Helping Hand SEO

How often your site gets crawled by Google varies and it’s mainly based on how often you post content on it and it’s age. 

Let me explain it this way…

1) Any page that is over 6 months old and posts content daily will likely get crawled at least once a day if not more often.

2) Any page that is under 6 months old and posts content every few days, once a week or less frequently will probably get crawled once every few days.

3) And any page that is under 6 months old but posts content daily will also get crawled once every few days.

Now most people who start a website are likely going to to be in positions 2 or 3 (for at least 6 months) and the ideal state to be in is position 1, where it happens daily.

But this takes time and I’m going to show you ways to increase how often your pages get crawled if you’re in positions 2 and 3 and there’s 3 main methods I’ll be discussing.

Why this topic is a big deal for SEO…

The general belief and understanding among people doing SEO is that the more often Google visits a page and crawls it, the more it has a chance to rank it better. There is truth to this. 

However, there’s more to ranking than just this (other ranking factors). But in any case, like I said before, I will show you how you can literally control how often Google visits your page and how to intelligently play this game so that you really get the best SEO results your page can get.

Enter the 3 options…

The 3 ways explained:

1) The first way is the fastest and that is through the URL Inspect tool through Webmaster Tools, which you can learn more about here.

It’ll allow you get crawled (it’s also referred to as spiders visiting your page) within an hour, even for existing content.

So with this, you can literally MANUALLY control how often your page gets crawled with up to 500 fetches a month allowed. I highly recommend using the (and personally use) the URL inspection tool whenever you publish new content.

And just as much, you should also be using this SEO tool to inspect old content you update.

2) The second is submitting a sitemap through Webmaster Tools. This is the second fastest option which you can leave alone after it’s set up. Instructions.

3) And the third is literally just posting content regularly. And your page can then get crawled very often, even a few times a day. Like I said above, publishing frequency affects crawling frequency. And doing that at least once a day is excellent. You can also update and republish old content and that will also count just as well.

This is the most hands on approach out of the 3 and it certainly requires the most work, but without it, the other 2 options above won’t really have as much of an impact.

The ideal way to use these methods:

The ideal solution is to publish new content daily, and/or update and republish old content daily (These are SEO ranking tips I advise), and URL inspect it daily through webmaster tools, especially if your website is under 6 months old, which is a number you have seen me mention numerous times above.

The reason I keep saying 6 months is because there exists a sandbox period which usually lasts this long and after it’s passed, the site will generally get crawled more often. Before that period hits, you should be manually using these 3 options to affect your crawling frequency.

The crawling process explained (in case you’re new to this term):

First, let me say that Google has it’s own explanation of how it applies this method to pages, which you can read about here.

But while that link/page I pointed to focuses on the general start to finish process and doesn’t really mention the frequency (how often) at which it sends spiders to your page.

So I’d like to explain my experiences with this process, since I’ve had years of experience seeing it from beginning to end and the general frequencies that I noticed go on, from the very beginning when you’re just starting the page, to the later periods where that page is huge, getting traffic and more…

When you start your website…

And it’s first post, even if you do not use any of the above 3 methods, you may find that may take up to a few weeks for that first post to be crawled, after which usually, the index happens. It’s annoying, but it’s the regular SEO process all new sites experience.

However, if you are the sort of person who posts content very frequently (good for you!), you will find that Google will send it’s spiders back to your page more and more often, usually proportional to your posting rate.

And to be honest, this is what you want, if rankings and SEO improvement is what you are seeking to get. It’s just not an easy thing to do, take it from me.

So generally speaking, posting once a day, will likely get your site crawled at least once a day as well like I said before. There are other factors, such as interlinking and backlinking playing a part, social shares having an impact and more.

2 of the 3 methods above (fetching and using sitemaps) are truly a speedier way to get that first crawl, for fresh content going and I would absolutely advise you use them when your page is still new. 

The Google dance also plays a role in how often crawling happens…

I have a post that in my opinion “brilliantly” (I don’t like bragging, but it’s really a good article) describes the Google dance process and breaks it down into 3 (tier) stages.

You should read that article to understand why it goes on (why rankings go up and down) and why after you hit tier 3 status with your site, that you’ll get crawled, indexed and ranked way faster than in the first 2 tiers.

