Terry Kyle’s Big 60-Day Backlink Experiment

[Terry Kyle]

Excellent idea Rendix and I know some Warriors run a 24 hour Adwords test on impressions to try to get a true picture of traffic given the apparent unreliability of the usual reporting tools.

In my setup for this experiment, the difference in reported numbers in both the Google Keyword Tool and Keyword Elite was crazy on some terms (both exact match)!

[Terry Kyle]

OK, 3rd article live on GA now so I can move on with the 'getting indexed' stage - AFTER I entertain some visitors for lunch, dammit!

Oh and I'll do all the screen grabs of my WP setup later today too...

[Terry Kyle]

Final update for the day - RSS fed all the sites as per the above method and - thanks to the brilliant Google Alerts - the first RSS service to show up with one of the new articles was...(drum roll)

MillionRSS (from RSSBot)

Weird huh?

However, even though the Googlebots have 'seen' my feed there, none of the 4 test sites has been indexed yet; this can easily be checked by putting the whole URL into a Google search.

If you get this message:

"Your search - http://www.mydomain dot com - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords."

You ain't been indexed yet.

I had also ordered an article rewrite with Human Rewriter (with all of the settings turned up to 11 for Spinal Tap fans) for the SENuke attack on Article 3.

With spinner text export on 4 out of the 5 rewrites finished (with 3 word spins per sentence and 2 spin options per word - the most you can request), the spinner copy delivered a 49% originality for 16 articles according to SENuke's uniqueness test. That sounds nice for a link wheel!

When I have the version with 5 rewrites, I can hit my first link wheel for Article 3.

From Monday on, I'll be doing the planned backlinking on Article 1 (IRRELEVANT backlinks only, minimum PR5) and Article 2 (RELEVANT backlinks only, minimum PR5) and hopefully they'll all be backlinked by then.

I've been light on detail today as Saturday's a bit crazy around our place with people dropping by etc etc but tomorrow it will be back to details and plenty of screen grab pics...

[Terry Kyle]

Feedage just came in at 2nd place by 10 minutes in terms of Google Alerts spotting my feed submission.

In short: MillionRSS and Feedage seem to have the Googlebots permanently staying over at their place - however, doesn't mean that the new articles/site have been indexed.

Tomorrow, we'll see how the race between the social bookmarking gang pans out when I run all the sites through my Firefox bookmarklets at virtually the same time.

My money is on Digg to get seen by a Google Alert in under 20 minutes and long before the other heavyweight boys.

Oh and still waiting to hear whether my new site - Test 4 - has been approved for addition to SB101...

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Not real sure how I missed this - But, cool experiment that you have going on

I am bookmarking the thread

[James Pateman]

Hi Terry, go for it mate...outstanding.

I'm all in favor of sorting out the myths from the facts through testing like this. Good-on-ya for putting in the effort for the benefit of us all.

regards,
James Pateman

[AJsVRE]

Outstanding thread, I'll definitely be following this! Not only are you putting a lot of ACTION into this, but you're also putting a lot of effort into sharing everything here, that's sure to win you a lot of appreciation! Also, curious as to how you're setting up your google alerts?

[edp78]

Very Nice thread Terry,

I'll keep watching.

[jspmedia]

Very interesting..using GoArticle as a LP...really want to see this experience progress.

[AvidAZ]

Just bookmarked this thread to track the results. This is a great experiment and I'm eager to learn from your data.

[Big JP]

Good Luck Terry!

You seem to have a very good plan for this experiment, and everything in place, so I'm confident along with other warriors I'm sure, that you will get some good ROI for your actions, and will be helping yourself and many others for future campaings.

All the best

JP

[moralde]

Originally Posted by Big JP

Good Luck Terry!

You seem to have a very good plan for this experiment, and everything in place, so I'm confident along with other warriors I'm sure, that you will get some good ROI for your actions, and will be helping yourself and many others for future campaings.

All the best

JP

I second that. I'll be closely monitoring your progress Terry. This is one good experiment and is definitely going to go well, in any case. In the end, when Terry reveals the best approach, everyone who will try to emulate this will have to take into consideration the karma-effect of 'being able to help other fellow webmasters'.

[itcoll]

Originally Posted by Rendix

Terry,

One comparison I would like to see at the end of your analysis is a comparison between googles exact traffic projection and your actual incoming traffic. Also the corresponding SERPS placement for those sites.

Best of luck to you!

this is exactly what i need to.Thanks for letting Terry know that,Rendix.Bookmarked this thread Terry.Thanks for starting such a cool experiment.I have found jumptags to be better for indexing.you may try that:
Jumptags.com - Beyond Social Bookmarking

[regan]

I think this will be the longest thread that I read ever. Will stay close to see the results. Good job Terry and thank for sharing your experiment with us.

