Mastering the Google Ranking Bounce
As I’ve argued before (see It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!), you need traffic to make money with a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re monetizing with AdSense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, or some other advertising system — no traffic, no conversions; no conversions, no money.
One way to get traffic is to show up in the top 10 results for a well-searched keyword phrase on Google. This is the Holy Grail of Free Traffic. But it can be very hard to hit that top 10, or even the top 20.
There is a way to do it on a temporary basis, though, with some effort. I call it the “Google ranking bounce”.
Here’s how it works: Google currently gives a “freshness boost” to newly-published content. If the site that hosts the content is authoritative enough, this freshness boost can be enough to temporarily catapult the new content into the top 30 results for the content’s main keyword. (We’re assuming good on-page SEO here, of course, with the main keyword in the title of the page and ideally also in the URL itself, plus sprinkled appropriately throughout the content.) The boost lasts for 2 or 3 days, after which the page will “slide down” to its natural rank, there to stay until it gets pushed up through “natural” means (i.e. link acquisition). The page may in fact disappear for a few days from the index before reappearing.
I’ve seen this boost happen on my own sites (I have a few old domains) and on sites like EzineArticles. You can get a real, but unfortunately temporary, traffic boost from this rankings boost.
So what do you do? Write several articles/posts of content targeted at the main keyword and then publish them several days apart. If you’ve done it right, the freshness boost will ensure that one of your articles is continually in the top 10/20/30 until your supply of content is exhausted.
This is not easy to do, and it takes real effort to write all that content. The best place to start is with EzineArticles, I think. Find a high-volume search term that displays two articles from EzineArticles in the top 10. You won’t be able to displace the first article, but you can probably temporarily push out the second article. You’ll be surprised at how many times your article will be viewed. It’s temporary, of course, and only some of the traffic will make it to your own site, but it’s a cheap way to get some good, targeted traffic.
If you try this technique, let me know how it goes for you. It definitely takes work, though. The good thing is that over time all the content you write will itself reach critical mass and help you rank higher in the future.
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18 Responses to “Mastering the Google Ranking Bounce”
The big problem with all your suggestions is they require work. Your blog would be much more popular if you could fix that little issue
Seriously, it’s amazing how hard people will work to avoid actually writing something themselves.
It’s not hard to get enough articles out there. Just outsource the work. When you look a little you can find good native English speaking writers that can write a lot of articles for you at a decent rate.
The key is to submit articles constantly. Don’t give up after submitting just a few articles.
Gunter
Absolutely true, and I’ve done it myself. If I look back and thought about all the times I’ve looked at different schemes for things, read the latest ebook, etc., I could have written perhaps a zillion things in that space of time, whether blog posts, articles, even book chapters… and probably been much further ahead.
Now the bounce method I describe is something that would particularly benefit an EzineArticles premium member, who can schedule specific dates to release articles.
Eric
It is amazing how much energy people expend attempting to get out of work, had they just buckled down and done the work it would have required far less effort
That’s a lot of work for little reward in my opinion. Think long term!
There are no “free rides” that is for sure. Love your tips of the trade, thanks.
Amber Kimball
Yes, if you could time it, like with the ezine premium tools you could really structure an awesome release. Thank you for sharing.
We’ve found unfortunately that new content brings Googlebot around more frequently, so we do have to keep working.
Site age helps, and having lots of backlinks helps make your site ranking a little less fragile, so that you don’t jump around as much if you have an old site, lots of backlinks, and new, quality content all the time.
Another strategy we’ve found is prototyping articles in the blog and then choosing the popular ones to build out further and add to the company site. It’s another way to let customers tell you what they want to read.
submitting an artcile to 200+ article directories helps in getting more traffic than 1 article directory(ezinearticles). You get backlinks and steady traffic
Article submission is a continuous process, dont stop
I could have written perhaps a zillion things in that space of time
creating your own unique and quality articles are much better.
brickmug44 – Do you really mean direct traffic? Because if so, I don’t think so. If you meant SEO value – then yes. You will get a ton more links that way. That might help you rank on a good term and get the traffic from Google. But nobody reads those crappy articles do they?
Nice option to get some free traffic. Its a good idea but very time intensice. In my opinion its better to create new niche sites in that space of time and get better rankings through natural link building…
I didn’t know that until i read your post. Great work guys.
I will try your technique, hope i can boost my rank
Cheers.
I’m pretty sure this is what’s happening with my sites. So what’s the difference between “Ranking bounce” and “Google sandbox”?
I agree with brickmug44. Those 200+ articles will become backlinks – at least some of them will. Some will probably not be approved. And I’ve noticed some article site owners actually take your link off (thanks)…
So my thinking is that those backlinks are fairly relevant because the content on the page is yours. As long as the site owner has not totally pimped out the page, there won’t be too many links out either – which is also good.
So much great input here and thanks for the whole blog. For someone new to the game it is amazing how much information is now out there about Google. I’m embarrases to say how much I spent on Adword to beat the algorithm but the bill just got higher and higher. Talk about self fullfilling profecies. Cheers to all those inputting to the discussions here!
amazing how hard people will work to avoid actually writing something themselves.