Let me put it this way:

Tier 1 lasts for about 1-2 months. During this time, the spiders rarely visit new pages. Probably about as rarely as I mentioned above (a few weeks sometimes), but you should still be posting new content and using the fetch option for ever new, fresh piece of content posted, to get it those spiders coming into your page ASAP and it’ll save you a ton of time (it can add up to months saved, literally!).

Tier 2 is going to be where your page is at during months 3 and 4 and you will get crawled more often (if you keep the peddle on the content going). Here, you may get spiders coming to the page within a few days of each new post you put up. Again, I advise using the fetch tool here to also cut down on the waiting time.

Tier 3 is where your page is out of the sandbox which is a “timeout” period for new sites when they first start their SEO process and try to rank on Google. Your page WILL be in the sandbox during tiers 1 and 2, keep that in mind, but again, the fetching will really help out A LOT.

Now when tier 3 hits, you can expect to get spiders visiting the page very often, including DAILY and even a few times a day. It is during this period that I would recommend not using the fetch tool unless you are using it for new content that you just made. For old content posted, the increased frequency of spiders visiting the page will handle that on it’s own. 

In fact, if you have a sitemap set up (option 2), that will itself regulate things and help your old content rise. In other words, let the old content get visited by spiders automatically, but use the first option (fetching) for new content created.

When you want old content to get crawled faster.

Certain old posts of yours (in fact many) will likely not get high rankings overtime, no matter how times they get Google spiders coming in.

But if you are doing SEO, you’ll likely want to get ALL your posts ranked as high as they can, but if that’s not happening to the old ones, here’s what you’ll want to do:

Optimize old posts using these 15 tips I listed. Then either wait (pretty much option 3) for that new piece of content to get those spiders OR do another URL inspection for the newly updated article/post and see if that helps rankings improve.

You will WANT to get old content crawled by the spiders ONLY when there are improvements made to that content, such as more comments added, more content added, or should I say, more GREAT content added and that’s when you will WANT Google to take another look at it.

Note: It’ll do that on it’s own, but again, URL inspecting expedites that process, just use it wisely when it’s truly worth using.

And only do this for truly old posts (we’re talking posts that are several months old) that are not seeing ANY improvement in SEO rankings.

For ones that are a few weeks old, it doesn’t really help to re-fetch those as they are already in the process of going through rankings (so if you fetch those, you may actually restart the ranking process and ironically, slow down the results). It’s the really old posts that have stalled in SEO, that you want to ping Google to take a look at again.

Overall, here’s the summarized info:

In the end, crawling content should be manually controlled on your end when it’s freshly made and published. Have a sitemap on Webmaster Tools and use fetch for newly published posts.

As for old posts, leave them alone and let Google send the spiders to them on it’s own, as they will do it regularly, IF you are growing your page regularly.

Only manually make spiders visit your page (aka use fetch) if an old post is not getting better rankings in Google, and only do that after a few months have passed for the said post/s and if you did the 10 optimization tips I linked above.

Good web hosting is one of the many important ranking factors for SEO and generally speaking, the free kind is usually the worst, so it can be bad for rankings.

The most important thing to note about this topic is that if you want to get better SEO results, one of the core things your site needs is to load up quickly when Google crawls it and/or when someone visits it from a computer or phone. That requires at least decent hosting.

If you currently own a site and want to know if your current plan is working well for you in regards to loading speed, head over to Google’s speed test site and see what score it gives you.

Anything green is fine, anything yellow requires improvement and anything red definitely means you need improvement or should change and/or upgrade your plan or service ASAP.

Naturally, the slower it loads, the worse it is. And usually the truly free places are the ones which have a lot of people trying to make tons of sites on it, often overloading the servers and possibly breaking them down. 

This usually leads to situations of down times happening more frequently and/or in most cases, slower loading times, all of which have a negative affect on SEO. There’s just less reliability with those places.

Now this doesn’t mean that ALL free web hosting services are slow or bad in quality, but you have to understand that those places and services, generally do not carry the highest level of value.

Some exceptions exist:

The only real exceptions you have to this general rule are sub domain providers where you can get free domains WITH hosting included and those generally have a decent reputation. However, because they are sub domains, you don’t fully own it and that carries it’s own risk.

