What is Google Medic? Stop Panicking SEO People!

Since 2018, Google Medic has been worrying tons of bloggers and SEO people. I’m not one of them and let me share why you shouldn’t be either.

Let me just be honest in saying that I’m a bit late in explaining this particular update (almost a year later!) because until yesterday I didn’t even know about it. It was only through a blog post I saw mentioning it and all the panic accompanying that post that I decided to explore it further…

Yes, such an update can worry a ton of people, but when you consider the big picture of how SEO is progressing and the way people who are inexperienced always tend to inflate the impact of updates such as this one, then you will see that there may in fact be nothing to worry about… 

Google Medic (GM) explained…

Suppose I run a medical blog and give out medical advice, but I am not actually a medical professional. Should my site actually rank high on Google for medical terms, questions and advice then?

One could argue that answer is no because if my unprofessional advice reaches a large audience, it could perhaps endanger their health. 

And that is actually a great segway and way of explaining what the GM update is.

It is basically an update which gives sites that provide content of sensitive nature, such as medical and health advice better authority and rankings, IF they are actually made by an expert or professional in the said field.

Suppose we take 100 websites, that talk about liposuction (a health advice blog basically) and they are all pretty large sites…

Out of those 100 websites, 2 are created by a medical professional, while the other 98 are created by regular people, some of which did or did not go though the liposuction procedure. Let’s say 50 of those blogs are by people who did go through the procedure, and the other 48 did not (You’ll see why these numbers are important shortly).

Through the GM update, here is how these 100 sites would rank:

1) The 2 blog websites which are actually made by a medical professional, would get higher rankings due to their professional resume being considered in the list of ranking metrics.

2) In my personal opinion, the next 50 blogs that would rank under it would be from the people who actually underwent that procedure. That lived experience adds better quality content in those blogs.

3) The final 48 blogs, would be ranked underneath the 50 blogs because they didn’t live the experience and their content is likely not as good as of those who did experience it.

Now it my opinion as to how these 100 blogs would be ranked according to the Google Medic update, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about the SEO nature of things.

Worried about GM? Here’s 5 reasons you shouldn’t be:

Let me quickly mention that blog post I read where I first discovered this update (here it is). If you read it, you will notice that a majority of the comments that blog got were either negative (reinforcing how horrible this update is) and most of the others are from people who are scared that their sites are now doomed. 

Only a few people actually had the experience to comment positively and list the following 5 things I will be listing for you now to explain why this is not an update you should be worried about…

1) There’s “no” official database to prove you’re a professional.

It’s more than likely that being a professional in your topic will give you higher rankings in the SERPS if you produce content that actually shows that professionalism, but let’s be honest…

If you’re a doctor and you start a medical blog, there’s no official place in Google where you go to “register” that you are who you are.

So if you are a current professional in a particular health field and you have a blog set up for this, just create an about me page or widget on your site that gives people a quick bio on yourself, so they know you are a professional.

And what if you’re not? Well…

2) Being a professional in a health field is more than just a certification, it’s about…

How well you show your experience through your content. In other words…

3) The quality of what you write determines the level of professionalism, PERIOD.

Since Google has no real way of “documenting” if you’re a professional in your field (point 1), the only real thing they have to go by is the content you produce and how the audience that reads it and then interprets it.

And here’s something to look for to make sure it’s doing well:

If the feedback is positive, it shows Google that you are an authority and professional enough to be ranked high to share this advice.

Now for that 1% of cases…

Sure when it comes to very serious medical topics, it’s very likely that your blog might not outrank something like WedMD or other major health blogs.

Or perhaps if you’re not a lawyer and you’re producing a blog with advice on law, odds are, a law blog will in 99% of cases outrank you. But…

4) People, there’s more space than you think to rank on to get traffic from.

  • Google has 10 spots on it’s first page.
  • YouTube has a host of results you can also rank for (and they rank on Google).
  • There’s a HOST of unlimited keywords where the competition is so ridiculously low, that you can easily hit page 1 and get traffic from.

So you may not be able to outrank a blog with better authority or a professional writing it, but guess what? There’s always spot on that list if you’re trying to rank on Google.

5) Generally the people freaking out about these updates have one of two problems…

They either don’t know SEO at ALL or their sites are so new and still stuck in things like the sandbox, that they incorrectly associate their lack of success and results with this particular update (or another one, I ALWAYS see this, and I used to make this mistake when I was an SEO newbie).

