EzSEO Newsletter # 115
March 19, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 115
Andy Williams ez SEO
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This week:
1. Issues when moving a site to a new domain
2. Great fr.ee tool.
3. New Site Logo
4. The hyphen debate
5. $500,000+ from a one year old Adsense Business?
6. Other Stuff
Hi again.
Hope you had a great week. Despite the white snow-capped Mount Teide behind me (you can see a photo I took last week when I took a drive up the mountain, here if interested), the weather here in Tenerife has turned a corner. We are now in what I like to call “shorts season”. From now until sometime in November, I’ll live in shorts.
I hope you have been busy working on, and building your business. I’ve been busy with a variety of projects as usual, with some exciting releases very soon (you’ll hear about them here first).
Unfortunately, with so much to cover in this week’s newsletter, the miniseries is once again shelved until things are a little less hectic. The issue of hyphenated domains is a hot topic on many forums, so a couple of the points in today’s issue relate to that (including a follow-up from last week).
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1. Issues when moving a site to a new domain
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Last week I talked you through how I have put a permanent redirect on my old ezSEO website using a 301 redirect. There is one point I should have stressed, and didn’t, so let me just mention that here.
In the 301 redirect line of your .htaccess file, you must include the trailing “/” after you insert the domain you want to redirect your traffic to. The example I gave last week did have this, but one or two have written to me saying that the redirect did not work for them. The final “/” is essential. Go back and read last weeks newsletter if you don’t know what I am talking about.
OK, with that covered, I wanted to highlight a few of the issues I had when moving my site over. As I mentioned, I also changed the site template to a CSS template instead, which will allow me to make sweeping changes to the look of the site easier in the future. The CSS style also removes a lot of the clutter from the webpages hopefully making them faster to load. Because of the changing template, the move was a lot more complicated than it would normally be. Maybe this description of what I did will give you some idea of what is involved.
My first real problem was how to move the content from each of the 380+ pages into new template pages. If I was not changing the template, this would not be a problem, as I would just make a copy of the site on my hard disk, and then search and replace the old domain name for the new one. However, with a change of template, the whole process just became a nightmare.
Normally this move would be very tedious, and involves manually creating a blank template page for each web page I wanted to move, copying in the content from the old page, copying across the meta tags etc, and then saving the page with the same filename as I used on the old site (essential if the redirects are going to work). You also need to recreate the directory structure of the old site to house your new one.
My first step was to create a template that I wanted to use on the new site. I built the template making good use of server side includes for much of the page content (header, footer, left and right menu, and Adsense ad space). I also put in some placeholders into the template. These are just bits of text like [TITLE], [KEYWORDS] etc, so that I could replace these with the appropriate values from the old page.
My next step was to make a list of all of the pages in my old site including the directory they were found in. For this, I used my Sitemap Creator tool. It creates a list of all the pages in a blink of an eye. Armed with my list of pages I needed to recreate, I wrote a small application to help with some of the tedious bits (you are going to have to do this manually, sorry). The program went through the list of pages, and created a mirror of the site to a new directory, creating blank pages using the new template for each page in my site. The great thing was that the program also copied across all of the meta tags from the old page to the new “template” page, so I would not have to manually copy and paste these (which would have added a lot of time to the whole process). When the software finished, I had a complete “template” website, with all filenames and meta tags recreated perfectly.
The next step was something I could not do by writing a program. I had to work my way through the list of files, and open the old page, and corresponding new page, and copy across the content of the page. Since I used server side includes on the old site for left and right menus, this was not as bad as it sounded. I opened the new page in Dreamweaver, and the old page in HTML Kit (a fr.ee HTML editor), and just copied the content of the page from the preview screen of HTML Kit, to the preview screen of Dreamweaver, and all formatting was copied across for me. I only had to save the file, and move onto the next page, and repeat, for all 380+ pages. This whole process including the programming of my little helper application took a whole day of mind-numbing work, but at the end, I had a replicated site with the new template.
I did notice one or two “dodgy” techniques used on a couple of very old pages of the site as I moved them (e.g. keywords in H1 title tags bolded), so I took the time to clean up the site while I was moving it. I wanted the new site to be squeaky clean!
