Aged Text Links, High Google Rankings & The World of Warcraft Ebooks

Interesting title don’t you think

No I’ve not lost the plot, all will become clear as you read.

The World of Warcraft

Recently I’ve become a little addicted to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) The World of Warcraft (WOW).

My eldest son (15 years old) is to blame, he wanted to try the game out to make some money, so I bought the game and paid for a 6 month subscription, but after I played it I was hooked (it’s so addictive)!!

Now we have two World of Warcraft accounts!

Originally he planned to sell WOW gold (apparently a big industry, but against the terms of playing WOW), but changed his mind and settled on creating the site Warcraft World which is primarily a list of World of Warcraft Quest Guides.

The World of Warcraft Leveling Ebook

Earlier this month my son told me about an Ebook “Joana’s 1-70 World of Warcraft Horde leveling Guide” that promises to power level your WOW Horde characters from 1-60 in 4 days and 20hrs (which is very fast) and 60-70 just as fast (so a fast 1-70 WOW leveling guide).

Unfortunately the sales page for this Ebook uses the scam like marketing technique (bold fonts, buy now and you’ll pull hot women with a single look sort of thing ) so I didn’t immediately buy a copy of the guide, (that marketing technique really puts me off, click the Ebook image to the right to see his sales page!) but did manage to see a printed copy (the leveling guide is really an online Ebook with links to quest guides) for a few days from another local World of Warcraft Player (apparently 8 million people play this online game!!!).

Turned out this Ebook was very good so I bought us a copy, and we both started to follow the leveling instructions within. We began to level much faster (several times faster) than before.

Affiliate Marketing Opportunity

We also saw an affiliate marketing opportunity since the author Joana/Madcow sells the 1-70 leveling Guide via Clickbank with a 50% revenue share, (affiliates make over $15 a sale) it made sense to join the affiliate program. With my SEO knowledge and network of sites and my sons ermmm… (will add something he can do later ) we could grab a fair chunk of a small, but lucrative niche market.

So we both wrote honest reviews of the leveling guide with affiliate links for those looking to purchase:-

My Joana’s 1-70 World of Warcraft Horde leveling Guide Review

My sons WOW Joana’s 1-70 Horde leveling Guide Review

Finally Some SEO Information

My son wrote his review first and used WOW in the title, so I used World of Warcraft for my title, the idea being he’d be more likely to gain WOW SERPs and I’d be more likely to gain World of Warcraft SERPs (title contents is very important).

The pages haven’t been live long and though my review is better optimised, covering many more terms than my sons (I’m teaching him SEO, but it takes time and he’s a teenager!) if all other things were equal you’d expect the dedicated World of Warcraft site to beat my Make Money Online Guide site which prior to the review had NO other pages about WOW (now a few supporting pages). Basically my site had no WOW/World of Warcraft optimisation and my sons had plenty (menu links, logo area etc… all shout World of Warcraft).

Despite this my site is doing better in the World of Warcraft/WOW SERPs and is making more affiliate sales!

Aged Text Links and High Google Rankings

My site was first registered 21-Aug-2001, though I bought it at auction almost 2 years ago and started using it in March 2006 (so just over a year ago). I’ve not gone over the top in text link terms (could add thousands of text links from my network) so the home page is a modest PR4.

My sons site was registered 24-Feb-2007, (new registration) and he started to use it straight away. Currently a low PR3, but I’ve added some links that should take it to at least PR4 next PR update.

So my site could be considered to be just over 1 year old (use time) and my sons site just 3 months old. In PR terms I think the home pages will be very similar at the next PR update, possibly with the World of Warcraft site having a higher PR (added some nice PR links). And yet my site that’s got little to do with WOW is gaining more relevant traffic than the relevant site is!

The reason for this is the aged links. Google delays link benefit (or full PR benefit) for a period of time (at least 9 months), this is what some call the Google Sandbox effect. So right now there’s hardly any PR/link benefit counting on the World of Warcraft site and the majority of the PR/link benefit is counting on the year plus old More Earnings site.

Long term (6-9 months from now) I expect the true World of Warcraft site to be above my page for the vast majority of the Warcraft Ebook SERPs because then all that PR/link benefit will count fully.

So if you create a new site and find it’s not doing well despite adding enough links give it some time for all that PR/link benefit to be fully counted.

You have to be very patient when waiting for Google rankings these days!