Plus places that allow you to make sub domains for no cost also have a monetary incentive to upgrade you to a better plan so they can make up the costs of offering those free services.

And that’s actually not a bad thing, but you have to understand that hosting page/s, require server/s, resources, time and more, and this costs money, so the costs have to be made somehow.

Places like WordPress and WiX are actually decent places to find free plans, but you will probably get better results if you pay a little bit for places like NameCheap.com, Hostgator.com and Wealthy Affiliate as those 3 examples, generally offer great plans for low costs and provide pretty decent services.

I personally use Wealthy Affiliate, as it actually carries free web hosting for many pages. However, I pay $49 for their monthly membership as they provide more than just that service, and that cost helps cover that added service. That indirect payment I make covers good quality hosting (learn more here).

Should I get free or paid hosting? 4 things to consider:

The following 5 things are circumstances you may currently find yourself in with regards to your page, and depending on the situation, I will provide a clear answer on which way to go:

1) I am just starting out with a page. I have no big intentions with it.

In that case, go with WordPress and set up a free blog there. If you have no major intentions with your page and don’t even care about SEO, this is where I would start.

2) I have serious intentions to make my page succeed with SEO. 

I would definitely advise getting a paid plan in this case, as well as a domain you pay for. In this case, I’d probably advise you go with Wealthy Affiliate since they’ll give you everything here: SEO training, a cheap domain and free hosting (which is actually high quality because the membership has a monthly cost). 

3) I plan to make a small page and want it do well in SEO.

I’d actually also go with Wealthy Affiliate here, since they actually provide a free (starter) service in addition to their paid one, but the first, starter option lets you have a sub domain that is hosted and it’s of pretty decent quality since it doesn’t have as many people using it as other big name places that can overload it. More on the starter plan here.

4) I plan to make a very big page.

In that case, you absolutely need to go with a paid option. Generally people who overload their sites with images, graphics, videos, content and basically anything that increase it’s size in memory, means it will put more pressure on the server/s to load it up, so generally speaking, a paid plan will ensure you get a higher quality service that helps all of that load fast.

I would still recommend Wealthy Affiliate (the paid upgrade) in this case if you can’t really afford a $50-$100 a month hosting plan, but if you can, go with the more expensive ones.

3 takeaways from the above scenarios:

If you have still have any reservations about the tips above and don’t know what to pick, here’s my general guidance:

1) If there’s no serious intent with the page you’re going to make, perhaps you’re just messing around with the idea, go with Wealthy Affiliate’s starter plan, you’ll get a great service and the option to upgrade and/or make something of that page later on (such as SEO) will be open.

2) If you do not see yourself doing SEO and just want to blog for fun, set up a blogger or WordPress page and just use that service.

3) If you have serious intent for SEO, making a big page, either go with Wealthy Affiliate’s premium service, get training to make it all succeed, OR if you already know what you’re doing and are going to make a truly huge, hard to load site, get expensive hosting to make sure it doesn’t let you down. This service is pretty good.

Even though I’ve been doing SEO for a long time, no matter how big my sites have gotten, I have personally never really had a need to go for the most expensive, highest quality hosting plans. I’m personally very happy with Wealthy Affiliate’s premium option and I am certain that or it’s starter plan will be perfect for you in 99% of cases.

But again, if there’s ANY ounce of intent from your end to make your site do well in search engines, do not cheapen or worsen it’s chances of doing so on completely free services.

Spend a little and get that quality service because a good plan in this regard absolutely helps make sure the page loads up quickly, often and doesn’t give you a headache and that is taken seriously by search engines too.

Have you ever had to do a 301 redirect and wondered if it’ll hurt your page and website’s SEO? Well I’m here to tell you it may. Read this post to learn more.

There are usually 4 circumstances for which you need to use 301 redirects for. For 2 of them, you will never have SEO issues, but for the other 2, you may.

As an SEO expert who has experienced or known people who have experienced these 4 issues, I can tell you about the effect it can have on rankings.

So whatever your current site’s situation is which requires the 301 fix (or doesn’t), align them with one of the 4 circumstances I’ll be talking about in detail (which best fits your site’s situation) and you’ll have your answer on whether or not it’ll hurt your SEO or not…

The 2 scenarios where they are ok for your SEO:

1) Moving page links from one site to another.

