Time to Stop Building on Sand

It seems like a lot of people are rasigin a hue and cry about getting hit in the SERPS these days.

Makes me glad I never jumped on the whole bandwagon of building a myriad of sites targeting long-tail keywords with little competition, then building a micro-site with little content and even fewer backlinks.

One of my main money-maker sites is a 3-word "longtail" and is a wordpress site built to resemble an ecommerce site. Each "product page" has short blurb of into unique content and outro unique content. Sandwiched inbetween are ebay results pulled in by the phpBay WP plugin.

I use AIOSEO and create custom title/description/keywords for every page.

The site has about 300 backlinks to the homepage (which is ranking for the money keyword) and about another 50 links to the internal pages.

Site is over a year old.

I have not touched this site since the beginning of this year I've been launching a new site (again, in a competitive niche for higher traffic rates) and have not had time to maintain the old site while building the new one and going to school full time.

My friend told me about this algo update this morning and said her sites have been impacted. She has recently switched to the micro-niche model from the a) publishing articles w/affiliate links in the footer model and b)squidoo lenses revenue-share model. All sits on the new model have taken the hit.

It would seem that lite sites with few external backlinks are more impacted than heavy sites with plenty of backlinks.

I've been saying for a while now that people need to take over more competitive niches with bigger paydays by building authority sites. The kind of sites that require you to work for 6+ months without seeing any revenue return because it takes that long for you to build enough content and backlinks to break through the ceiling.

Once there though, you've actually got a solid structure building on a solid foundation. The "winds and storms" of Google changes won't be such and issue then.

As it is, so many people are focused on quick ranking and quick cash that they end up building the equivalent of a Indian slum shanty on a sandy beach. Then they wonder why what they have built gets washed away.

Then they swear that such statements don't apply to them. They equate "lots of work" with earned stability. It's not so. Just because you invested as much work building 300 shacks on the beach as the guy who built one solid building on a concrete foundation doesn't mean that you "earned" the same level of stability.

I was so tempted to go the XFactor route. I'm now glad that I didn't. This site will take till the end of the year to rank either 1,2, or 3 for all 8 keywords I'm targeting. It should easily pull in 5 figures a month by itself. Then I can take those funds and invest in 3 full-time employees for my next site (niche already selected, site skeleton already built and "seasoning") which will require about 24 months of work.

I'm prepared to pay 3 people for two years without any return because I know that when the site DOES rank (and it will) it will pay mid five-figures on an average month and break six figures on two peak months.

It seems that the concept of "divide and conquer" isn't working these days.