One of the major challenges of being a part time internet entrepreneur, at least as far as I’m concerned, is managing multiple projects.

My confession to you is that after getting off to a pretty good start on the Niche Site Duel I have completely ignored since my last update two months ago. Of course, this is not surprising. Having a full time job and a part time internet business in addition to four kids and a beautiful wife leaves me pretty busy.

In my last report we were talking about how amazing it was that the site (for no apparent reason) was ranking on the first page of Google for the keyword I had selected, “learn guitar basics.” At the time I mentioned that I felt like this was part of the rank and tank phenomenon common with blogs.

Often times when you start a new blog it will go to the top of the rankings briefly only to fall later. My theory on this is that Google very briefly gives a lot of weight to brand new content on the internet to see if it will go viral in terms of backlinks. If this doesn’t happen Google will drop the site out of the rankings.

Now, understand this is just my own personal theory about what Google is actually doing. Nobody actually knows what Google is doing except for Google. If anybody ever tells you that they know what’s going on with the Google search algorithm, they’re probably lying to you unless their name is Matt Cutts. (Just as a side note, Matt might be lying to you just to throw you off, so be careful about that too.)

There's good news and there's bad news…

The bad news is my niche site is no longer ranking in Google. I retain excellent rankings for my keywords in MSN and Yahoo, but those are almost completely worthless from a traffic standpoint. As you can see from the below traffic stats, traffic is very, very light for this websites.

To make matters worse, most of this traffic trickle is from the case study — not from search.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is I would have had a really hard time explaining to you why the website was ranking on the first page of Google with no backlinks all of the sudden straight out of the gate if that ranking had stuck.

In fact, Pat Flynn and I discussed this and neither one of us could come up with a really good reason for the good ranking other than the rank and tank phenomenon that I described previously. So, the good news is that I don’t have to explain something that I don’t understand.

The second piece of good news is that I need to try and fix this, and that is something I can teach you. So, I’m back on the Niche Site project and I’ll be doing some promotion of this website and explaining to you what I’m doing.

Check for Site Indexing in Google

The first thing you need to do when something like this happens is check and make sure your website is still indexed in Google. If you’ve been dropped from the Google index you have really big problems that are sometimes difficult to solve. Not impossible to solve, but certainly more difficult than if you just have a poor ranking in Google’s index.

As you can see from the below screenshot, our site is still indexed. We determined this using the site: parameter before our website URL, this will show you how many pages of your site are indexed in Google.

As long as you’ve got some indexed, you’re fine. If Google comes back and tells you no pages are indexed it means that they’ve looked at your site and determined for whatever reason it’s not suitable for their index. Once that happens to you it’s possible to get re-included in the index, but I’ve found it to be very difficult. Again, not impossible, but a total pain.

Back to Website Promotion

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll have my virtual assistant undergo several promotion tasks for this website. I’m particularly going to go to trouble to include directory backlinks as part of my promotion strategy so we can see the effect that has. You’ll remember in Pat’s Niche Site Duel “Backlinking Boo Boo” update he cited directory backlinks as a mistake. I feel completely the opposite about that, over the years I’ve seen good results from directory backlink submissions as one part of a much larger link strategy. I’ll be discussing that strategy as well as the tool that I use for the submission, Deep Linker Pro, in subsequent posts.

Until then, I’d love to answer any questions you might have about the Niche Site Duel. Feel free to leave a comment in the space below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can with an answer.

Have a great day!
Mark Mason