[Poker Rakeback Mafia]

Absolutely superb thread. These forums are full of the same old advice being branded around, based only on what people have read on forums themselves. Nobody ever tests anything. This thread is bookmarked and sure to become famous. Thanks for being good enough to share and not keeping the results to yourself.

[Terry Kyle]

Many thanks for the supportive posts!

OK, here's today's update:

As per a suggestion above, I ran all 4 URLS through Jumptags and my bookmarklet-heavy Firefox toolbar e.g.

The sites started turning up in Mister Wong pretty quickly (go figure!) BUT both Digg and Mixx refuse to accept GoArticles submissions.

However, they will accept submissions from other sites linking to GoArticles so tomorrow I'll hit that too.

From memory, adding a URL to your WF sig file will get spotted pretty quickly with a Google Alert too (not doing it on my sig for obvious reasons).

Also today, I created the first 10 IRRELEVANT backlinks to Article 1 from Angela's recent packets BUT I logged the URLs in a Word document so that I can audit those links with one click each week to check whether they've been deleted and I need to replace any e.g.

It's simple but effective (of course you could do it in Excel too but I personally find that program too unwieldy for simple jobs).

Once I had the 10 backlink URLs for Article 1 (the IRRELEVANT ones), I created a unique RSS feed over at

WebDevTips - Code Generators - RSS Headliner

and pumped it into RSSBot. However, when I went to also add it in to Feedburner, FeedAgg, they told me that the feed was corrupt so I'll have to recreate that tomorrow and hit it again.

I will also run each backlink through my full bookmarklet range (see above pic).

Now, here is my WP custom setup that has worked pretty well for me in the past (remember I would only backlink a keyword-intensive inner post page and not the domain name if I were setting this up normally).

Plugins:

My usual set are All-In-One-SEO; Google Sitemaps, Google Analytics, Jeremy and Don's Content Blender (to make posts look more unique) and Ghost Pinger.

I like the simplicity and direct professionalism of the "Direct Response" Theme from "Happy Joe".

You can see a sample of it here from one of my other blogs.

Other important WP steps (sorry if you already know these but I'm spelling out all the steps!):

Make the Permalinks SEO-Friendly:

Expand the automatic RSS feed list (list from a great old Tommy Gadget WSO - thanks T!):

Make sure the privacy default switch is changed so that search engines can find you:

I also allow only one post per page to [a] improve readability and [b] possibly get more individual pages per site:

More in the next post, this one is getting kinda long...

[Terry Kyle]

Today's Update - Part 2

At this stage - Sunday night London UK time - none of the 4 sites has actually been indexed by Google yet though the domain and URLs show up in Google SERPs on the bookmarking sites.

I screwed up on the good $35 article from Human Rewriter as that was for the new website - Test 4 (the one mainly driven by SB101) so I've started adding a spun article a day to that site (it's the WP blog above).

I haven't heard from Ken Fry yet about whether my site has been approved for inclusion in the program but will update hear when I find out.

That leaves me with an article still to spin in Power Article Rewriter for the SENuke trial on Article 3 (linkwheels) and RELEVANT backlinking to do on Article 2.

My goal by Friday is to have:

- all sites indexed
- active in SB101
- 50 relevant backlinks up for Article 2
- 50 irrelevant backlinks up for Article 1
- my first linkwheel for Article 3 up and indexed (from my one brief past experiment with linkwheels, it is important not to assume that beacuse some of the linkwheel sites have been indexed, that the connected ones will be too; Google is funny like that and you may need more action on sites that aren't getting indexed. I would think that a half-indexed linkwheel on the Web is about as useful as a half-finished wheel on a car!).

Someone asked above about Google Alerts, click here.

As you see on this image below, enter the exact term you want to be notified about (when G finds a new occurrence of that exact term on the Web) in "inverted commas", change to "as-it-happens" and put your email address in (probably has to be a gmail account) and you will get emailed when Google finds a new mention of that term anywhere:

More updates tomorrow and all questions are welcome...

[curtroese]

This is a great thread, not only am I going to follow it, I am going to duplicate it starting today. I have all of the tools and content articles that you have, so your ACTION has inspired me to step it up. Thanks.

[ryandales2000]

Hi Terry,

Great work. I'm sure this will become an epic thread with hundreds of eager Warriors following your experiment. I'm bookmarking this thread.

Thanks Terry for coming up with this.

[Richard Essi]

Hi Terry!

Your methodology is priceless! Thanks for documenting this brilliant experiment of yours!