People switch their domain names very often and have to move content (pages and blog posts) from the old site to the new one. They’ll erase the pages and posts from the old site and put them up on the new site.

However, if the old site was up for quite a bit, it will still have rankings that Google recorded and will still show to people, meaning that your old site, will still get traffic and that traffic will now see 404 errors. 

However, if you set that same old site up with 301 redirects, then all that traffic that was coming into the old site from Google will now be redirected to the new one and eventually the rankings will adjust to show your new site on Google.

In this case, you can set up an infinite amount of 301’s if necessary, it only makes sense and Google is fine with it. Don’t worry.

Here’s an example (Video with article link):

2) You have a site which itself has broken links.

Your site NEEDS to have a good linking resume with Google and what that means is that it should have these things set up properly:

-The site needs to have a healthy amount of internal linking (from one part of your site to another part of your site) and every page you link to internally should load up just fine (no 404’s).

-It needs to have a healthy amount of external links to websites you link outward to and these links should themselves also load fine (again, no 404 issues).

These things are generally good for SEO (as are these additional 8 tips). But very often, people who are new to building sites screw this up. They incorrectly place URLs across their site and very often link to pages that don’t exist.

This creates 404 errors across the site, Google takes note and reduces the site’s rank (because there’s no sense in ranking pages that are error pages).

In this case, 301 fixes are also good to use to correct all the 404 errors that can arise within the site.

For these situations, you should use 404 link checkers like this, get the list of the errors, and then set up a 301 redirect plugin to fix the issues. Here is an example:

The next 2 scenarios (where 301 redirects are bad for SEO):

3) You set up too many of them when all you need is one.

This was actually explained by Matt Cutts (the man in the first video above) but basically if you’re trying to link from one site to another, and instead of it being done in 1 simple link process, that it’s done in several amounts, than the Google bot, which crawls content and follows links, will eventually “give up” with all the redirects.

Imagine sites A and B and only having to click on one link in A to get to B. 

Then imagine the same sites, A and B, but 5 or more redirects taking place before a person can go from A to B. The Google bot will see this and not like it.

What’ll end up happening is that it may not even reach site B and rank it as a result, so you only want the 301 fix to take place once per link, for each circumstance. The ease for someone to reach site B, from site A should literally be 1 click, 1 link and that’s it.

Make the ability for people to get to the right site, quick and happen the first time.

4) You just have way too many of them happening throughout your site.

This is actually my personal speculation on the matter and there’s logical sense in this affecting your SEO, but I suspect if a site has more broken links and 301’s happening than it has fully workable links, that it can slow down the progression of it’s rankings.

The reason I say this is because in my personal opinion of how Google does things, they like to see solid websites where links go to where they are supposed to and the pages load up perfectly fine. 

If there’s too many cases of broken links (situation 2) or there’s too many cases of redirects happening, it MAY (this is my opinion) give Google the impression that you either don’t know how to link properly, or perhaps there’s some flaky linking practices going on (even if the redirect works).

This may not cause negative rankings, but it may cause a lag in them rising in my opinion. Of course if your site is riddled with 404’s, it’s better to have a ton of 301’s around to fix them, than to keep the 404’s around, because if you don’t, you will absolutely lose your rankings, but at least by fixing them, you ensure that doesn’t happen.

But I personally try to stay away from this scenario ever taking place by only linking my sites internally and externally, correctly the first time, so none of these 404’s or 301’s ever happen or need to get fixed if they do and this is what I would suggest to you as well.

The fact of the matter is that broken links can and WILL occur on your site, even if you think you are doing things correctly. My Webmaster Tools account occasionally shows broken links on my site that in most cases, I swear, I do not have, but some reason, the Google bot is spotting a link that doesn’t exist on my site and it’s triggering a 404 error.

This is just something I’ve come to expect, so my position on the matter is to keep the 404’s as little as possible (Under 1% ideally) as well as the 301’s to a minimum as well (also under 1%). If any 404’s show up, I will set up the fix. 

