end up triggering a manual review, so you want your site to look top notch if you do this. They also make it very obvious that the source of your backlinks may have landed you in trouble. If this is the case, you’ll want to be completely honest with them and fess up to what you’ve done. Failing to mention this little detail could easily keep you in the doghouse.

Be patient

Regardless of what you do, don’t expect immediate results. You may luck out and see them, but more often than not, this type of thing could take weeks or months of effort and waiting. Be relentless and patient and keep on proving to Google that your site is worthy of display in its search results and you’ll eventually see it, but be prepared to wait.

Of course, you may decide that it’s simply worth moving on it light of the above. But if you choose to do this, remember under all circumstances that you must absolutely avoid repeating the mistakes that got you into trouble in the first place. Work to build high quality sites and learn from this troublesome experience. Google has come under a lot of recent criticism for displaying spammy results, and they’re fighting a very hard fought war to not only wash all existing crap sites away from its search results, but make it impossible for sites like these to thrive going forward. Play on their side and spend more time building things that readers will love. In doing so, you’ll sleep well at night knowing that your sites will only benefit more as Google continues to fine tune its technology. Good luck.

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Why You’re Failing At Internet Marketing: 10 Possible Reasons

May 6, 2011 Seekness One comment

So many people hear about that friend who lives the dream that comes with making a full-time living through internet marketing. The passive income. The flexible schedule that lets us work in our boxers, in a coffee shop, on the beach, or anywhere we feel like being. The lack of a boss, and in lots of cases, even clients to answer to.

It all sounds great, and once we’ve decided we want that for ourselves, we frantically search the web looking for a blueprint that sets us off on our way to that promised land of passive riches.

If we’re lucky, we end up at a valuable resource like WarriorForum or WickedFire that lets us read about the stories of many others in the same boat – some of them successful and kind enough to share their stories.  We may end up buying a WSO or some other product that shows us one person’s method and approach, and if we’re lucky once, it may actually work.

Others may fall right into to one of the hundreds of “Make Money Online” products that claim to show you how to make thousands of dollars a day with the click of a button.  Autoblogs, one page “Sniper” sites that you can set and forget. Link blasting tools that promise to get you ranking for anything you want with some spun articles, social bookmarks, profile links, and more.

Do these things work? Some do, some don’t – but it’s not always that simple. I come across so many people who commit to doing whatever it takes to succeed in this industry but quickly fade away after a few days, weeks, or months. If you’re in that boat right now, you’re most definitely not alone. Your lack of success could be related to one of a number of possible reasons. More likely than not, it’s a combination of some of the reasons I’m about to list.

Be honest with yourself and use this info to try to identify where you’ve gone wrong. Everything is fixable and with a little self honesty, effort, and consistency, you can overcome any problems you’re experiencing and break through.  Here are 10 possible reasons you may be failing at internet marketing. No matter what method you’re going after, there’s a good chance these factors may apply to you.

1. You’re simply not doing enough work. No, you’re really not.

Most people out there don’t realize how much work it really takes to succeed in this industry. As the saying goes, content is king. As Google fine tunes its algorithms to meet its mission to give searchers the most value content possible, this couldn’t be truer in this day and age. If you want to generate traffic, you’re gonna have to put as much high quality writing as you possibly can around the web. I don’t care if these are your own sites, web 2.0 sites, forum posts that link to your content, tweets, Facebook posts, article directory submissions, or anything else. When it comes down to it, people will only find you if you’re producing new material.

If you’re not willing to put in the work, you won’t see results. I have a friend who’s 4 months into this business. He’s only making a few dollars per day and can’t understand what he can be doing more effectively in order to boost his daily earnings. “Do I need more backlinks?” he asked. “Do I need a better backlinking method?”.  “Did I choose bad niches?”.

These all seem like reasonable questions, but in his case, it turned out he had only written about 120 articles of site content since he started – or an average of one article per day.

It should come as no surprise that he’s making what he’s making. When I first started out, I made the commitment to write at least 10 articles’ worth of site content per day, and I did just that. 12 days into it, I had amassed as much content as he had over a four month period. And I was probably making a few dollars per day at that point.

