After I had a breakup with my co-partners I was left with only two blogs i.e All Tech Buzz and All India Youth. These two were my main blogs from which I had to generate revenue. I didn’t had any other blog which was generating revenue, also I stopped niche blogging as it was short term and I didn’t want to do anything for short term result. I am not saying you to stop niche blogging, I started niche blogging to make money fast, but now my primary goal is not instant income as we are already funded from Angel Investors. So, the main goal is to build some good products which can be automated. Among these two blogs All India Youth was stuck in conspiracy for few reasons which I cannot disclose here. So, I paused working on that blog aswell. Now I was left with only one blog i.e All Tech Buzz from which I should generate income. Ofcourse I was running few services from which I was making money but income generated from services is not stable. It can go up and down each month.
So, after a lot of brain storming I decided to work on my own blog All Tech Buzz and get its rankings back to normal. After I started company I didn’t put much focus on this blog rather worked on blogs using which we can generate a system. Then I decided to use All Tech Buzz only for branding purpose and stopped posting articles very frequently. If you have seen past few months my article count was less before. Later I started one more blog called All India Roundup, however I knew that its gonna take some time for this blog to perform well. So, even All India Roundup was not generating any income. To grow a company exponentially we need products that last for long run. For this reason I didn’t wanted to take any shortcut by building too many links(Black Hat Techniques) which might give results instantly but the blog will be dead after a month or two. I didn’t want that to happen.
Why was All Tech Buzz Penalized?
During my initial days of blogging, I was not much aware of SEO. I was learning SEO step by step. In this process I came to knew that a blog with good number of links does well with Search Engine Rankings. Then I started working vigorously on link building. For god sake my link building worked. My blog was doing extremely well with almost all the keywords. I was overwhelmed and didn’t stop the link building over there. I went for few more. I also ordered a lot of gigs on Fiverr and SEOclerks which gives EDU and GOV backlinks which are considered as most powerful backlinks in the past.
After that I have stopped link building as I was already doing pretty well with several thousands of backlinks. My blog did well for few days but slowly the ranking got down day by day. That was not all of a sudden, so I was not able to notice whether that’s a penalty or due to less frequency of posting. But it was actually a penalty that has been triggered on my blog i.e Penguin.
I had one more hit along with the penguin i.e my blog was deleted by blogger and I made a shift to wordpress. During the migration process I lost many articles resulting in lot of 404 and broken links.
- Find out which Algorithmic change has lead to penalty on your site.
How did I Boost My Ranking?
Most of the people might think that my blog rankings is due to my content but that’s not the case. I do implement some advanced SEO strategies to keep up my blog with the competition.
Links are good but too many of them is Bad:
Backlinks were the reason why my blog ranked well. At the same time, the same backlinks lead to penalty. If you have links its good but too many links is bad these days. Its not about how many links you have but the quality of links are the key. You can get some links from whatever place you want and boost your rankings but the results you get by those random links is short lived.
Link Removal Process:
I decided to remove all the links that are bad or that looked suspicious for me. For this purpose I downloaded the complete list of backlinks from ahrefs and disavowed them using the Disavow tool.
- I also used a tool called openlinkprofiler which helps you in finding bad links to your site using the LIS(Link Influence Score).
- You can check my article on How to Disavow Links in Google Webmaster tool.
I disavowed almost 20,000 backlinks. That was a big risk but I decided to go for it.
Once I disavowed the links the results were not instant. I had to wait for few weeks to notice the results. To be on safer side I tweaked the site a little more.
Reduced the number of Ads Above the Fold:
As we all know there is a page layout algorithm which hates sites that have too many ads on top. I decided to go ad free and display ads only the articles that get majority of traffic from search.
If you see my homepage there are no ads. As my majority of revenue comes from sponsored adverts, I decided to go ad free on majority of the articles.
Fix Broken Links:
As you all know my blog was deleted by Blogger which results in lot of 404 errors. I used a plugin for wordpress called Broken Link Checker, this automatically detects the broken links and makes it easy for us to fix them right away.
- Also Check : How to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress without loosing traffic and SERP Ranking.
Redirecting 404 Pages:
As I said my blog was deleted by blogger, so I was left with a lot of 404 errors. To fix this I used two more plugins called Smart 404 and Redirection. Smart 404 is one of my favourite plugins which automatically redirects to relevant pages whenever it comes across a 404 page.
Updating all the Old Articles:
Few of my old articles were outdated. Decided to update all of them. Updated all the old articles one by one with the help of my editorial team.
After I have made all the changes I waited for about 10 days and was hoping that things might work. Eventually the strategies which I implemented worked out for me. My rankings boosted back in Google. The main reason for the blog getting a hit was the Penguin due to bad backlinks. However, currently we are no more working on link building instead putting more efforts on Content Marketing.
These days we also noticed a lot of negative SEO on popular sites that are doing well with Search Rankings, all you have to do is just disavow those links and everything would be fine. Let me know your thoughts on the same in your comments.