Update: Yes I was right, there is some negative effect:

After finishing this article and hopping over to YouTube, the good old cookies and algorithm from that site saw I was interested in this topic and gave me a few related videos, one of which actually proved my theory on the 4th scenario indeed playing a negative SEO role, here it is:

Now they are talking about page rank here, which is a concept no longer used, but you can apply the overall “resume” of a website in Google’s eyes instead of page rank and assume, that the more 301 redirects it has, the less value it has in Google’s eyes.

This may not be detrimental in small proportions (and it shouldn’t be) but in mass proportions, it can start to play a role.

In most cases, you only need to worry about the first 3 situations.

The first 2 scenarios are the most likeliest in which this fix is necessary and in those circumstances, there’s no limit to how many of these fixes you can have. Google recommends it and the first video says there’s no limit.

It’s just when you begin over redirecting between just 2 URLs, which only require just doing it once, that the 301 redirect starts to cause an SEO problem.

And in the final scenario (which is again, my opinion), I would avoid it by simply making sure your external and internal linking practices are done right the first time. 

This pretty much solidifies the topic of 301 fixes and their SEO impact. So as I said earlier, if your current site is in need of them, at least now, you can see that in most cases, you can safely practice this fix without worrying about rankings being affected.

Parasite SEO is just another term for placing your website link on high traffic sites that Google loves so they will send you link juice and boost rankings.

But does this strategy work? 

It can if used correctly, but often, the very term “parasite” gives people who first hear about it the wrong impression and usually that wrong impression leads them to do the wrong things to get their site either no boost in rankings or an SEO penalty. 

There is a right way to do it, and I will show you it.

Parasite SEO (PS) explained more in-depth.

The most common and misinterpreted theory behind this strategy is that you “simply” post your website links on specific websites (High traffic sites) and through doing so, those sites send you a lot of traffic back, which then Google sees and interprets that your website must be some sort of catch to rank higher, and so they do.

This gives website owners the impression (the wrong one) that they don’t really need to focus on building up their website and that they can instead just head out, post a few links to their site/s on forums, other high traffic blogs (leaving a comment with their website link) and just site back and enjoy the link juice that comes from it.

In reality, the odds of this primitive approach to SEO isn’t going to get you anywhere. And like I said, there is also the chance that it can be done in such a wrong way, that penalties occur to your website.

See an example of how incorrectly this is talked about on this Quora post on PS. They make it sound like it’s a simple process of just linking and reaping the rewards, it’s simply not…

This is where I have 2 major warnings about this strategy:

1) This isn’t a cheat to boost rankings.

It’s often misinterpreted as such. The very way I just explained it above is how most people understand this subject, and then predictably, they think they can easily get rankings and this makes them engage in the wrong strategies. 

2) You can’t focus too much on using this method, because…

The core to SEO success does not lie with this, but it lies with focusing on your site’s content creation and waiting for the sandbox period to end. The problem with PS is that it gives people the impression that it’s the other way around, and that ends up making them do one or two things:

A) They end up being lazy, not posting content on their site (which inevitably is what makes the site fail). Trust me, when people hear and think that they don’t need to work so much on their site and can post a few links to get rankings, most of the time, they WILL do it.

B) Or they focus too much on posting links in places where they will never ever get approved, so it’s empty work that produces no results, and they are left with no valuable links and no site to “feed off” through this method.

The truth is that you shouldn’t try to leech off other sites (They probably won’t let you).

This is the core problem behind PS and the way people think about it. Believe me, NO website is ever going to let someone they don’t know leech off their rankings and traffic. 

Anyone who has a high ranking site and good traffic understands how difficult it is to reach that level of SEO and you can bet money that these people would never allow some stranger to just come in, leave a comment with their URL in it (a form of PS) and just funnel traffic from the said site to theirs, not unless they are someone the website owner KNOWS. 

Now some people make the claim that PS success comes from posting links on social media and other similar sites, but I say that this is often a useless tactic for 2 reasons: 

1) It is totally fine to make your own social media pages that funnel traffic to your site, but they start off empty and you need to build them up so they become known, and THEN you can leverage them for rankings.

See my social media SEO post here to understand how that works.

2) Some people suggest finding popular social media pages with large communities and posting your link on their page, in hopes that the large community will see that link and click it (again, this is all parasite SEO examples).

But folks, this is spam and spam never gets approved by any decent social media page, because they don’t want their page to become sullied with people who do this, and any community page on social media that allows this to happen quickly dies out.

