My SEO Experiment - 7 cool results

[traianturcu]

Hello fellow warriors,

In this brief post I'd like to share with you some of the findings I've made when it comes to search engine optimization. I hope you'll find some use in the results I'm about to share

Basis
I think I should first tell you where my conclusions are drawn from.
I've bought 18 domains in a quite long tail niche (4000-6000 exact searches / month for each keyword).
For each keyword I've bought the .com, .net and .org where they were still available (exact match domains - keyword.com,keyword.net,keyword.org).
This happened only 3 weeks ago, so after the Google famous anti-farm change.
I would like to make it as clear as possible that all conclusions are based on actual facts and not my personal opinions, however I won't share the URLs of my websites.

Results
1. Exact match domain names have a huge advantage over the competition. Almost all websites (17 out of 18) got indexed in less than 2 days and ranked on places varying from 18 to 68 without any links or content on, just Wordpress installed.

2. If you're using Wordpress, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a must-install. I'm not sure what makes this plugin so special, but Google seems to love it, at least when it comes to indexing.

3. If your website disappeared from the search results delete the any content you might think it's not original enough and it will rank again. I intentionally used some copied articles on 3 of the websites. They all disappeared from Google. On 2 of them I've deleted the duplicate article. The reappeared and even quite high in the rankings (positions 27 and 34). The one which still had the copied article was still nowhere to be found.

4. .com = .net = .org When it comes to the SERPs, all these 3 do equally well. Same link building, same kind of content, keyword1.net was in position 14, keyword1.com on 15, keyword1.org on 16. For another keyword, all 3 sites very similar, keyword2.com on 19, keyword2.org on 20, keyword2.net on 21. so if you find a great keyword and either .com. .net or .org are available take it! (p.s. I have some other sites ranking on Google.co.uk - co.uk and org.uk are both doing equally well, just better than .com)

5. 10 do follow high PR profile links > 7000 nofollow/follow mixed links
I've outsourced backlinking for some of the websites and got a combination of edu and gov + a lot of blog comments + a lot of profile automated links. For some other sites I just researched my competition and found that very often the sites ranking first had only 30-40 profile backlinks from various high profile sites. I build the links manually (about 10-20 for each site) and their rankings improved a lot!
Here are some numbers:
Initial position -> position after getting the 10-20 high quality links
58 -> 9
68-> 28
38 -> 11
38 -> 4&5
40 -> 21
39 -> 15
24 -> 6
[...]
and the SERPs continue to improve even to this moment
So I guess the conclusion would be - Work less but focus on the right things. See what works for your competition and channel on that, it will surely work for you too. To outrank your competition just do exactly what they did + what some other great competitor did.

6. I've bought some WSO which recommends among other things to get your links by submitting articles with your links to private blog networks. Private blog networks suck! Maybe they used to work, but now Google just took my sites out of the results (the 3 ones for which I've tried private blog networks). So don't try mass links which have nothing to do with your niche.

7. Link out to an important wiki related to your niche. The ranking of my websites which link to some important resource in the domain (Wikipedia for example) is significantly higher than of the ones which don't link out to authority websites.

--------------------------------

That's all for now but I'll definitely have a lot more results as I'll try out some more things and see what works and what not.

To your success,
Traian

P.S. Waiting for your comments and ready to answer any questions you might have!

[Manuelcrc]

Great share!

[AnimalSpirit]

Thanks for sharing your story!!! I pretty much knew everything you said there, but I didn't have personal success yet. Your post should be helpful to the beginners too.

Cheers

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by AnimalSpirit

Thanks for sharing your story!!! I pretty much knew everything you said there, but I didn't have personal success yet. Your post should be helpful to the beginners too.

Cheers

Yeah, I didn't find out anything new.. It's just that before trying out these things myself I was a bit unsure since I've seen people saying that works people saying that the other things works, just a lot of contradictory opinions.. So at least for me this was and continues to be a great experiment since I can actually test what works and what doesn't (and yes, maybe these are not general conclusions, but at least I know they work for my niche )

I'm also sure you'll be successful! Just as a side note, I would recommend purchasing Google Sniper. I am in absolutely no way associated with George Brown. i'm just recommending this product because it's the one (out of hundreds I've bought) which truly provided me a working powerful strategy.

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck!!!
Traian

[Trivum]

What are the time frames for these results? Also, are these sites on different IPs or the same? ... Thanks.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by Trivum

What are the time frames for these results? Also, are these sites on different IPs or the same? ... Thanks.

They are all on the same IP. The time frame is 3 weeks, meaning I've bought the domains 3 weeks ago and now most of them are either at the middle of the first page or at the top of the second (and very few of them on 3rd, 4th or 5th page).

[Trivum]

New sites often get a pop from Google and then retreat back into the woods, so it would be interesting to hear how this goes with more age. ... But I'm not sure you should be trying to get people to sign up to your list from a post here on the "regular" forums. The mods might not take to that very well.

I'd put a link in my signature if I were you. If you give good info, people will check you out. For example, take the guy in this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...nt-2011-a.html

He gives tons of great info there over a course of time. Because it was so good, I did check out his blog and started to follow him. You want to know the funny thing -- he gave more info in his Warrior thread than he did on his blog. People respect that type of thing, I think. Especially marketers. ... My 2 cents.

