Niche Site Ranking Part 2 – Unique Article Wizard Sucks

I am finally getting around to writing part 2 of my Niche Site ranking series. You can see the kick that I am on lately centers around really driving my existing sites to the top of their keyword rankings. This might be the most frustrating part of niche site building for most site builders, it definitely is for me. My issue is that I cannot see instant results and I am impatient as hell, neither of which are going to help me become better at this.

Link building seems to be one of the most prolific sources of angst around the niche site building world. It would seem that nobody wants to do it because it’s tedious and dull and really almost mind numbing. Many turn to automated or semi-automated link building methods in hopes of becoming a ranking superstar. You know the types of tools that I am talking about, the ones with the giant sales page promising you health and wealth beyond your wildest dreams.

Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to perform some real world testing on these tools. The first one in the breach is Unique Article Wizard. I see this service being recommended all over the place, despite it being not much more than piles of duplicate content published on piles of sites that have probably been identified by Google as link farms. I am not saying this is true, just what my opinion is but I decided to give it a try to see what it could do for me and I thought I would share the results.

In Part 1 of Niche Site Ranking, I shared a site that I recently bought from Mark at the Niche Store Builder. This site was a former project that he put together more as an example of how to build an N1Way type site if I remember, not too sure. I have a number of cycling related sites and it is one of my favorite niches. So he took my first born child and a quart of blood and then pushed the domain to me, laughing maniacally as he did it. Here is the site in question.

Niche Site Renovation

I decided to dust the site off a bit and freshen it up some. The first thing I did was go through it post by post and found a number of posts that were not showing any Ebay auctions at all. This sure won’t earn us any money so I decided to add Amazon to the mix as Amazon seems to produce well for cycling related stuff and has a TON of inventory for these types of products.

You can see the dreaded “No Items Matching Your Keywords Were Found” message which translates into no earnings. See, my Momma didn’t raise no dummies. So a little dose of ReviewAzon and no items turns into a very professional looking presentation in my opinion.

So once we had something to purchase on every single page, we decided to implement a “review” system. I don’t know if this has merit or not, but there is a theory that Google is not as harsh on sites that offer product “reviews” and “ratings” as they are on pure affiliate sites. I have NOTHING to substantiate that claim, it just makes me feel better to think it and I like it, so there ya go.

If you look at the picture below, I am highlighting two things. I have added a star rating review system where I rate each product that I add to the site and then any readers or users that come along that wish too, can write a review and leave a rating on a product as well. Over time, the theory is that we will have a reasonable selection of ratings to give someone an idea of whether a product is any good or not.

I also added a “section” at the top that includes a gravatar and a few links that will allow you to bookmark a page or jump right down to leave a review. I also have a 468 ad at the top of every page, I currently have an Amazon contextual ad in there but it’s not returning very targeted results. I will experiment with adsense once I get any kind of traffic. I am still tweaking this site so it’s not what I would consider done.

Yeah But….

So you may be thinking so what….the point of this article wasn’t a renovation but rather an experiment to see how quickly we could move the needle on how a site ranks. You’re right, so let’s get to that part. If you recall last time there were 3 keywords that were mentioned for this site. The two that are shown below and then the keyword “bike rack reviews” was mentioned in the comments.

We were ranking #7 for bike rack reviews, #193 for car bike rack and #15 for car bike racks as of the writing of that post which was January 10th. So where are we now? Where are we after submitting our article to nearly 300 different blogs and directories in the UAW system? Almost in the exact same place…that’s where.

As of this writing I am coming up #6 for bike rack reviews, 108 for car bike rack and #18 for car bike racks. Nearly 300 keyword anchored back links targeting these keywords and I barely made a dent in it. Moving from 193 to 108 is a lot of places, but it’s hardly difficult and don’t get lost in that. We actually moved backwards to #18 from #15 for the domain URL.

To rub salt in the wound….out of 300 submissions….not one single pingback or backlink in Yahoo. Not one….so I am guessing that most of the sites submitted to are either deindexed or penalized in some way from the search engines. I am sure they have found whatever footprint this network leaves but again, that is only speculation on my part. What I can tell you, fact based, are my results and you can draw your own conclusions from that.

Summary

So what am I telling you here? Am I admitting that I suck at linkbuilding? No…the entire point was to try out a few different methods and share the results. I would give UAW an EPIC FAIL rating for it’s effectiveness. I used it on a few other sites and saw the same mediocre results and I would definitely not recommend it to anyone for $70 bucks a month…that’s for damn sure.

The next tool that I intend to use is one I am pretty familiar with and have had fantastic results with in the past, so we’ll see if it is able to produce a better showing that UAW.

Stay Tuned for Part 3!