Dig deeper into the people who complain about their sites losing rankings and you’ll usually notice the following things:

  • They have good content, but they don’t have a lot of it (advice on this).
  • They have bad content.
  • They’ve only been blogging for a week or maybe a month.
  • They don’t target keywords with actual low competition.
  • They don’t actually know SEO.

Like a doctor, I can deduce why a blog isn’t doing well and when I hear an see people complaining about updates like GM, I know from experience, it’s usually because of other (multiple) factors that they aren’t getting results.

The truth is one update is not going to break your blog and it’s rankings unless it’s actually producing bad content or trying to cheat it’s way around the updates (that’s what we called penalties and this is why they really happen).

So what should you do to make sure you aren’t hit?

Well rule #3 really summarized what I was trying to get across: Content.

Read my blog post on trends and this is what you should be doing on your blog to avoid Google medic hitting your site or any future or past update also affecting it negatively.

And for future reference, please avoid the panic that hits each time these new updates hit. I’ve been doing SEO for many years and focusing on the very trends I list in that link and each of these updates that hit usually produce me with HIGHER rankings, not lower ones. This is why I didn’t even hear about or worry about GM when I first heard of it.

Sure they can go up and down from these updates, but they DO solidify overtime and return to their usual high rankings or even rise up higher in many cases as well.

2 more Google updates you should know about:

Both these really add to the thesis the Medic update which focuses on authority sites in specific medical field niches having more favor in rankings. BUT either way, as long as you follow these 10 factors that Google likes to see, you should be update proof, and benefit from them in the future.

Furthermore, like I said earlier, if there’s ANY issues with rankings you have, use these 15 tips

What is Anchor Text? How to Use it to Get Better SEO Results.

Anchor text is actually pretty easy to define and understand, but what it does for SEO is what’s truly important and I’ll help you use it correctly.

what is anchor text in seo

Here is what anchor text means and an example of it:

Anchor text is simply the words you put on top of a link to lead people somewhere. Let me give you an example:

Suppose right now, I start writing about social media and SEO. That very link I just placed points to an article about social media and SEO, and the anchor text is the same exact subject. It’s really simple.

Now that we understand and have an example, the next question should be…

How do we use anchor text correctly for rankings?

There’s a couple of things you need and I’ve broken that down into 4 of them:

1) You need to write content that correctly steers into the link so that it fits together.

For example, if I am writing on a subject like getting rankings and I point to an article which is related to getting rankings, that is an example of me steering to a link that fits with my subject.

2) You need to label the anchor text in a way that gets people to click it and shows Google it’s also relevant.

So in the above example, when I was talking about social media and SEO, and I made that into an internal link, and clearly the person who sees it and clicks on it expects to see an article or resource with THAT subject because I labeled it that way.

That makes it relevant and that improves ranking.

In addition, I JUST provided another example of this when I pointed to internal links. When you click it, it’ll take you to an article I wrote on internal linking and why it’s beneficial for rankings and that too is an example you can use.

3) There’s also cases where if I’m writing an article, that I’ll make the anchor text a keyword I’m targeting and point the link to an article with the same keyword. For example…

anchor text example

As you can see from that example, that paragraph smoothly segways into the second keyword and article and makes it easy for people and Google to see it. It’s also organized in a way that helps both articles be considered high quality, all of which are positive things for rankings.

4) Also it is recommended that when you do use it, that it be blue. That’s because the color blue is what is most recognized as a link. People know that when they click, that it’s a link and it’ll take them to another page, so they expect it and knowingly click it.

Can this strategy hurt SEO?

Sometimes it can and a few example of this can be…

When you provide anchor text that makes people assume they’re clicking to see something, but it points them to something else.

For example…

If we use the first example above where I talked about internal links and made that an internal link.

If that DIDN’T lead to an article about internal links, it would disappoint my reader and make them leave the page and this would affect it’s ranking, so make sure you don’t do this.

A very important ranking factor is quality of content and expectation of it, so if I send a reader through an internal link expecting to read something, they clearly clicked on it because they are interested and want to read more, but if that need/expectation is not met, they’ll leave and the page they went to will be recorded as having high exit rates, which will tell Google that it’s low quality. 

Something you very often hear regard SEO is the term relevancy and that is something you should ask yourself when you’re using anchor text and the question is:

Does my link relevantly point to what I’m labeling that link as?

If it is, then it’s good and if it’s not, change it or remove it. If you read my blog posts, you will see that just about every single link I have is always giving readers a preview of what they are clicking to and when they click it, there are no surprises and the expectation of what they’re about to get, is gotten.

