Exclusive Interview With Neil Shearing
Of ScamFreeZone.com

Part 4 of 5

LA - This is the last link question and then we'll move onto case studies and expand on the business plan but something you mentioned a number of times - which I think is important to touch upon - is that you say it can be dangerous to your site or to the amount of traffic you get through the search engines if too many links appear linking to your site, too quickly.

Would you say there's a yardstick to keep in mind or is it just a case of proceeding carefully for the first few months? What would be your suggestion?

NS - Well the only thing I have to go from is when I built a blog and I went to, I think it was Digital Point forums. And I didn't want to do all the directory submissions manually so I paid someone to do some directory submissions, and I don't know how many it was - 100, 150 or something.

But the blog was brand new and in retrospect that was a big mistake because I didn't know which directories he submitted to or how many he actually accomplished, but whatever it was it was enough for Google to drop the actual site out of their index.

So, yeah, I would say that you need to be very careful with your link building efforts for the first couple of months. I wouldn't dare to put any hard and fast numbers on it because no one knows that information outside Google. But definitely hundreds of links or thousands of links is going to raise a giant red flag for any brand-new website.

Because when you think about it Google have indexed what, I don't know, billions and billions, 30, 40 billion web pages. They don't really need your website unless it is something that is magnificent and never seen before on the Internet, which is possible, so they'll come round and they'll have a bit of look - yes a new website, okay we've noted it.

But they don't really need to give you any authority or any trust or the benefit of the doubt. As soon as you raise a red flag on a brand new website that's it, they're going to say "No, we don't particularly need you. If you're going to start messing around and getting 10,000 links to your site in the first week then we're just going to keep you out of the index."

So, it's much better to take things slowly. And I actually drew a graph with time along one axis and the number of the links on the other axis, and there's a couple of lines saying "Between these lines is the shaded area of where you're good and you would be expected to get this number of links" because Google will know based on the sites appearing online and the averages of the number of sites being online and the average of the number of links they'll get over time, they'll have a profile for the average website.

And say, they would expect it to get maybe 50 links in the first month or 150 after 3 months or something like this, and they will know based on this profile what the average website would generate by way of links. And presumably they give you a couple of orders of magnitude either way, as leeway, but if you're outside that either with way too many links or your site never gets a link, which is also unnatural and shows your content must be rubbish, either way outside the gray area then they'll know something's up and they won't index your site and give it as high rankings as it otherwise could have had.

There may not even be a direct penalty; they may just not give it as high rankings as they would have had otherwise so, yeah, it's definitely important.

Another thing is when you look at the graph at the very beginning of the graph where the X axis meets the Y axis, as you start going out within the first couple days of the site, the actual gray area where they would expect your site - the number of links your site to have - is very small and narrow. That's why a site that's older can get away with having a lot of links thrown at it quickly because the gray area then is huge, as these links diverge from the X and Y intersection at time zero.

As the time goes along the bottom axis and the number of links goes up the other axis then you get more and more leeway as the site gets older and older and that's what we see in the search engine's index. It is easy to attract a penalty when the site is very young. It's harder to attract the penalty when the site is old because it's established and it's trusted more. So that's the reason behind not getting links too quickly when your site is new. It's important to grow them very slowly and very naturally for the first couple of months.

LA - And just from my own experience, I found obviously getting your site banned from Google is not a good thing. One of my own sites was affected this way several years ago when I was using Traffic Equalizer software, which doesn't work anymore but was popular at the time.

And that brings you a lot of traffic at the time but, yeah, it doesn't work anymore just because Google is a lot better at judging quality content. But the domain I had the Traffic Equalizer pages on was banned eventually after about a year of having those pages on it. I hadn't really paid attention to the site but I checked it quite recently and now it's back in the index. So even if your site does get banned, if you're patient with your site and if you stop doing the things that got your site banned in the first place, chances are it will reappear.

NS - That's right. I think Michael Campbell said that Dynamic Media was banned for 7 years or something (laughter) and eventually he managed to get back in the Google Index but, yeah, I don't think he was best pleased that he was banned for that long.

What you can do is, I think most penalties will be temporary and if you keep building links and keep adding content eventually Google will accept that it should re-index the site after, I don't know how long these penalties last but I don't think they're for the lifetime of the site so, as long as you keep building quality links and you keep adding quality content then they will say well, okay, maybe that site made a mistake at the beginning.

If you actually do something very naughty like cloaking and they find out or something like that, then you can stop doing what you were doing and submit a re-inclusion request I think.

That also works if your site was hacked and you end up with naughty words all over the website and Google de-lists it. You can say well, yeah the site was hacked and we've taken these steps to make sure it never happens again and would you please come and re-include our site and they'll come out and re-spider it, so there are ways back in, I don't think anything is ever permanent.

And even if you make a mistake it's important to note that Google doesn't ban you. Lots of people are like, "Oh Google's going to ban you if you do this" or "You'll get banned" and people think about themselves. Well, it's not you, it will be your website, and if you have a network, it may be the network. Google doesn't know who you are, you can appear with a new name and new credit card on a new web host and start a new blog, it's not the end of the world.