If you want to make more, you’re gonna have to grind it out. It’s not fun. It’s not glamourous. But it’s how you get your start.

Make the commitment to stick to a daily routine. No matter what you do, don’t veer from it. When I started out, I promised myself I’d have my 10 articles to show for my day’s work no matter the circumstances. I wasn’t going to sleep until my work was done. And guess what? There were nights where I was up until 6am finishing the job because I wasn’t allowed to sleep until I did what I made the commitment to do.

Trust me on this one. This is probably the most common reason for failure and I can’t emphasize it enough. You’re not doing as much work as you think you need to do in order to see measurable results. Some people get lucky with websites that suddenly hit it big. I have, and you likely will one day too if you stick it out. But when it comes down to it, it’s all a numbers game. The more content you throw up, the better the odds something like that will happen.

How much work do you plan to do on a daily basis? Make that decision right now and stick to it. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re probably not serious enough about really wanting this for yourself.

2. You aren’t learning from your mistakes.

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” – James Joyce

Embrace the opportunity to fail. Every successful person does it. Most venture capital firms are very interested in investing their money with someone who’s failed at a past business venture and ready to go forward with a new one. Of course a longstanding track record of failure after failure might be a different story, but the reasoning is simple. Failure gives us insight into what doesn’t work, which is all the more valuable when it comes to figuring out how to make something work.

This couldn’t be more true in the world of internet marketing. Potential missteps exist in so many forms. Keep some of the next possible reasons for failure in mind, because most of them are mistakes. If you can relate to any of these, identify your missteps and learn from them!

3. Bad niche selection.

Maybe there’s simply not enough money in your niche. If there is money, maybe it’s too competitive and you haven’t written and/or backlinked enough. They say that you should avoid the most popular niches when starting out, but I don’t entirely agree with that statement. It all depends on the difficulty that it might take in order to rank for whatever you’re targeting. If you’re going after two or even three word heavily searched keywords in popular niches and wrote a few articles targeting that very term, congratulations on having wasted your time. Then again, if you’ve written a boatload of content within a particular niche on a range of different subtopics and keywords within that niche, the long tail traffic will begin rolling in over time, especially if you update your site regularly and throw some consistent links back to it.

4. You’re not giving Google what it wants.

Not only is the search giant constantly tweaking its algorithm, but there are certain rules in place that could easily be deal breakers for your site if you’re violating them. Do you read their webmaster quality guidelines? If you haven’t, leave my website now, read them, and then come back. Really.

Maybe you have too many ads up relative to your content. Maybe you’re largely copying your sites’ content from other sources and offering nothing unique. Perhaps your articles are blatantly low quality, with meaningless drivel that simply targets a keyword.

“Electric blankets are a great way to stay warm in the winter. When it gets cold, nothing can be quite more comforting than an electric blanket…

….you can find electric blankets by searching Google, looking to Amazon, and other local retailers like Walmart.”

Look at all familiar to you? Shame on you, and sorry you’ve wasted your time. That don’t work no more. Don’t try to fool Google and searchers. Produce something meaningful and you’ll be rewarded for some time to come.

5.  You’re getting visitors, but they’re not converting to sales, leads, ad clicks or list subscribers.

This is one of the better problems to worry about. Getting traffic to your site is typically going to be the hardest thing to accomplish starting out so if you’ve gotten to that point, I pat you on the back. You’ve obviously succeeded at producing some good content and you might have done some smart keyword research and backlinking to get to where you’ve gotten.

Anyway, there are a number of reasons that your visitors may not be converting. Here are a few.