For instance…

Very often on this website, I’ll mention the topic of improving rankings and when I do, I’ll say something like this:

Here’s 15 techniques I use to improve my rankings and you already know where the anchor text is in that sentence, but when people click it, guess what they are expecting to read?

That’s right: 15 techniques on improving rankings and if they get that, that helps my rankings. If they don’t, then it doesn’t help so making sure you do this right is not a difficult task.

What if I don’t have a link to point to? Then you have 3 options:

In my particular case, I have a site with a lot of content and articles, so relevantly linking them together is easy for me, but for most new bloggers and site owners, who only have a few pages up or perhaps even just 1 page, this is likely not going to be the case.

But there are 3 options available if this is the case:

1) Don’t make any link at all.

2) Point to an external link instead of an internal one. As long as the external link is relevant and point to a high quality site, you’ll still get the SEO points. So for example, if we use the above example of internal linking, if I didn’t already have an article written on it, I’d just find a link on Wikipedia or a high authority site on ranking and point it there.

3) Don’t post any external links, build up your site, add more pages, and then go back to the old ones and interlink then.

You can ALWAYS go back to old article you’ve written and improve them with adding more internal links as well as using the 15 techniques I also linked to above and even if an old article wasn’t 100% as optimized as it could be for SEO, again, it can be edited, improved upon, republished and then do well in the rankings.

In fact, for this website, I’ve been going over months old posts, and adding new links to fresh articles I’ve published. This has allowed the old articles I once wrote to become better optimized for rankings. And it doesn’t matter how old certain articles are in your case, you can still do this (also another SEO tip is to update the date!).

Pages vs Posts For WordPress. Which Rank Better For SEO?

There are 2 ways to post content on WordPress websites: One is through pages. The other is through posts. But does one way rank better than the other for SEO?

This is what I’d like to give you my position on since it was a question I had asked frequently when I was new to SEO and after many years of seeing one particular strategy work over and over, here are the general guidelines I have:

1) Pages and posts are the same the thing when it comes to WordPress.

2) It is generally better to create posts if you’re running a new website and have your main URL display a blog roll (which shows posts). This helps Google spiders crawl your content a little bit faster and if you create content frequently this way, it helps your site grow it’s authority faster and exit the sandbox faster as a result.

3) However, pages should not be discounted and I mainly create them when I write things like my about me article, a get started article, an about us article, things like that.

4) If you are currently in a position where you created a lot of pages and are worried you’ll lose ranking for it, don’t, because in the end, Google still sees these them as the same thing and there is no ranking factor that I know of that discriminates between them.

In the end, if you write an article and it’s classified as a page or post, it will eventually rank under the same rules and in the same way if it’s content is good. The classification of the content you write doesn’t really matter. 

So for people who understand the details of what I just wrote and are more experienced SEO users, you should be fine from this point. But if you are more of a beginner, I’ll be explaining in better detail these same points I just made. 

Either way, you can ask me detailed questions about this below.

Now for the details of why I have these positions and on this topic…

1) Again, posts and pages are basically the same thing.

You can literally log into your WordPress website right now, click to create a new article under either of these classifications and guess what?

You’ll see the EXACT same layout, with the main things shown for either option, that being a box for the title, a large section for the body and if you have plugins installed like the All in One SEO tool or these other SEO tools I personally use, they will be shown exactly the same way on posts and pages.

But why is that these 2 things even exist?

Well my understanding is that posts are more often associated as “blogs” whereas the other is more often associated as important parts of the site. But this doesn’t mean you should worry about where to classify content you’re about to write.

You can honestly make every single article on your site either one of those things or a random mix if you want. I’ve just learned to navigate it in the way I explained in point 2 from people I know to be experts at this and followed their strategy and because this approach has gotten me results, I haven’t really deviated from it since I learned and began implementing it.

Here is that approach explained again:

2) When you have a new website, make a blog roll your home and a majority of your articles posts.

What happens with this approach is that your site will start to show your most recent blogs (posts) and when Google visits it, and sees new fresh content being displayed there, it crawls your site more often and this helps SEO speed up a little bit.

I don’t really know why this same feature is not available for pages, but I just apply it as it’s taught.

Now later on when your WordPress site grows to an authority site, it is recommended to switch up the blog roll to a main page that helps introduce people to the site and to put up the blog as a menu item people can access rather.

Don’t worry though. Whether or not you do this early on or when your site becomes an authority, doesn’t really change the big picture SEO game where the most important thing that determines how well the site does is it’s content quality and how often it’s created.