I will continue to follow this with great interest.

Richard

[Fernando Veloso]

Terry,

Have you been using content blender and ghost pinger for some time now or is this a first time?

They look very powerful but what about results?

[solderite]

Hey Terry,
I just wanted to say Thanks for including SB 101 in your research. I know it is a wildcard and does not fit quite like the articles. It was very nice of you to go out of your way to make the extra time and effort to include it in your study. You will be in the rotation Wed.

Ken

[Terry Kyle]

Monday Night Update:

Thanks for the support above and great to see Ken Fry joining in - Ken has said that my new site (Test 4) will be approved and in the SB101 system by Wednesday (Sept 23).

That's good news and SB101 may be the dark horse to win the race!

Firstly to Fernando's question: running a proper comparative test on the Content Blender plugin is on my 'To Do' list but I'm trusting Jeremy Kelsall and Don there as their other stuff is really solid (until I get around to it).

With Ghost Pinger, I put that in the 'it can't hurt' box but isn't essential in my view.

As of about Midnight Monday night, none of the 4 have yet been indexed and I added the sites to 2 backlink sites that I know from Google Alerts are 'seen' by the bots pretty quickly.

However, patience is importance and it's where these sites will be in 30/60/90/120 days that really matters.

Now, this experiment isn't without unexpected twists and turns and two of these landed in my email inbox today.

Here's one from the SENuke crew:

Hey guys,

First of all, our sincerest apologies if you’ve been getting low success rates with some of the SEnuke modules.

The last update was over a month ago, and a few sites have changed their submission systems. No update in a whole month is very unlike us (if you’ve been following us for a while).

The reason for the delay this time is that we’re working on a massive update, and we really can't release things mid-update.

This update will add about 20 new sites in the social network nuke module. That is our most popular module and we wanted to take it to the next level However, adding sites to this module is not an easy task…

These 20 new sites will be in PR ranges 6 to 9. This means that now you can press the Start button and have blogs/hubs/wikis/pages created instantly on almost 40 high PR sites like hubpages, blogspot and wetpaint. And most of these links are dofollow! Imagine all the link juice you can get and the massive linkwheels, and blog networks you can create with one click!

Another reason for the delay is that we’re working on making SEnuke fully compatible with IE 8. Making the video module compatible will take some time, but the rest of SEnuke will be fully compatible with IE 8 for the next update.

Other than that, we’re working on a better registration system inside the software, and adding a bunch of member requests.

All this has taken us longer than we expected and our sincerest apologies for that, but just know that we haven’t been sitting around lazily It will be well worth the wait!

Moreover, work is well underway to create SEnuke from scratch in a completely new technology which will allow for scheduled submissions, background submissions, submissions without using Internet Explorer, and lots of other cool new goodies that members have requested, plus it’ll make it a lot more stable.

So keep your eyes peeled for the next email from us announcing when the update goes live. Should be Monday, Sept. 28th

To be continued in the next post...

[Terry Kyle]

Monday Night Update II

So I feel that I should wait until the SENuke upgrade (theoretically) on next Monday in order to give it the best possible chance - even if I need to extend the experiment by another week in November for a fair and final result across the four sites.

One other detail I wanted to add concerns the hotly debated issue of link density i.e. how many backlinks can you put on a page before you start losing link power (is 'link juice' finite on a page and if a page has 80 outbound backlinks, are those links greatly diminished/worthless?)

With the backlinks for Article 1 and Article 2, I am only using ONE backlink per page.

However, when searching for a #1 site's backlinks in my target niche, I found this 'link density' (more like 'link insanity' in some cases as you'll see) for a site ranking at #1 (ahead of Wikipedia) for a reasonably competitive term (not that I use or recommend this measure at all but 4.5 million results without quotes and 3.7 million with quotes).

Take a look at screen grabs on this site from backlinkwatch.com:

Out of 542 reported backlinks for this site, the number of pages linking to it with 10 or less outbound links would be less than 15 and many have hundreds of outbound links.

This is an interesting sub-debate here but this site's success obviously some other factors help such as domain age {it was established in 1996}, on-page SEO, .edu links (only 1 of 542 reported here and no .gov backlinks).

Interestingly, this specific inner page has a PR5 and the homepage PR7 - even if these links don't look that strong!

More updates tomorrow and keep the questions and observations coming.

One we have to discuss is buying intention with certain keywords and how to judge the commercial viability of some keywords and not others - another night perhaps...

By the way, a tip I mentioned earlier about using SEO Quake INSIDE Yahoo Site Explorer works well BUT page load time is very slow AND Yahoo blocks you if you do it too much (they don't like that data scraping).