So in other words, good pages with PS potential in this context, won’t allow you to leech off them.

When PS really works, 2 scenarios:

There are a few circumstances in which this approach works, but what you will find is that in order to even get to these points, you will need to EARN it and like I said earlier, there is no cheating your way to this point, it WILL take hard work:

1) Your site through legitimate SEO strategies, becomes well ranked (see tips) and earns traffic.

You use this traffic, create social media pages or email lists and then build communities off these things. In the process you become your own “leech” in a way because you don’t rely on any other channels or places to link back to you. You already possess them through working hard on your site.

2) Through the process of building your site and it’s rankings through #1, you become well known by others who also possess their own communities and followings.

Then when you are known by these people and trusted by them, they will allow you to share your site and “leech” off them, and odds are, they will ask you to do the same and this can occur through things like guest blog posts or promoting each other on your sites.

So as you can see, in it’s most legitimate approach, parasite SEO is nearly impossible to succeed at if you follow the traditional way of doing it. Instead, you have to acknowledge that this cheap way of getting rankings is usually met with failure.

How can I tell if a PS strategy is legit:

Since there are many forms of using this strategy, I’m going to give you a special tutorial to help you figure out if the PS strategy you’re thinking of using will work or not.

First, understand that in it’s essence, you’re simply trying to get your website link out on websites that get a lot of traffic and you hope that in doing so, that the masses will see this link, click it and give you link juice. 

Based on this, the bigger the link juice the better the rankings. Now I also refer to this as “backlinking” and it literally is the same thing. In other words:

PS = Backlinking.

So based on that explanation, read this guide I wrote. In there I detail how to identify the value of a backlink based on it’s context and it all comes down to identifying if it brings you link juice or not.

• If it doesn’t, forget it.
• If it does, use it.

I assure you that within 5 minutes after reading that article, you’re going to turn into an expert on everything regarding backlinks, link juice and PS, because it is all based on the same concept.

Doing SEO full time, for years, has taught me many lessons. I’ve experienced the success and the horror it can bring, but it’s still worth it, to me. 

Will that be the case for you? Will you be on the success or failure side?

Well that’s dependent upon your ambition to succeed in it and being prepared to face the likelihood that it won’t work or produce fast enough results. 

I’m not trying to tell you to not embark on this trip, but I am going to explain that it has it’s bumps, big ones at times, that can truly shatter your ambition instantly at times, which happened to me multiple times, and that’s on the negative end.

On the positive end though, this business is highly in demand, not just from a point of view of you making websites, getting organic traffic and making good money (which I have also experienced multiple times), but being a valued in demand professional in the field, who clients are ready to pay big money to in order to get their sites and potential businesses to do the same. 

You can make more as a professional or at least intermediately experienced in this field than most major job titles pay in the world, that is NOT a joke.

How much can you make with SEO? These are my real numbers:

My history with SEO & real stories of failure and success.

While I have made a lot of sites since I started, I don’t want to list all of them. Instead, I want to breakdown my history with SEO into 3 phases, each of which started well but ended because the rules changes or I did something I shouldn’t have. 

When I would move into the next phase of my experience, I did so knowing what past mistakes NOT to repeat and that actually made the progressing of my phases better and better. 

My first phase of success (and eventual failure):

I began an SEO career writing articles on directories. At the time, writing a short, 300 or more word essay on any topic that had profitability produced me fast, high rankings and sales.

This was a method I milked for about a year, having daily sales that went from $20-$200 at times. And I grossed $10,000’s of dollars in the process.

But this eventually died out and the standards rose and neither I nor anyone who used that approach could do it any longer, because this business evolved, a lot.

This meant that I would need to evolve how I did SEO or quit and frankly, this was one of the biggest hits I took. Think about how easy it was to write short little blog posts and get high rankings, and make easy money.

You get used to doing this after awhile and imagine yourself being set for life. But once the hit comes, ALL of that fell apart, those daily profits disappeared.

This would be the first of many hard lessons I was taught about how tough this business because of how it changes (it was the first of many changes I experienced). But whining about it certainly wouldn’t pay my bills. If I wanted to continue, I would have to evolve and try harder. 