The next step in the process was a search and replace of my old domain for the new one. Dreamweaver makes this easy to do for a whole site.
One some pages of my site, there were forms (like on the link partner page), and email addresses needed to be changed to the new domain. This was not a problem because the search and replace did this for me (searching for ez-search-engine-optimization and replacing it with ezseonews).
Finally before uploading I checked my .htaccess file. I use a lot of redirects on my site so that I can use shorter URLS, and these needed to be changed over to the new domain.
At last it was time to upload. My site was uploaded to a new folder, and the new domain was live.
Once the site was live, I used Xenu Link Sleuth (mentioned last week) to check for broken links. Despite my best efforts in the move, there were some broken links that needed fixing.
Once problem I had which maybe you wont have is that my affiliate program script needed to be moved to the new domain. I wanted affiliates using the old links to still make commissions though. This sounds like a problem, but really it wasn’t. Adrian Ling (the author of the script I use) installed the script for me on the new domain.
NOTE: Incidentally, this script allows Clickbank “merchants” (ie those selling their own products through Clickbank) to host multiple products through one Clickbank account and is used by lots of top marketers. If you have more than one of your own products and only want to pay for one Clickbank account, this tool is great, and there are some great side benefits. You can read more about easyClickMate Here:
OK, back to the move:
I had to make a few small changes in Clickbank, but everything went across smoothly. Because of the 301 redirect I am using on my old domain, old affiliate links will resolve to the correct new affiliate link on the new domain, so affiliate tracking was not affected.
So, the new site is now live. The search engines have found it without me telling them where it is, because of the 301 redirect. I just have to sit back and wait. Eventually my old domain listings will be replaced by the new ones. It will be interesting to see what happens to the rankings of the new site. When I moved a domain a couple of years back using a 301 redirect, rankings were preserved. A lot has changed in the last couple of years, so I am curious to see what happens here.
I actually wont just be sitting back though. I have to contact my link partners, and get their links moved over if possible. I also need to change my articles found in article directories so that the resource boxes point to the new domain instead of the old one. Then there are directory submissions, new content, and more articles that need to be submitted.
If you are moving a domain and changing the template, good luck. There are a few pitfalls, but hopefully, taken one step at a time, you will manage just fine.
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2. Great fr.ee tool.
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As we all know, backlinks are very important for any site.
When you are researching a niche, it is wise to check up on your competition. How much effort will it take to beat them in the rankings? Well, that will depend on the number and quality of their backlinks. Here is the tool I use (and did I mention it was f.ree)
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3. New Site Logo
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As part of the new look site over at http://ezseonews.com, I wanted to get a logo created for me (I am not very creative in this department and wanted one that looked professional).
I contacted a good friend of mine – Andrea Thomson at Golden Pine Cone.
and she was glad to help. I love the new logo, and it was ready within 24 hours. She is very helpful, and does a great job. If you are looking for a new logo yourself, I cannot recommend her highly enough. Head over to Golden Pine Cone.
and contact her for more details.
Incidentally, I got Andrea to include my photo in the logo for branding reasons. In a lot of my fr.ee reports, I include my photo on the cover page. I wanted to make sure that people were not too confused when they found they were redirected to a different domain than the one they expected.
They can at least see at a glance that the site is mine.
That photo has served me well, but was taken when I was 33. I am going to turn 40 in October this year, so will be changing it to a newer photo real soon ;o) I just need to find one taken in the “right light”.
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4. The hyphen debate
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A raging debate is whether or not hyphens in domain names can hurt your rankings. You all know my opinion here, but I have received a number of emails from people saying that Google Engineer Matt Cutts has said in various places recently that Google does not penalise a site for hyphens.
Well, I’ll come to that in a minute. For now, I think Michael Campbell summarised it very nicely in his newsletter earlier this week when he talked about the hyphen issue. He said that there was no real reason for debate since you can all go check for yourselves. I talked with Michael about this and the odd exception to the rule, and he told me:
“Yep, there’s always exceptions to every rule. That’s why I kept testing – 18 tries – until I finally found a hyphenated domain in the top five. But for most of the hotly contested affiliate categories… they’re nowhere to be found. ”
OK, Michael and I agree on this.