Oh well, still valuable but be aware of those potential drawbacks...

[esh]

uploaded all terry's important posts from sept 14 to 21 in a document file with date and time (till monday night update II )

hope you find it useful!

cheers!

Terry Kyle?s Big 60-Day Backlink Experiment Sept 14 - 21.zip

[Terry Kyle]

Tuesday Morning:

Test 4 - the new website with a 2 at the end of the keyword term in the dot com domain (e.g. mydomain2.com) has now been indexed by Google.

I've also added additional bookmarklets to my Firefox toolbar to help speed up the bookmarking of backlink sites e.g.

I have also been fixing up my installation of Warrior Big Mike's SocialBot to blast at the backlink sites to help make sure that Google finds them.

In theory, this new website (Test 4) should be up and getting social bookmarked by others in Ken Fry's SB101 tomorrow.

The other interesting email I received yesterday was this one from Lemonarian - a linkwheel proponent whose list I'm on:

Hi everyone...

Since I discovered the LinkWheel methodology back in February 2009, a lot has changed.

It's not nearly as effective. When I released the report, it quickly became viral and everyone and their grandmother was doing LinkWheels left and right... a lot of people made money.

Now, it seems Google's caught on.

So I recommend you STOP doing perfect wheels and start mixing it up.

The real power comes from interlinking the web properties. There's nothing magical about the "wheel" structure. That's really just a name.

The power, as I said, is in interlinking them.

So mix it up as much as you can at all times.

Remember not to do reciprocal links.

In closing, here's an example of how you could "mix it up":

<< CLICK - PICTURE HERE >>

Also notice that I never "close" a wheel.

And oh, if you blatantly copy that... well that might not be the best idea, since a couple thousand other people is getting this email.

MIX IT UP!

The principle is still valid, just try to leave as little footprints as possible.

Stay cool,
Linus

Food for thought and today relevant backlinks for Test 2 are the order of the day...

[Terry Kyle]

Just to clarify - the only help that the new website (Test 4) has been getting (apart from the same treatment as the articles) is a new spun post (from my $35 Human Rewriter article) each day - it isn't in SB101 until tomorrow.

It seems that just from that (and remember I've customized that site with an expanded RSS list - see my earlier post - to get automatically pinged), it has beaten the articles in getting indexed.

We'll see by how much soon.

[solderite]

Hey Terry,
This is just my experience, I have absolutely no proof to back this up. I have found that when I bookmark a blog or static webpage with an RSS feed integrated into the site it gets indexed quick.


I have made rss feeds for static sites but the RSS is not actually hosted on the page (make sense) then bookmarked them and the indexing is noticeably slower. Like I said I have no documentation to support this, but it seems that sites pinged with RSS implented on them index faster. Hope this makes sense. (I mean my explanation)

I see no logic why the RSS would talk to each other but it almost seems like they do.

Ken

[esh]

just commenting on some related popular blog's posts, gets my articles indexed faster !

[Terry Kyle]

Wednesday Update:

Thanks Ken - great to have your input on board.

I don't claim to be an expert on RSS and have always done it because 'you're supposed to' but I've seen pretty mixed results - the best results for me have been with FeedAgg.

With this experiment, I have created RSS feeds for the GoArticles too though through this site:

WebDevTips - Code Generators - RSS Headliner

rather than through GA which doen't give individual authors an RSS feed - which EZA does - but rather only has RSS feeds for article categories.

Things are a little quite at the moment BUT:

Test 4 - the new website with a WP blog IS in Ken Fry's SB101 program whereby a group of webmasters social bookmark each other's sites with a set range of sites.

So Test 4 on SB101 is live and running!

Bookmarking each of Ken's assignments (using bookmarklets) takes no more than 5 minutes and each webmaster is expected to 'do their homework' and social bookmark their 'homework assignment' every few days (about 10 other sites per 'assignment').

Mainly at the moment I'm backlinking Article 1 and Article 2. Remember that SENuke will roll (hopefully) on Monday when SEN goes through a massive update.

Each day or so I add a 'new' spun article to Test 4, the new website.

Still Articles 1, 2 and 3 have not been indexed by Google - only the new website has been so far.

Interestingly though, each site is returning very different backlink reporting in Yahoo Site Explorer e.g.

Ladygaga.com is a PR7 site that I use sometimes (used on all 4 test sites here) because Google Alerts picks up new links there very quickly (e.g. under 20 minutes) BUT that doesn't mean that Google will index the linked site/s there!

I will fire a question to Matt Cutts over on Google's new Webmaster Central area of YouTube which is quite useful for us backlinkers if you 'read between the lines' of his answers there.