So as long as this is what the focus of the site is, you’ll be fine.

3) Like I said, I only really make pages when I’m not interested in targeting a keyword term.

You don’t really have to follow this rule, but I do because posts can get seen faster by Google and ranked faster if they are on a blog roll and that is on the homepage, I generally use that to my advantage and when it comes to pages, I only really use them to create general content as I said before (the about me article, the contact us article, and so on).

4) If you aren’t already following the approach I suggested in #2, don’t let it bother you.

While there are plugins available which transform pages into posts and vice versa, if you are currently running a WordPress site which has let’s say 100 articles and most of them are pages, do NOT worry about changing them into posts.

If they aren’t ranking well on Google, it is not because their classification is “wrong”, it’s because they aren’t optimized enough in their content to rank high, which is why if you are in that situation right now, do these things to improve it and yes, these tips will work for either classification (because again, it’s the same thing).

So overall, I’d say if you came to this article worried that one type of article ranks better than the other, the overall answer is it doesn’t and you shouldn’t really change anything in regards to how it’s classified.

Just stick to the optimization tips I suggested and let that help the article rank better.

5 Reasons Why SEO is so Hard And How to Overcome it.

Being in the SEO game since 2005, I can attest to it getting progressively harder and I can tell you in my experience, there’s 5 reasons for this, all of which have solutions.

why is seo so hard

Now I’ll be giving you a list of each reason SEO is getting harder, but with each reason, I’ll be explaining why that “problem” presents an opportunity at the same time.

Firstly: Expectations are too unrealistic for people.

I talk to and get countless questions from people wanting to get into SEO and if I were categorize the kinds of questions most of those people have, it would be things like this:

  • How do I get fast rankings?
  • What’s the best SEO strategy for fast rankings?
  • What’s the best tool to get on the first page of Google fast?
  • How do I make money through this business as fast as possible?
  • What is the secret to getting fast results in Google rankings?
  • And things like that…

All of these questions indicate to me that the person asking them is very inexperienced and EXPECTS fast results and I have often cited places like Quora where this is asked.

Just have a look at that link I placed and you’ll see these kinds of questions occupy the majority of SEO questions on Quora, and this speaks to the bigger picture of what people are thinking when it comes to this topic…

The truth is, in this business, results do NOT happen fast. They used to when I started with one page websites, but today, that is no longer a strategy, but it’s still being peddled by inexperienced people, parroting it to others who then ask me these same questions. 

Here’s the reality (solution):

Getting results in this business will take at least 6 months or even a year. When you start a website, considering you do the right things on it to have it gain rankings, it’ll still take 6 months or more to see the results of that work.

This is because ALL new websites, regardless of which “secret” or “spicy” ranking techniques they use will undergo the Google sandbox and see their rankings jump around via the Google dance.

So the reality you have to understand is that this business WILL take time. Never expect fast or easy results with SEO, otherwise you will fail. And to the people I tell this to, who still seek those “shortcuts” and so on, I will answer followup questions that usually pertain to things like if there’s any secret or magic techniques to shortcut that process.

And here is my answer:

Secondly: There is no secret technique or magic strategy. It’s straight forward hard work.

If you are just starting out in this business, have no connections, no influencers with their own high authority websites sending traffic to your page through valuable backlinks, then you can expect to go through the typical 6 months to year long process to get results and in 99.9% of cases, this will always be the scenario.

Even for someone like me who has connections, and people who can I link to on their site and them on mine, I still find that when I start a new site, I will have to start fresh and grow my authority from scratch.

Thirdly: Many people who try this stuff are lazy.

I was one of those people. I thought writing a simple 100 page article would get me high rankings and traffic, when in fact, it’s closer to about 1,500 or even 2,000 words and the value and quality of the content that has to go into those 1,000+ words HAS to be high. 

I literally tell people that quality content is arguably the most consistent and important SEO trend that’s continued over the years and I have no doubt it will continue to be a top priority for rankings.

If you are lazy and CANNOT invest the time to write at LEAST 50 articles of high quality content, each of which is at LEAST 1,500 words or more, forget this business and leave, because it will be a dead end.

I currently run 5 active sites that have either already reached an authority status with Google rankings (1st page rankings) and/or are already climbing and that is ALWAYS the initial goal I set when I start these sites. It is because of this goal that I set, that these sites are all climbing and not dead in rankings.

Once again:

  • 50 articles.
  • 1,500 words or more.
  • 6 months wait time to see it mature.

