matt-beedle.com

I have finally gotten around to re-writing the first rails site I ever wrote. So here it is http://www.best-mobile-phones.org.uk, the new and improved best mobile phones. The original was just a simple DB, and literally everything was using page caching. I had used out of the box scaffolding to edit the db, and whenever a user submitted a review, a cache_sweeper would clear the required pages from the cache.

The new site is built almost completely using REST. All phones lists are paginated using the will_paginate plugin, although I have not implemented the AJAX version yet. All the images are stored in the DB, and cached on the server when requested. I’ve also built a sweet CMS which allows me to edit almost anything on the site once logged in. There are sweepers set up for all of the data so any caches affected by the CMS are automatically expired. Finally, I also decided it was time to learn some web2.0 CSS! So I got my GIMP out, made a “Beta” badge, and curved the edges of any box I saw! So there it is, please go take a look, find some bugs, give me some feedback, buy a phone. End advertisement!

Back in October 2006 I decided that working for someone else for the rest of my life was not going to get me the big house, fast car and hundreds of women I have hoped for and expected ever since I can remember! I figured the easiest way to achieve these targets would be to launch a web site of my own. Something with a glaringly simple design, clear navigation, and providing a useful service to the user. Best Mobile Phones was born. OK, it seemed like a good idea at the time!

I quickly knocked up a very simple site in a couple of hours using Ruby on Rails, bought the domain name, and uploaded my site to my web hosts PrimeHosting.co.uk (who I thoroughly recommend). My design was shamelessly ripped from mobile-phones-uk.org.uk. OK, now time to get some traffic. I should point out before going any further, that when I started this site I had only the best intentions as far as search engine optimisation (SEO) was concerned!

I submitted the URL to Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN live and a few other search engines. Then using a freelancer site, I found someone to write reviews of mobile phones for me for $3 per article. Bargain! Soon I had 50+ very poor quality mobile phone articles. As everyone with any SEO experience knows, content is king. In order to get the most benefit from all this content, I uploaded it to the site database slowly over a period of about 3 weeks, making the search engines believe that my site was updated regularly. By now my site had been indexed by Yahoo and Google, and I was receiving around 20-30 unique visitors a day from Yahoo. Nothing from Google, as I was still too low in the rankings. After no more than a month I was fed up with the slow progress of my various white hat SEO methods and began to turn to the dark side.

When a new phone is released the manufacturer publishes a press release. My first port of call was to copy and past the press release for each phone on to my site, and link it to each phone via a “related articles” section. This isn’t particularly bad, but search engines do frown on duplicate content. Next I started to spam the comments on all of the other major phone review sites with links to my site. Surprisingly most of these comments where actually published! At the same time as this, I started to increase the keyword density across the site. Every where a phone was referenced, I made sure the whole manufacturer name, phone name and model was quoted. I did the same on the left navigation. After doing this for around a month my rankings (and traffic) where shooting up! I was receiving around 300-400 unique visitors per day, and the site had only been going for two months!

There were many more tricks I was looking forward to trying, including creating a hexagonal blog farm to boost PR. I never got a chance to try them though, as 2 weeks later I was sandboxed by Google, my main traffic generator. After many hours spent on Google forums, I found that because of the way I had keyword stuffed my left nav, I had been labeled as a black hat doorway page by the search engines. Once I had reverted the navigation to its original state it took a further month to get the site out of the sandbox, and I had to upload new content daily. Even once out of the sandbox my ratings never recovered, and eventually I decided to stop flogging a dead horse (gave up).

There are hundreds of ever evolving black hat SEO techniques. I only used a couple of them. They may seem like an attractive option for getting results quickly which otherwise can take months. In reality, however, they can do much more harm than good, and unless you know what you are doing, they are far from the easy option.

UPDATE
Although my black hat tinkering did destroy my results in google, and also the majority of my traffic, I do have a glimmer of hope, I appear to still be number 1 in microsoft live search for the term “best mobile phones”, which is delivering around 200 UVs per month:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=best+mobile+phones&mkt=en-gb&FORM=LVCP&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search