If my question makes it into a YT video there during the life of this experiment, I'll add it to this thread.

Remember that these sites went through basically the identical process of getting indexed (not quite yet!) by Google and the difference between results on GoArticles above shows that SEO/SEM is not a perfect, predictable science.

I expect the first week or two of this experiment to be a little light on action but hopefully things will heat up after that, so stay tuned...

[Big JP]

Originally Posted by Terry Kyle

Wednesday Update:

I will fire a question to Matt Cutts over on Google's new Webmaster Central area of YouTube which is quite useful for us backlinkers if you 'read between the lines' of his answers there.

If my question makes it into a YT video there during the life of this experiment, I'll add it to this thread.

I think that channel is great! and agree it is very usefull for us IM's to be able to get more of an understanding on how these google bots actually work, which is what everyone would love to Know.

Also Terry, how exactly do you use WebDevTips - Code Generators - RSS Headliner to make RSS? I couldn't make sense of it

[Joe118]

Terry, in my experience Yahoo Site Explorer is a few weeks behind on Google. Or at least, the data set they're using is a few weeks older than the one that Google is using to determine ranking.

[Terry Kyle]

Quick Thursday night update:

Originally Posted by Joe118

Terry, in my experience Yahoo Site Explorer is a few weeks behind on Google. Or at least, the data set they're using is a few weeks older than the one that Google is using to determine ranking.

That's true Joe - Google will respond to backlinks loooong before they turn up on YSE - which I suspect never shows all of them anyway!

Originally Posted by Big JP

how exactly do you use WebDevTips - Code Generators - RSS Headliner to make RSS? I couldn't make sense of it

I'll post step-by-step screen grabs on using this service over the next couple of days Big JP.

Also, Article 3 has now been indexed - that took almost a week! - though Articles 1 and 2 still have not been indexed yet all three went through the IDENTICAL process outlined above in previous posts.

IMPORTANT: I've also started work on a top top secret Test 5 (with a completely different approach) and I'll reveal all the details of that much further on - everyone loves a mystery - as I hope that it will solve the problem for all of us when trying to backlink numerous Web 2.0 inner and outer wheel sites of our linkwheels quickly! Fingers crossed.

Back to backlinking now...

[Terry Kyle]

OK - quick extra postscript on Thursday night.

GoArticle 3 has not only been indexed (finally!) after a week but is now sitting at #12 on page 2 of Google for a search term that (if you believe it) the Google Keyword Tool estimates gets 5400 phrase search matches and 2900 exact match searches a month.

Article 3 is planned to get blitzed with SENuke next week when the new update comes out but hopefully this result - with a few links and social bookmarks to get it indexed - shows the power of GoArticles when it works.

Now, the bigger questions are:

- will it retain its position before SENuke kicks in next week or gradually slide downward?

- is it a buying phrase?

- does GoArticles convert?

- does my GoArticle for that phrase convert?

- does that Clickbank vendor site convert well?

Let's see...

[GIahGroup]

Awesome thread Terry and very generous of you to outline your steps here.

I am in the process of doing the something similar but using fresh just reg'd domains, only I am using similar / comparitive tools.

My tools being used are:

1. Senuke
2. Thelinkjuicer
3. Linking loophole by P Drew
4. Video marketing using Traffic Geyser

I'm targeting very competive terms too (88,000,000 broad match & 22k searches / mth on G with exact match) its huge competition but I guess too many people traget smaller niches so I want the sites to rank well all that ecommerce shopping at Christmas.

My market is Nintendo Wii's, which is hot but very competitive so I appreciate your steps being outlined here which hopefully might save me some time.

Looking forward to your updates.

[4morereferrals]

IMPORTANT: I've also started work on a top top secret Test 5 (with a completely different approach) and I'll reveal all the details of that much further on - everyone loves a mystery - as I hope that it will solve the problem for all of us when trying to backlink numerous Web 2.0 inner and outer wheel sites of our linkwheels quickly! Fingers crossed.

Back to backlinking now...

Hrmmm .... this sounds familiar.

I'm sorta feeling left out Terry

You mention every other backlinking appoeach BUT ....

Lovin this thread.

[disi]

Originally Posted by 4morereferrals

Hrmmm .... this sounds familiar.

I'm sorta feeling left out Terry

You mention every other backlinking appoeach BUT ....

Lovin this thread.