  • Bad ad placement. I don’t know if you’re using banners, text links, pop ups, or something else, but try switching up the placement and making it more visible. Whatever you do, you don’t want to overload your visitors with ads (which can also have a negative impact on ranking), but you’ll need to position things strategically if you want them to see what’s on offer. Change some things around. Do A/B testing wherever possible and keep a close eye on metrics.
  • Bad looking ads. Maybe your placement’s fine but the ads aren’t being noticed. If they’re Adsense ads or other text ads, tweak the size and/or color of the text. Play around with link color, text color, text size, background color, and any other possible settings to make sure that your ads stand out enough to visitors so that they’ll notice them (without putting off with something that’s just obnoxious, of course).
  • You’re linking to a bad affiliate offer. Check the creative of whatever landing page you’re linking to. Whether it’s a lead capture form or a sales page, it’s critical that whoever’s doing the marketing has wisely built their landing page. I’ve marketed Clickbank products that convert 1 in 20 (this is great), and I’ve marketed others that I’ve literally sent hundreds of visitors to without a single conversion. Look at the way the page you’re linking to is laid out. Look at what they’re selling and the price it’s selling for. Is it something you’d be interested in if you were looking to solve whatever problem this offer does? Be honest with yourself and think about that. Because if you’re sending visitors to a page and they’re not converting, you owe it to yourself to switch products ASAP. There are plenty out there so look for more.
  • Bad keyword targeting. You need some form of tracking code on your site that lets you see how visitors are finding you. Usually, your content will be targeting a specific keyword (or a few), and the percentage of visitors that click your ads/offers can EASILY be tied directly into the nature of the keyword the visitors used to find your site.Let’s use a simple example here, and say that your niche is TVs.  If you’re targeting “plasma TV deals”, there’s a very good chance your visitor will very obviously be interested in any ads that you display pushing off plasma TVs. On the other hand, if the keyword is “plasma vs. LCD”, despite the fact that it gets a ton of monthly searches, this reader is probably just looking for an article that explains the differences and talks about which is better. Think about the commercial intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. A different word or two can make a world of a difference when it comes to monetization.A good way to measure this is using the Google Adwords keyword tool via the “Competition” bar that displays when you search for keywords. The more full that green bar is, the more advertisers are bidding on that keyword. Paying advertisers obviously know what buyers are interested in, so this is a great way to measure potential buying interest if you’re unsure about whether the keyword you’re targeting is likely to convert.

6.  You’ve chosen to build sites around subjects that are simply too boring.

Even if there’s money in niches like payday loans, refinancing, asphalt, and heating systems, they’re boring as $h!t to write about. Don’t fall into this trap and try to find a niche that genuinely interests you – at least a little bit. You’ll find the writing to be much more bearable.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you should go ahead and write about something you love if there’s no money behind it. I see so many people in the industry telling IM newbies to find a subject they’re passionate about and to devote their first site to it.

Love cooking? That’s great and all, but see how much you love it when you’ve written 200 articles with recipe ideas, only to find that readers only wanted to use your recipes without dropping a dime on you or any advertiser. Sure, there are things you could do down the line to monetize a cooking site, but why spin your wheels like this when there are faster ways to get there? It’s especially important when you’re starting out that you go with something that begins to earn money once traffic begins coming in. You need to see some kind of reward for the fruits of your labor, and a bunch of oohs, aaahhhs, and thank yous for the tomato mint quinoa salad recipe you shared isn’t gonna pay the bills and let you quit your day job.

When all is said and done, try to find that middle ground. It doesn’t have to be the most lucrative niche out there, but there needs to be some money behind it. There are hundreds of them out there. Look around you and think about things you’ve recently bought. Problems you need solved. Things you see on store shelves. Commercials you see on TV. The inspiration is all around you.

And of course, if you can stomach the idea of writing about uninteresting subject matters with money tied to them, all the better. If these are things that people need, there’s every reason to consider throwing up a website about it. There’s a good chance you’ll have less competition here since we’re all human and usually tend to shy away from things we don’t like. Otherwise, leave the boring niches to the outsourced help you hire down the line once the earnings are rolling in :)

7. Your backlinking method isn’t effective.

Without links back to your content, there’s very little chance that you’ll rank for whatever you’re trying to rank. If you’re the NY Times, Amazon, or another major authority site with a ton of history, content, and trust, you won’t need this; but the little guy needs some show of confidence from the rest of the world before Google will really love ya.

Maybe your link profile isn’t varied enough. That profile link packet you bought and went through once or twice just isn’t enough these days. The bookmarks you threw up on Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon won’t be enough either. The directory submissions don’t work on their own. The blog comment spam campaign you spent a few hours on won’t do the job. Neither will those few Ezinearticles that just got accepted.