So, there are people out there who like testing these boundaries and see how far they can push Google before they get banned just to work out where all these parameters are set. But I think life's too short for that, I'd rather just play how Google wants the game to be played from the beginning, because I think Google drives what - 70%, 75% of all searches in the States, and I think it's higher in the UK - and it just makes sense to give them what they want and give the visitors what they want which is to create high quality content.

I was always worried that if you created really high quality content... say you spent 3 hours or 4 hours creating a really good article on whatever topic you're interested in and you put it on your blog, then if you've ever looked at your web logs you'll see that there are scraper sites that come round and hit your sites all the time trying to take the content or looking for email addresses to harvest and things like this. So, it concerned me that Google never gave attribution to the original author. Obviously you get into huge copyright issues if you start doing that, so Google hasn't actually done it, all they do is list the most relevant result.

And I was thinking well if I create a really good article and it gets scraped and appears on other people's sites then their article could well appear above mine in the search engines. And it was only until I realized well, you can stop that happening by getting good links into the content you put online and being the most relevant result every time then it's the links that protect your content from being ripped off.

You can't stop it being ripped off, you can try and stop these different harvest bots getting into your server but they will just come with different IPs so you can't really stop it being ripped off, but, as long as you have built good links into your content you can be seen as the most relevant result for that content in Google and be at the top of the search engine, so it doesn't really matter if there are 8 sites in some foreign country listed in positions two through to ten, as long as you're number 1 you'll be getting the lion's share of the traffic for whatever searches that piece of content has.

So it's quite important to think about it in that context. Yes, you can spend a couple of hours creating a really good piece of content, but if you do that then you should also spend a couple of hours getting some really good links into that content and protect it against being ripped off. But then that allows you to, as soon as you accept that idea, that allows you to create really good content, get good links into your site and that is exactly what Google wants to see.

LA - If we can talk through a couple of case studies of your own sites and then we'll move on and take everything that we've talked about and discuss how that can be taken to grow a larger business...

You can start, for example, with blogs making a few hundred dollars a month, and how that can potentially grow to a lot more.

Okay, first of all your two case studies -- Now I forget the exact site, but I remember you talking about this. It was a blog you put together very quickly and in a very short period of time it was getting traffic and it was already making money for you, and this was quite recent?

NS - Yeah.

LA - Do you know which one? Sorry I can't be more specific, do you know which one I'm talking about?

NS - Yeah, what I did was I created a plug-in for WordPress. Plug-ins are basically just other ways to add functionality to WordPress, so it's just something that you can activate within WordPress.

You can have a plug-in that creates a site map for WordPress or a plug-in that shows the most recent posts or the most popular posts or things like that. It's just a piece of code that does some functionality.

Well I created a plug-in for WordPress that allowed me to use data feeds... and what data feeds are - they're small files, text files that merchants generate and give to affiliate networks so that the actual affiliates can get the information about all the products that the merchant sells.

So there could be, I don't know... in the UK there's an automotive and bicycle store called Halfords, and they maybe would have a data feed that would list all the products they sell from spare tires through bicycle pumps, through to headlamps and goodness knows what, and they put all this information in a data feed.

And I thought it would really good if I actually had a plug-in that took each line of the data feed and created a blog post around it. So the first blog post might be the Xenon Headlamps and then it would have a brief description taken from the data feed and then it would have a picture which would be supplied by Halfords and would appear in the blog post, and then it would have an affiliate link and that would appear as a blog post.

Now because of the way WordPress works and the SEO benefits that it has, I thought individual blog posts based around each product from the data feed would be attractive to Google because when I did a search for a phrase from the description, say for the first product in the data feed there were hardly any, if any at all, people using these data feeds.

So the merchant was going to the effort of making these data feeds and I think most affiliates didn't have a clue what to do with the data feed, it was an alien concept, so most of them weren't being used.

So I thought well, okay, the only time the actual product appears is in these product comparison sites so they'll say, "Yes, you can get the Xenon Headlight from Halfords" or you can get it from here or you can get it from here or you can get it from here, and... it wasn't particularly well optimized, they were just doing cost comparison for the different websites.

So I thought "Well, if I put a blog up based around each individual product, that should be fairly attractive to Google and anyone searching for that specific product would most likely end up at my blog, and they click the affiliate link and they would go through to the merchant's website and then they would buy the product they're interested in and I would get an affiliate commission."

So I had this plug-in created by my coders and I took a couple of data feeds, ran the data feed through the plug-in. The plug-in took the data feed, stored all the individual products from the data feed as posts pending in WordPress, so it didn't just publish them all at once, it had them pending in WordPress, and then I had a little script called a cron job which ran and published I think a post every hour or something.

So my posts on the blog would appear every hour, a new product would appear at the blog and Google would come through and they'd go "Oh, a new post... and a new post... and a new post...". And they were loving it.