This one will be sold for $10

[Terry Kyle]

Sunday 27 September 2009 Update:

OK, so we started on Thursday 17 September with these 4 Web properties:

[1] 500 word article (keyword phrase mentioned 5 times in article) on GoArticles backlinked with 50 weekly IRRELEVANT backlinks from Angela, PJ and my own WSO each week by an outsourcer hired through Elance (I'll go into all that with screen shots in a post soon);

[2] 500 word article (keyword phrase mentioned 5 times in article) on GoArticles backlinked with 50 weekly IRRELEVANT backlinks;

[3] 500 word article (keyword phrase mentioned 5 times in article) powered by SENuke linkwheels (with backlinking of linkwheel sites);

[4] New website with WP blog installed (plugins settings previously detailed in this thread) - keyword phrase as domain name (with a '2' added at the end as original dot com name was unavailable) - powered by Warrior Ken Fry's SB101 program of mutual social bookmarking plus spun posts (spun with Human Rewriter).

Just from GoArticles' own traffic, some 'tire kicker' traffic has passed through the articles e.g.

This is a new ClickBank account created just for this experiment. My tracking codes all follow this pattern:

1/2/3a - Cloaked (via offto dot net) link at top of article/site
1/2/3b - Cloaked link within article
1/2/3c - Cloaked link in bio box
4d - banner ad at bottom of blog post
4e - banner ad in sidebar

This allows me to check EXACTLY which links are working (I encourage you to go to the trouble of testing all your links too).

While the 2 order page impressions from the Analytics pic above might seem positive, they appear to have come from the same visitor to a picture ad on the WP blog (test 4).

Progress so far:

Article 1 - Indexed by Google and currently on Page 2 (this may 'disappear' from SERPs temporarily as links are 'seen' by Google - that's totally normal)

Article 2 - Still not indexed (hurry up Google!)

Article 3 - Indexed (first of the GoArticles by a couple of days), was at #12 on Google Page 2 for keyword but has currently disappeared. I am waiting for a major update to SENuke before major linkwheel building campaign begins (with Warrior Tome Brite's help) - according to SEN, the upgrade will be out tomorrow (Monday, 28 September).

Test 4 - Indexed first of all test sites, has been included in SB101 for most of the past week. Outside the top 200 for keyword so far.

With any backlinking campaign, patience is really important and once a 'tipping point' is reached, progress is usually pretty rapid on Google.

In my opinion, Google is the only search engine to focus on - I have #1 sites on Yahoo and MSN but the traffic isn't that great. Maybe you've had better luck!

I'll go heavily into outsourcing in my next posts as I get a lot of PMs and emails about this side of IM.

Like all this stuff, it's important to just jump in and try it and learn by doing it; that's how I've learned many of my most important findings and skills (plus great WSOs).

More coming soon...

[Tom Brite]

Great thread so far Terry, you really are documenting everything which is great!

Looking forward to seeing the results after you use senuke to blast away at that article.

Tom Brite

[xbokcom]

This is great Terry to follow your experiment. It just show you that the best way to make anything work is test and trial and error till you succeed.

Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing this with us.

[jasonmorgan]

Are you also tracking the amount of traffic each site / article is receiving as well? I don't deal with goarticles so I'm not even sure if you can do that.

Aside from the obvious goals of search engine rank and income, I'm curious how the different methods work when it comes to raw traffic. If wordpress has any benefits over a single page article since it has a larger footprint of content that can be found through your index page, archive pages and actual post page.

[udomaki]

Truly awesome post, seriously I check this every day after I get off of my J.O.B. thanks for the hard work!

[AggieMom]

waiting for the results!

I will definitly learn something from it!

[JonathanBoettcher]

Originally Posted by Terry Kyle

Excellent idea Rendix and I know some Warriors run a 24 hour Adwords test on impressions to try to get a true picture of traffic given the apparent unreliability of the usual reporting tools.

In my setup for this experiment, the difference in reported numbers in both the Google Keyword Tool and Keyword Elite was crazy on some terms (both exact match)!

The problem with the 24 hr test is that unless Google has ramped your account way up, the chances of your ad showing up on each search for the term is very small. Go to Google, type in a phrase, watch the ads closely, then hit refresh a few times and watch how things change. Some people show up some of the time, some rarely, and others nearly all the time.

I don't see how you could guarantee a proper estimation using that method...

[vicone]

This looks like a very interesting study. It's a pity that other back linking services couldn't be included for comparison (such as Link Juicer) but I know that you've got to draw the line somewhere or it would become too unwieldy.

I'll keep an eye on your progress and look forward to you reports.

Ivan

[Terry Kyle]

Tuesday 29 September Update:

OK, let me answer some posts first:

Originally Posted by GIahGroup

I am in the process of doing the something similar but using fresh just reg'd domains, only I am using similar / comparitive tools.

