Today’s affiliate tip comes from a conversation I had this morning with one of the best affiliate SEO guys I know, who will remain nameless (because that’s how he rolls), but for the purpose of this post we’ll call him Mr. SEO.

As you might guess, doing SEO for Google in competitive verticals (like insurance) requires time, skill, and healthy amount of experimentation. Experimenting with eternal linking methods, content creation, site structure and internal links are usually necessary when trying to pull first page ranking on big money terms.

What a lot of affiliates don’t understand is that the same experimentation that makes a site successful in Google can also eventually lead to ranking penalties. Whether those penalties are deserved or not isn’t really the point - if you get zapped by Google, it’s time consuming and difficult, if not impossible, to recover - especially when you aren’t a mainstream branded site.

When faced with a fairly obvious Google slap to his main money making domain, Mr. SEO realized right away that it was time to dump his penalized site and start the optimization process over with a new domain.

This caused a bit of a problem.

Mr. SEO knew that Google wasn’t likely to give first page rankings to a newly indexed site for competitive search terms (yes - the mysterious “Sandbox”). Based on his experience, Mr. SEO knew a site would need to be in the Google index anywhere from 8 to 10 months before it had any chance of making it to the first page for big terms.

Without an alternative, Mr. SEO ended up buying a new domain, developing it, and after almost a year of no income from the vertical, got the site ranked for competitive terms once again. A great success, but not an ideal situation by any means.

With this experience in mind, Mr. SEO now makes sure he is prepared for inevitable fluctuation of his search rankings by keeping anywhere from 7 to 10 domains on the back burner, ready to rock, in case he has issues with his prime money maker.

These backup domains have fairly basic websites on them and he points some links to them from sites that are already indexed. Once the sites and links are up he keeps an eye out to see when Google indexes the site, and makes a note of it so he’ll know when the domain will be ready to rank in the eventuality that he needs it.

By keeping a handful of aged and indexed sites on hand, Mr. SEO is now ready for any issues his main money-making domain may face, and as a result, he protects himself from extended periods of reduced income.

If you’re an SEO affiliate, I’d highly recommend that you take some time this week and pick up some backup domains like Mr. SEO. That way, if you run into some Google ranking issues down the line, you’ll be able to get back on your feet and keep earning!

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