When it comes down to it, a natural looking backlink profile is what works. What does this mean? Get links from as many sources as you possibly can. Social bookmarks, article directories, web 2.0 sites, directory submissions, RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook links, blog comments (from related blogs on the same subjects), forum posts and signatures, etc. Scatter it out and don’t do it all at once. Don’t just link to your homepage either. Spread it around to the inner pages of your site, all of which should have great content too.

Keep it steady and mix up your anchor text so that it’s not just targeting one keyword.  If the majority of your keywords say “how to get a mortgage”, is it conceivable that a number of sites and users around the web miraculously linked to you with the same exact 5 words in their anchor text? Very doubtful, and the search engines are onto you. Mix it all up and do so responsibly. Most importantly, any links that you do throw up should be surrounded with content that’s valuable to those readers who stumble onto the pages that contain your backlinks. It goes a very long way these days.

Linking irresponsibly can easily bring a ranking penalty (temporary or permanent) into your life, and that’s the last thing you want to worry about when you’re just starting out. It’d be quite the crippling blow that most wouldn’t have the persistence to bounce back from.

8. You’re not being patient enough.

These things really do take time. Unless you’re using PPC, going on a social media rampage, comment spamming chat rooms, or deploying some other method that brings in an instant flow of traffic, you need to give it time. Most of my sites take at least a few months before I really start to see visitors en masse, and as long as I continue posting content on them, they continue to improve even more with age.

Time is your friend in the world of internet marketing, and even if you’re doing everything right, pouring your heart into the work and producing some great content on a daily basis, you should still expect not to make much (if anything at all) during your first month or two.

Give it time and keep on doing what you’re doing. One day you’ll wake up to see a pleasant surprise. A huge jump in traffic, your first affiliate sale, or some other encouraging result. And as long as you keep on doing what you’ve been doing, it only gets better from there.

9. The method you’re trying out doesn’t work well.

Maybe it used to work and times have changed. It’s also possible that you were duped by a product creator who peddled off a method that sounds great on the surface but doesn’t have the real world results to back up its claims. I’ve seen some dirty tactics used to market products and methods and it’s very well possible that you’ve fallen victim to one.

Whatever the reason for your adversity, it’s always good to change it up a bit if you’ve given it an honest shot and haven’t faltered in some of the above potential internet marketing missteps I’ve cited.

There are literally hundreds of possible ways to make money online. List building, product creation, affiliate sales, CPA networks, Adsense, Amazon, Ebay, freelancing. These are just a few.

When I started out, I decided to spread my work out into a few methods, hoping that one would hit it big. You should do the same. In doing this, you’ll also get a feel for which line of work you find easiest and most enjoyable. Give a few things a shot, without spreading yourself too thin.

10. You’re spending too much time reading through forums, products, and blogs like these. Go away. Now.

It’s absolutely true. I’m amazed to visit forums and see so called experts who have post counts in the thousands on those forums. How could someone with 4,700 posts genuinely have the time to spend both preaching their gospel on forums all day AND building a successful internet business? Not possible.

Forums and blogs can be a great resource. They can open you up to new ideas, help you learn about (and be inspired by) the successes of others, and give you a general sense of community that reminds you that you’re not alone in this struggle to figure this all out.

But…they’re a huge distraction too. Get yourself out of the habit of relying on these communities and feeling the need to keep up with “the news”.  Here’s some news for you – there is none. The most successful people out there are the ones who aren’t posting everyday because they very well realize their time is best spent focusing on ways to grow their own business. The biggest earners stay under the radar and you don’t know of their existence. Adapt that mentality and your productivity will shoot up.

For that reason, I don’t plan to post on a regular basis here. I have plenty more to share, but I need to worry about myself too. I’ll throw up some more posts as I have time. And until then, it’s back to work for me.

Go back and read each of these reasons once more. Try to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, because it’s almost guaranteed to be related to one of these reasons. Tweak your approach from there and you won’t be one of the thousands of those who quietly fade to IM dust during the days and weeks to follow. It’s in your hands from here.

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