So, why did Matt Cutts say that hyphenated domains were not penalised? Well, he didn’t, at least not that I can find. What he did say was (and this quote is taken from Alan Gardyne’s excellent newsletter as I could not find the original location of the quote, though I do remember it being accurate):
“We don’t use hyphens as a spam signal.”
Well that clears it up doesn’t it? NOT!
What Matt Cutts has done is avoid the question (and who can blame him? Google aren’t about to tell you what makes a page rank highly, are they?). The question that is being asked is “Do hyphenated domains get penalised?”. This answer does not answer that, it just says that hyphens don’t automatically mark the site as spam.
There are a number of reasons why a page ranking will fall, and most don’t have anything to do with whether they are spam or not.
From my own observations, and following on from what I told you in a previous newsletter, hyphenated domains do not get you booted out of Google (which is what you can expect if your site is spam). From what I can see, Page Rank is maintained, so there is obviously no spam penalty in action here. What I do see though is what Michael Campbell described. Fewer and fewer domains with hyphens ranking in the top 10 at Google.
You make you own minds up about this, I know I have.
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5. $500,000+ from a one year old Adsense Business?
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You may have seen the video in the last week or so. John Reese (the guy how became “more famous” for his million dollars of sales in a 24 hour period) released a video recently showing proof that a new business he set up went from zero to over half a million dollars in sales within the space of a year. I have tried to locate the video, but cannot find it now. Its a real shame as proof like this is not often available.
The gist of the video, was how John created from scratch “hundreds” (he does not say how many) of content sites on which he used Google Adsense. The whole video is there to promote his newsletter.
John Reese’s “insider” newsletter describes how to create this kind of wealth, but a subscription is not cheap. Why would it be when the potential rewards are so high? This one is definitely only for the serious internet marketer, but to be able to get this type of coaching from probably the world’s most successful internet marketer is a real opportunity.
You can get a fr.ee sample of one of his newsletters here.
I will be bringing you a full review of his newsletter in the next few weeks so look out for that.
OK, the main point of telling you about John Reese is obviously to draw your attention to this incredible resource if you can afford it, but there is another reason. I got thinking about this incredible Adsense income from his sites and wondered how many sites were needed for this kind of return.
Help came from one of my SEO Website Builder users called Tim (who also has a full time job in the armed forces). On the SEO WSB private forum, he gave facts and figures about his own income from his content sites. Here is what he said:
“- Almost every site I’ve built using Andy’s niche blueprints makes over $300 a month in adsense (some more then others). Last month was a down month and even when I had these sites drop off in rankings after a SE algorithm change they still performed well. Affiliate sales for some is between $100-$200 a month as the niches are high paying items or leads for financial related services…..etc”
Great Advert for both SEO Website Builder (which he uses to build his sites) and my Niche Blueprints (Tim buys every single Niche Blueprint I release).
OK, so now I have gotten the ad out of the way, let’s look at the details of what Tim said:
“”- Almost every site I’ve built using Andy’s blueprints makes over $300 a month in adsense (some more then others).”
If he makes $300 per site per month from Adsense (let’s ignore the affiliate revenue for now), to make the same annual inc0me as John Reese made with his niche site Adsense empire, Tim would need to create:
500,000 / (300 x 12) = 139 sites.
That is very doable.
With two new sites a month, that’s 24 new sites a year (or the equivalent of adding $86,400 a year to the bottom line of his company).
Obviously not everyone can expect the same sort of returns from their websites, but Tim is living proof that it is possible given the right tools, and guidance. I am expecting Tim to release his own eBook documenting his success, so if that happens, I’ll make sure you know about it, but for now, I am very happy that Tim is sharing his motivational results to the SEO WSB community.
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6. Other Stuff
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The March Niche Blueprints are almost ready for release. As always, I’ll notify those on the notification list when they are ready. You can sign up for notifications at the Niche Blueprint site.
This months topics will be of interest to dog owners, and those with small children. More details when they are released.
For those who want to try one, there are still some of the pre-October 2005 blueprints which can be bought for only $35 each. There are two of these blueprints that have only 3 or 4 copies left before they are sold out.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives .
Have a great week!
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