That HAS to be your initial goal when you begin in this industry. 

And the simpler ways to get this goal accomplished to look at your site as a blog and to blog about a specific subject that you know a ton about. Without this, you are going to make that above quota I set nearly impossible to reach.

Fourth: There are specific techniques that help rankings, but…

They are only useful when you apply the above point about writing high quality content (the main dish). Without this MAIN dish, the SEO ingredients that help that content rank higher, will not work.

What I find is that people focus on the techniques to make a site grow and not on the big picture advice (the main disH) I gave in point 3 above writing 50 articles, lots of content, ect…

It is because of this misplaced focus that they fail. And again, this is tied together with the laziness point.

So considering that you are doing this stuff the right way and truly writing high quality content, if it isn’t already ranking high on Google, then you can do these 15 SEO optimization strategies to make that happen.

There are even tools I recommend using here that are great, but just like the optimization strategies, they will not work without the great content being at the HEART of this.

Fifth: Make sure your passion is tied together with your site.

Because SEO is so hard and takes so long to see results with, as I said earlier, you’ll have an easier time with this process if your blog/site is focused on a topic you love.

Very often, I find people who create travel blogs, mom blogs, and/or basically share with the internet world their passion, are the people who produce the BEST content and get the most traffic through organic rankings.

There’s a wise lesson within these examples and that is that the people who truly succeed in SEO are those who create a site based on their passion. That passion in turn helps them produce better content and since content is what is truly the most important SEO ranking factor, this is why they get results.

Now what happens more commonly and unfortunately is that people neglect chasing the passion and instead chase the money, and end up creating sites on subjects they have no clue about. And when they do, the content they produce is very poor and naturally, then reaching that 50 article goal becomes next to impossible.

Not only that but anyone who does read that poor content will very quickly see that it is poor and leave the site, thus signaling to Google and other search engines that this page does not have quality content worth ranking.

If we use me as an example, I mentioned earlier that I run 5 active sites and I can tell you that every single one of them, including this particular one are on topics I have passion for, so when I write my content, it flows very easily and I’m able to produce that content very quickly.

This very article took me about 30 minutes to write and that’s because I have PASSION for this subject (and of course practice from writing 1,000’s of articles, literally). And I assure you that you can reach this same level with a mix of passion and practice.

Now I regularly help people decide on what kinds of blogs to build to help them succeed in this business, so if you are stuck in this part of the process, comment below and I’ll be sure to assist in that regard!

Do Affiliate Links Hurt SEO Rankings? Not if You do This.

There’s a rumor and myth in the affiliate marketing world that affiliate links can hurt SEO. Is it true? It can be but if you follow 5 rules, it won’t hurt rankings.

But before I get to the 5 specific rules, let me explain:

Why affiliate links generally do NOT hurt SEO rankings.

There are 4 reasons why I say this:

1) I’m an affiliate marketer and on many of the sites I do it on, I also do it through SEO. 

2) I have not seen any major decline or Google penalties in my rankings from practicing this.

3) There are endless websites I could cite that prove that statement true, and I will actually point to several in this article to illustrate my point. In fact, I did a post on SEO not being dead and cited 5 websites, all of which have affiliate links on pages which rank high on Google.

4) If this practice did not mix well with SEO, there wouldn’t be so many websites practicing it and ranking so high, for so many valuable keywords on Google (many of which are mine), but since they are, that’s a myth we can scratch off the list of worries.

While most of these worries are unwarranted, there’s more to this…

There’s a big reason why in my main statement above, I said generally in yellow.

And this is because there are circumstances within which affiliate URLs will hurt a website’s SEO, but it has NOTHING to do with the actual URL or the practice of this business model.

You see, good and bad SEO results are a combination of things.

It’s not like one good thing on the site will have it rank high or one bad thing on the same site will cause it to crash, there’s a ranking algorithm in the mix here and it takes into considering way more than just 1 thing…

Now while there’s 100’s of things I could talk about in regards to what goes into ranking algorithms, in my experience, it’s not a good idea to start thinking about this stuff so meticulously, because you simply can’t do it.

There’s just too much stuff to worry about and you’ll drive yourself insane overthinking it and from that, you’ll never make any headway in SEO, because you’ll always be worrying that you’re violating something, somewhere on your site. 

