As I’ve mentioned before, building niche websites is one of the most popular ways to make money online. One of the main aspects of doing that is getting your sites as high as possible in Google search results.

To do that, you need back links. For years there have been many “blog networks” that have been used for building back links. Google has never liked them. Today I got an email from PayPal stating that I have a refund from Build my Rank.

I headed over to my account only to find a message from Build my Rank letting us know that most of their blog network has been de-indexed so they’re closing it down. Many other blog networks have been de-indexed too. This isn’t something that’s never happened before but the scale of the changes that Google’s making is pretty significant.

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As I’ve mentioned previously, building niche sites is probably one of the most popular ways to make money online. I’ve been having a bit of a dramatic time with one of my niche sites and thought it would be worth sharing the story. Basically, one of my sites has been pinalized by the boss, Google. This is what happened to my traffic:

Google can pinalize a site for a few reasons. If they feel like your site is ranking higher than it should be due to “black hat search engine optimization” or something else, then it can de-index your site or move it lower down in the search results.
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NOTE: Build My Rank is currently closed to new members while they make improvements to the service. Sign up to their email list to be notified when they re-open their doors. Also, I mentioned the niche site and keywords in this post but as you can see in the comments section below, the people at build my rank kindly asked me not to reveal them so I am doing as they say. The data is still all relevant though!

On the 16th of January 2012, I published a post about how I was going narrow down my SEO strategy to two simple steps.

1- Continue adding content to the site.

2- Build high quality links to the site with Build My Rank

I did exactly that. Before this experiment, my key phrase was at position 62 in the Google search results. It’s currently at number 9 which shows that this extremely simple SEO strategy worked a treat!
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NOTE: Build My Rank is currently closed to new members while they make improvements to the service. Sign up to their email list to be notified when they re-open their doors. Also, I mentioned the niche site and keywords in this post but as you can see in the comments section in this post, the people at build my rank kindly asked me not to reveal them so I am doing as they say. The data is still all relevant though!

As part of the Niche Site Competition, the aim is for one of my niche sites to be on the first page of Google for my search term. The search term gets about 8000 exact searches per month so getting on the first page would generate some decent traffic.

While I’ve been working on the external search engine optimization on my various projects, I started to suspect that the majority of my results were from a service called “Build My Rank“. It’s basically a blog network where you can post articles with links back to your site to the various blogs. I’ve used various blog networks in the past and seen great results, but Build My Rank works in a different way to most and has been pretty amazing so far.

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