My tools being used are:

1. Senuke
2. Thelinkjuicer
3. Linking loophole by P Drew
4. Video marketing using Traffic Geyser

I'm targeting very competive terms too (88,000,000 broad match & 22k searches / mth on G with exact match) its huge competition but I guess too many people traget smaller niches so I want the sites to rank well all that ecommerce shopping at Christmas.

My market is Nintendo Wii's, which is hot but very competitive so I appreciate your steps being outlined here which hopefully might save me some time.

Sounds like a powerful combo GIG!

Why not add your results in here too? For newbies following here, GIGs tools do cost a bit (which is fine if you're getting the income) e.g.

I think the rates are: SEN lite $67 a month, SEN Pro (the one being used for this experiment) $127 a month, Linkjuicer $37 a month (I think), fellow Australian Pete Drew's Linking Loophole $X a month (I have no idea on that one, someone else can post how much it is) and I think that Traffic Geyser is $100+ a month. It can add up but if you're getting results, it's pennies, relatively speaking.

The other thing GIG is to monitor which one is the most effective. If they are all running at the same time, it can be tricky to identify the most effective. Would love to see your method and thinking posted here!

Originally Posted by 4morereferrals

I'm sorta feeling left out Terry

You mention every other backlinking appoeach BUT ....

If it's any consolation Steve, you are aff linked in my WSO!

Originally Posted by disi

This one will be sold for $10

All free, free, free here Disi! I'll get my reward in heaven (possibly).

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

Are you also tracking the amount of traffic each site / article is receiving as well? I don't deal with goarticles so I'm not even sure if you can do that.

Aside from the obvious goals of search engine rank and income, I'm curious how the different methods work when it comes to raw traffic. If wordpress has any benefits over a single page article since it has a larger footprint of content that can be found through your index page, archive pages and actual post page.

Great questions Jason and some of the ones that this experiment seeks to answer. This morning I had accumulated a total of 36 "Requests" (GoArticles term for views I believe) for Articles 1 and 3 (weird that they had the same number) while #2 had 19 Views. That's all traffic INSIDE GA though Article 1 and 2 are currently sitting around position #13 or #14 on page 2 of Google for their respective terms.

Here's the latest Hops-Tracking ID Report from Clickbank:

Originally Posted by JonathanBoettcher

The problem with the 24 hr test is that unless Google has ramped your account way up, the chances of your ad showing up on each search for the term is very small. Go to Google, type in a phrase, watch the ads closely, then hit refresh a few times and watch how things change. Some people show up some of the time, some rarely, and others nearly all the time.

I don't see how you could guarantee a proper estimation using that method...

Spot on Jonathan - you are dead right. I have never used this method myself and in the past I blew loads of money on PPC and they do rotate the ads with each Refresh/Reload. Would love to hear Jeremy Kelsall's/Don's thoughts here on it!

Let me also just quickly share one good PPC tip I used to use (I am on an all organic Google diet these days!): In AdWords, in theory, you can't use phrases like 'Click Here' Right? Well in fact you CAN add this and other calls to action in one spot: after a forward slash on your display URL (as long as your display URL matches the link URL, it is fine) and Google doesn't care if you don't have a sub-folder called that e.g. Display URL mydomain dot com/ClickHere e.g. mydomain dot com/BuyNow (it has to be all joined up with no spaces but capitals make the differentiation between words easy). Hope that helps ya!

Back to Business here:

Given the obvious inaccuracy of search volume estimation tools (check out the number of "I'm #1 on Google but only get 3 visitors a day when it should be 150" threads on WF), my own imperfect approach is to overestimate i.e. go after a higher number in the search estimators (though I haven't done that in this experiment to be honest) than you think you will get.

Yes that does mean that many terms will be more competitive but doing the work to get ranking at #1 and then finding little traffic would be annoying to say the least.

Originally Posted by vicone

This looks like a very interesting study. It's a pity that other back linking services couldn't be included for comparison (such as Link Juicer) but I know that you've got to draw the line somewhere or it would become too unwieldy.

I'll keep an eye on your progress and look forward to you reports.

Ivan

There will be a few surprises by the end of this experiment Ivan so stay tuned...

Other Important Developments:

1. Despite going other through the same 'index me Google!" process as Articles 1 and 2 (remember, they're on Page 2 of Google for their respective terms now sitting around position 13-14), Article 3 still ain't backlinked.

2. I did a big bunch of screen grabs on creating RSS feeds for any page on the Web with this service

WebDevTips - Code Generators - RSS Headliner

BUT

the sample link failed RSS validation on several services! In short, do NOT use this service without validating your created feed. I will look around for other sites that offer this service and post screen grabs of the setup there.

