Forgotten about niche found ranking on first page!!!

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Gary · Posted in Track our Progress

Affiliate Project and Google have a Love/Hate relationship. Maybe we’ve not figured out the exact formula for ranking sites yet as we’ve had success in some areas but not in others. I’m sure Google keep moving the goal posts too!

We do have many sites ranking on the front page for the domain keywords and some are ranking for many keywords, but these are sites that we’ve worked on promoting more. So it is true when Affiliate Peeps say content is king.

Today we noticed a niche that was started about 1 month ago but never finished because of other priorities, and its now ranking on the first page. There is hardly any content, some pages were returning 404s, we’d never done any back links about this site and all on page SEO was turned off. So with about 100 words and a few products on the front page it was ranking based on only a few things; keywords in the domain name, good use of Heading tags, and a tiny bit of relevant content.

Now we did pick this niche because we researched the competition and found the ranking sites didn’t have much to them, wrong use of on page SEO or targeting different keywords. Plus hardly any back links.

For now with little time to spare to work on the site, we’ve put up a few products, some banners, affiliate links and some google ads so that a dormant site that is ranking for approx 15000 exact searches can be monetised a wee bit. Well that is the idea anyway.

We’ve also enabled the All-in-one-SEO plugin for wordpress, Google XML sitemap, submitted to google with the sitemap to see if this helps it climb. Lets hope these changes don’t make the site drop. If it does, it would be bloody typical of our Love/Hate relationship with Google. And it make us think twice about using all that meta stuff! Maybe organic way is the best. Only time will tell