This led me to create personal websites where the norm for content increased dramatically. From the 300 or so words I was able to get by before, I now had to reach over a 1,000, on every single one. Not only that, but standards rose in more than just word count, I had to create better content, better links and more.

But being that I already tasted the success within this world, I knew it was worth it and so I did meet the standards. And I did see success.

But then another crash happened, Phase 2 (I tried to cheat):

During my second phase of SEO attempts, while I did have some success, I tried to take a shorter path to reaching it, by engaging in very poor backlinking strategies, which in hindsight, I warn people to avoid, due to them being in the red, danger zone. 

But at the time, I didn’t know what I know now and in doing what I did, every site that I managed to get successful through crashed. Just as my first stage of SEO crashed, so did this one and in all honesty, it was short lived. I only made a few $100 from this.

The 3rd phase (where I’m at now):

Prelude: Putting in a lot of work during the second phase and then having it ALL be destroyed nearly overnight put me in a bit of a depression. Again, just with the first phase, putting in the work, seeing the results and then having it all go back down to zero can really mess with your mind.

However, being that the second phase failure wasn’t the first time I experienced such a thing, I managed to bounce back from it faster, because I knew what I did wrong, and I knew what I had to do in order to fix this and continue.

The only issue was…I had to start over. And that was my biggest struggle to overcome at the time.

Again, I asked myself if SEO was worth it, and then I remembered all the profits I had experienced in the past, the potential I saw and experienced personally. I had an action plan to reach this goal, and I knew that I could no longer cheat my way to success.

If I was going to make my 3rd attempt at succeeding at this work, I would need to truly sit my butt down and work for a long time. And I truly did that.

This hard work and effort was what led to the $200k+ generated.

While my first half year working hard produced little results, thanks to the Google Sandbox, eventually I realized that this is how SEO works and being persistent during that waiting period, I was able to bear fruit in ALL the efforts I put into the new sites I made that truly followed the white hat rules of getting by in this business. 

That occurred in early 2013. And being that 2019 is less than a month away (Update: This article was updated in mid 2019), I’m here to tell you, the rules I’ve been following for nearly 6 years still stand, have not killed ANY of my sites that I have followed through with this one and there’s no sign this will stop. 

While I had to work A LOT harder than I did during the first 2 phases, the end result was what truly made it all worth it.

3 lessons I want you to take from my experience (if this is worth it to you):

1) You will have to write a lot.

Content is king in modern day SEO. If you wish to survive in this world, content creation is what will drive you to success. If you are not a writer and don’t enjoy it, you have no business getting into all of this stuff.

You have to consider that the average person may take several hours just to produce just 1 blog post. Then you will have to consider that these efforts will need to be multiplied by 100x at least to get to a point where you can get enough traffic to make enough money to make this a livelihood. 

Promoting local businesses is a little bit different (here is how it works) and does require less work, but I’m personally not a local businessman, I’m a person making his own blog and so are most people, so they will have to aim for that main goal.

2) You will need patience. 

That Google Sandbox I told you about is a real killer of ambition and one of the reasons people think SEO is dead. Not only do you have to get over the hump of writing a lot, but then waiting for that work to produce results, over a period of months usually can really kill your determination. 

The important thing here is to be aware of this sandbox and know that it WILL affect you no matter who you are and that it’s fine to go through it. You just have to keep focusing on the first lesson while you’re waiting.

You only need to get through the sandbox period once, then all your future work will be ranked faster.

3) Just because you get free traffic doesn’t mean it’ll get you money.

Once you pass that sandbox hump, you will be very happy to see a spike in traffic, but it won’t always mean that you’re set and the money will start pouring in.

Out of the few people who actually get to this point in SEO, there’s also a minority within this minority who get the profits right away. You have to understand how to get sales from visitors and how to monetize your site and you have to TEST different sales angles and that bears it’s own training.

Here’s an extra tip that will solve most of these problems…

As you can see there are a lot of obstacles in SEO and while I am hopeful you will see how worth it can really be, there’s a lot of expected problems when you begin. And if you expect them, you’ll be fine.

That is why I have this following tip to minimize these obstacles for you:

If I haven’t scared you away from trying this business, then try that program above and I promise you, with added ambition, you can be where I am in this business.