When I started selling this plug-in I explained in the sales letter that I got the search engines round within a couple of hours, and I was indexed in Google in, I think it was a day or two I don't remember the exact numbers now. And I think I got traffic coming through from someone who had searched at Google and clicked on my link within 3 or 4 days. And I made the first sale as an affiliate based on this blog in 10 days I think, from actually registering the domain name to actually making an affiliate sale it was 10 days. Hence, '10 day Cash Secret' was the product name we sold the plug-in as.

And so it was very fast to get indexed, very fast to get traffic and very fast to start making affiliate sales. And the only link I ever got for the example site was I went to WordPress.com started a blog for free and linked through to this new blog that was data feed driven. So that was the one free external link that I got that basically I think Google might have followed. I assumed Google followed that link to find my blog and then once they found it they kept coming back to re-index the new blog posts.

So, yeah, that obviously worked and that was only last year that I started selling that product. So it wasn't too long ago. But I think going forward it may be necessary to add a bit of unique content to each post, so maybe a short review or a paragraph or two about the product, so that it's unique content and Google doesn't see it as so-called thin affiliate sites.

Because as I've said several times, Google likes to actually provide sites and results that their users are going to get value from, and if your site doesn't provide any more information than the merchant who provides the data feed then Google may as well send the traffic direct to the merchant.

The only thing my blog post provided that was slightly more than the merchant provided was that I'd SEO'd them better - each post was specific, had the title for the individual product name and then mentioned the product name in the header tags and just a little bit of a description, then it provided the link so it was quite well SEO'd for each individual post in each individual product. And if the merchant hadn't done any better optimization than me I would get the traffic.

But I think that isn't going to work as well in the coming years unless people add a bit more content to the individual blog posts, but yeah, it worked really well when I did the test. And then I got loads of people saying that it was working well for them. And when I released the product a couple of months ago the guy said, "I'm definitely going to buy this because I bought the 10 Day Cash Secret Plug-in and the blogs I put up are still making me money."

So it must have worked for him for well over a year, so yeah, the actual concept worked. I'm not sure how much longer that's going to work for because it didn't have any unique content, it was just the fact that no-one else was using these data feeds that meant they actually appeared in the Google results and got quite a bit of traffic quite quickly.

LA - And, okay, a second case study is a site I think you put it online maybe 9 years ago or something, close to 9 years ago...

You don't have to give the web address if you don't want to create too much competition for the site, but if you can just describe the site, it's not a particularly large site is that correct? Not a huge amount of pages?...

NS - That's right, it was just a half dozen pages. Basically, like I said at the very beginning of this interview, when I started out online the way I started selling was to use third party processors, so companies would process the credit card order for me and only take a percentage of each sale.

At the time, it seemed that all over the Internet there were banner ads where people were promoting the fact that you should get your own affiliate programs. These banner ads were saying merchants should come online and they should get a MOTO - Mail Order Telephone Order. Then they should get Internet access as well to process credit cards in their own name, and it was costing about $1,000 to set that up.

And the reasons those banner ads were everywhere was because the affiliates were making an awful lot of money from anyone that signed up for a merchant account. So they would get a lot of money from each individual sale therefore those were the banner ads that were being shown all over the Internet.

Now I knew that people, when they came online didn't have to use a merchant account in their own name, they didn't have to spend $1,000 up front, they could test the market with a third party processor. And if you started making loads of sales and making hundreds or thousands of dollars a day then, yes, eventually you could go and get your own merchant account. But it was better to test the market up front with a third party processor which meant you didn't have any set up costs or anything like that.

So I started a website that basically just listed half a dozen, to a dozen of these third party processors, and one of them let me use an affiliate link such that if the merchant signed up with them I would get a percentage of the fees that the third party processor levied.

So, say the third party processor charged 5% of each order, I don't remember the numbers but something like that, and they would pay me maybe 1% of that order - or 20% of their fees - so I would make a little bit of money every time a merchant that I'd referred to this third party processor made a sale.

And it wasn't a lot of money but it added up to being a couple of hundred dollars I think they were sending me every two weeks initially. And the first check they sent me was in August 2000 and it's now 2009, so they've been sending me checks ever since, so that's a 9 year uninterrupted run of receiving checks, because I put myself in the payment pathway and made sure I got residual billing.

Now there are other third party processors and other people who obviously pay you per individual sale or a bounty for each person that signs up, up front, but I think it's much more lucrative in the long run to get yourself into the revenue stream and take a small percentage over time than it is to just accept the initial bounty.

And so, I think I said at the beginning, that one site that I referred people to, that one site has paid me $32,800 over the 9 years they've been paying me.

So that's a quite a successful example of just a couple of pages that were there for the service of providing a comparison of these third party processors and I guess Google found that interesting and sent me the traffic and I sent the traffic through the different third party processors. There a couple that use affiliate links, a couple that didn't use affiliate links, and this one has ended up paying me over $30,000 over the past 9 years.

Neil Shearing Interview: Transcript Part 1

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Neil Shearing Interview: Transcript Part 5

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