That’s just bad overall, don’t do it…

Here’s how you should approach it (The 5 rules):

Whatever question/s you have on SEO, whether it be the topic we’re discussing here now, or anything you hear with regards to rumors, what’s good or bad for it, just do this:

Run these things through the following 5 rules, and in doing so, you’re going to make affiliate marketing via SEO a much simpler process for yourself:

most important seo rule

Everything you do to get higher organic rankings needs to start with this rule in mind (and practice). I’m truly serious when I say that you should start with this rule. Its one of the main trends I talked about here.

If this rule is not followed, you can forget high rankings and being a successful affiliate. It won’t happen, it can’t. 

So let’s apply affiliate marketing to this 1st rule:

Let’s consider that you’re running a review page, and it’s getting traffic. Obviously, that review page has referral URLs. It has to.

  • Will it be penalized?
  • Will it see high rankings?

Well let’s find out:

  • How many actual promotional links are there on the review page?
  • Are there a few, are there too many?

I would say if there’s too many, such as one on every single sentence you write, you need to reduce that by at least 50%. Why?

Let’s go back to the rule and here’s how it applies:

Too many would interrupt the reading flow of your visitors, causing them to either leave too early, or get annoyed and leave anyway. And that will negatively affect the ranking of that review.

It only makes sense because Google looks at how users look at your site, the more positive their experience, the more positive they’ll see your site.

Now too few is a better option yes, but that would probably hinder sales. So what can you do? Here’s my suggestion:

Scarcity with linking and focus on content is better in this case, so make sure you follow rule #2. Now this raises the next very important rule:

If you want to rank your pages with affiliate links high on Google, you can’t ONLY have those kinds of URLs on those pages, there needs to be more diversity…

Internal linking on your site is 100% guaranteed to help SEO, and I have truly noticed that there is strong evidence to this:

For one of my websites, which features a lot of review pages and promotional URLs on it, when I diversify it and include more internal ones within the same reviews, it ranks better. 

For pages which do not diversify, they hardly ever rank well.

The big reason for this is again, back to rule #1. If all you’re doing is trying to send people to a product page to sell them something, your review page’s value is not considered high.

If you’re providing a good review and pointing people to more than just the sales page (your referral URL), it shows you seek to help people and raises the review page’s value. 

Out of the 5 rules, this is actually optional, but if you’re trying to rank a review page with affiliate links and there’s a lot of competition, applying this rule may give you the edge (well it actually will). 

I have noticed that some of the top review sites I find on Google that consistently rank on the first page have at least these 4 rules in place. This leads me to talk about one of the sites I actively follow:

That is a review site (here it is) that literally does nothing but provides reviews for programs and pretty much every single page that site has, also has affiliate links.

Now this is one of the most extreme examples I could find where the person engages in some truly aggressive affiliate work and yet has their site rank VERY high for the search terms of products he’s reviewing.

While his approach to selling just about every program he reviews isn’t something I agree with, the lesson here is that you can pretty safety practice promoting things on your site without fear of Google striking it down. 

Now that site from my analysis gets high rankings because:

The person provides a good quality review, and that basically nails down rule #1 I mentioned.

He does scarcely point to his promotions within each review, which covers rule #2. 

And he also does point people to other blog posts he has on just about every review (which also covers rule #2).

He also makes his own YouTube videos, which themselves also hold great value, which is rule #1 and it is on his review pages and the actual YouTube video, in the description points to his review, which adds link juice to the page and helps it rank better.

So rule #4 is covered here as well and by the way, this practice is also a great way to get backlinks.

But there are also 3 additional things he does:

1) He reviews the product WAY before it’s release, which at the time has no keyword competition, so he can easily hit the first page without much effort. 

2) His site is pretty developed and has long since passed the sandbox stage, which means it ranks high, pretty quickly.

3) Within each review, what he also does is, he inputs the keyword he is targeting to rank for within the images he provides. This improves his ranking as well (read my 10 tips to make sure you’re doing all this stuff too).

Don’t worry about all the details, focus on this:

Like I said before, rather than over analyze every little thing he’s doing, my main point with this person’s site is to show that its totally possible, and safe to practice affiliate marketing and still keep high SEO rankings.  

Essentially when someone prioritizes selling over helping, they are violating rule #1, which time and time again, throughout this post, I’ve said is the MOST important rule you cannot break. 

  • Start trying to sell people stuff and you will naturally reduce the value of the content of your review.
  • That will affect how the people who seek to get info from that review read it, and it will affect it negatively.
  • And in the process you will get lower rankings. But it won’t be because of affiliate links, it’ll be because you violated the rule, just know that! 

I hope these 5 rules helped answer your questions 🙂