3. The new website (Test 4) is indexed but not appearing in SERPs yet. GoArticles has natural ranking power so let's see how SB101 is faring in a few weeks when that site has loads of social bookmark backlinks.

4. I get a lot of emails about outsourcing so I will set up a small job on elance later in the week and screen-grab document each step. It's pretty straightforward and elance is well run but using any new service for the first time can be slightly nervy for a newbie.

Personally, I regard outsourcing as an ESSENTIAL practice in an IM business. When I began, I stupidly resisted it for a while but was blown away by the low prices and speed when I did get into it!

For the record, I pay US$25 per 50 backlinked profiles created with photo upload (I provide the photo), bio paragraph copied and pasted in (that I provide) and email verification/validation done by them. I do this through an outsourcer on elance.com.

I go to that extra trouble to give my profile (hopefully) the appearance of legitimacy and therefore the backlink/s a better chance of not being deleted by a vigilant moderator/webmaster.

5. I have just had my first digital product approved by ClickBank for sale through them. In theory, I am now a ClickBank vendor and not 'just' an affiliate. It's the publicly priced version of my WSO in my sig file. It should all be live in a few days.

The reason I mention this here is not just a shameless call for affiliate partners but also if you are considering joining CB as a vendor and want to know how it's done, I can document my process as a CB vendor too in this thread if there is interest here to do so.

In your own IM journey, developing your own products is pretty important to long term profitability - in my humble opinion - so getting more info from this thread about being a CB vendor could be useful to you too.

Let me know what you think...

6. I got this email from SENuke today so more delays there (I will extend the experiment if necessary):

Hi terry,

As you might or might not be aware, the SEnuke servers were under attack by hackers three separate times this past weekend.

Only a few people were affected by it because it happened on a weekend and the problem was resolved within a couple of hours.

However, we had to do a complete restore of the server from backup, so almost a whole day's worth of data was lost (Sept 27th).

Most people receiving this email will not be affected by this data loss, but if you were active on the SEnuke website on Sept 27th, we might not have received your correspondence.

If you signed up for a new SEnuke account or upgraded your existing account on that date, you might have to send us a message at the Help Desk (by logging into SEnuke SEO Software,SEO software,search engine optimization) again if your account doesn't seem to be working. This also applies to any help desk tickets or forum posts you might have made.

Moreover, fixing all the issues that these attacks caused took up valuable hours that we wanted to devote to putting out the next update.

As a result, the next SEnuke update will be delayed by 24-48 hours.

Probably closer to 24 hours but it could take up to 48 hours.

An email will be sent out to everyone once the update is released.

We thank you for your patience, and sincerely apologize for any problems this may have caused you.

We are working with our security team to make sure this never happens again.

To your success,
SEnuke Team

[dwrglobal]

Try this free service from Mr Brute Force Pete:

HTML to RSS Feed Creator, easily create rss feeds by Peter Drew

You can consolidate several URLS to create a single Rss feed URL that you can ping...

Hope it helps..

DaNNy

P.S. Can't wait to see the results.. will be following this thread

Originally Posted by James Lancaster

I have some questions:
How I should build my backlinks? I have no problems building almost unlimited amount of backlinks from various high profile sites and random sites as well, however, some of my goarticles have ranked in the first pages during a week but haven't risen any more. The inner pages of my sites that I built backlinks for along with goarticle ones, haven't been indexed at all or rank very badly. Is it ok to build, let's say, 40 backlinks a day and then rest for some time? It's much more convenient to build 100 in one day on a week than 10 a day. Does it matter to google? I ask because apparently Google can't find all backlinks at once thus it can not think it is spam.

Also what about submitting batches of backlinks to profile sites by copy-paste method? Won't google catch up that those are the same and same backlinks with no changes?

Thank you for your answers

[jasonmorgan]

Personally, I regard outsourcing as an ESSENTIAL practice in an IM business. When I began, I stupidly resisted it for a while but was blown away by the low prices and speed when I did get into it!

For the record, I pay US$25 per 50 backlinked profiles created with photo upload (I provide the photo), bio paragraph copied and pasted in (that I provide) and email verification/validation done by them. I do this through an outsourcer on elance.com.

thanks for the info, I've been on the fence regarding outsourcing. As I'm sure you know, it's tough to keep up with the constant backlinking ratrace.

[purelight]

To be honest Terry, even though I recently bought your WSO I don't know a heck of a lot and a bit of what your doing is just going over my head. I would be very interested in the CB process if it doesn't slow the thread down too much with basics for everyone else.

[alwaysontop]

Thanks you very much for this insightful post.