[markowe]

...and P.S. this belongs in the SEO forum.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by Trivum

New sites often get a pop from Google and then retreat back into the woods, so it would be interesting to hear how this goes with more age. ... But I'm not sure you should be trying to get people to sign up to your list from a post here on the "regular" forums. The mods might not take to that very well.

I'd put a link in my signature if I were you. If you give good info, people will check you out. For example, take the guy in this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...nt-2011-a.html

He gives tons of great info there over a course of time. Because it was so good, I did check out his blog and started to follow him. You want to know the funny thing -- he gave more info in his Warrior thread than he did on his blog. People respect that type of thing, I think. Especially marketers. ... My 2 cents.

Thanks for your advice! Highly appreciated

I took down the subscribe thing, so I hope the mods will have no problem with my thread now :P

And yes, I am totally aware that as more time will pass the sites might lose their ranking. But that's why I'll continue to try out more stuff and hopefully be able to get my sites to the first position and keep them there. Anyway I'll post more results as things evolve.

[Trivum]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

Anyway I'll post more results things evolve.

Sounds good. I'll bookmark this thread. Thanks.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by markowe

...and P.S. this belongs in the SEO forum.

the thread is not general enough for the general discussion forum?...

[healingoasis]

Thanks for the informative post!

[TPFLegionaire]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

Hello fellow warriors,




3. If your website disappeared from the search results delete the any content you might think it's not original enough and it will rank again. I intentionally used some copied articles on 3 of the websites. They all disappeared from Google. On 2 of them I've deleted the duplicate article. The reappeared and even quite high in the rankings (positions 27 and 34). The one which still had the copied article was still nowhere to be found.



6. I've bought some WSO which recommends among other things to get your links by submitting articles with your links to private blog networks. Private blog networks suck! Maybe they used to work, but now Google just took my sites out of the results (the 3 ones for which I've tried private blog networks). So don't try mass links which have nothing to do with your niche.

-

Have you considered the possibility that you have come to the wrong conclusions concerning the facts above?

Early in their life, sites can jump a lot, espetialy if you are building backlinks, how do you know for sure that the movements (appearence/disapearance ) of the sites in the SERPS are attributable to the contents rather than the links?

On the subject of the blog networks, you said that Google took your site out of the results (not in top 1000), did they come back? if they did , considering that you would not have been able to remove the "offending" links, what did you or didn't do to make them come back?

You make a very bold statements "So don't try mass links which have nothing to do with your niche"

Are all of the competitors you have analyzed in your niche only getting links from relevant sites.

Your sites have only be up for 3 weeks.....

Don't get me wrong , I wish you unparalleled success with whatever strategies you are using and believing in but I think you should be more cautious in interpreting your results.

To your success.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by TPFLegionaire

Have you considered the possibility that you have come to the wrong conclusions concerning the facts above?

Early in their life, sites can jump a lot, espetialy if you are building backlinks, how do you know for sure that the movements (appearence/disapearance ) of the sites in the SERPS are attributable to the contents rather than the links?

On the subject of the blog networks, you said that Google took your site out of the results (not in top 1000), did they come back? if they did , considering that you would not have been able to remove the "offending" links, what did you or didn't do to make them come back?

You make a very bold statements "So don't try mass links which have nothing to do with your niche"

Are all of the competitors you have analyzed in your niche only getting links from relevant sites.

Your sites have only be up for 3 weeks.....

Don't get me wrong , I wish you unparalleled success with whatever strategies you are using and believing in but I think you should be more cautious in interpreting your results.

To your success.

Hi,

First of all I do believe that you statements are all pertinent and my conclusions might be a bit off. Of course, I will have to wait a bit more time to be sure.

However, the reason for which I am quite confident that the conclusions I've arrived to are correct is the fact that I've built very similar sites and one by one I've tried the various things described above. I've kept sites for control and sites for checking. The fact that all the sites with copied content or using private network blogs got out of the SERPs, but all the others didn't when nothing else differed is good enough for me.

Of course, SEO is not an absolute science and my results might be valid only for my particular niche or circumstances. Yet, I believe they are worth sharing just because they helped me improve my own blogs


And I've made a mistake saying you shouldn't build mass links unrelated to your niche. What I meant to say was that building just a few links with high PR belonging to your own niche is much more efficient and a better way to spend your time

Anyway, thanks for your response and for your pertinent observations!

I'll definitely post more once time passes and maybe I will have more righteous conclusions later on

Best Regards,
Traian

[Jason Dittberner]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

7. Link out to an important wiki related to your niche. The ranking of my websites which link to some important resource in the domain (Wikipedia for example) is significantly higher than of the ones which don't link out to authority websites.

Thanks for sharing. Did you use no follow tag on this outbound link?

[prismkuet]

The 7 results obtained are quite appropriate.
Those must be followed by every site owner.

[Andy Yusuf]

nice info mate...

how competitive your keywords ?

you said you can rank them within 3 weeks

i'm so surprised

[snubi]

Great share. Thank you very much

[simonbuzz]

Hey thanks for the share...Will install the plugin...and see what happens..

[gokhanfil]

thanks for sharing (:

[rinor81]

Great post, thanks a lot.

My question is, where do you get/find quality links? Do you buy them from high PR sites? Or come to an arrangement with the webmaster?

I have a couple of sites that ranked high on Google and vanished but I did not have any duplicate content there so it's really frustrating...have no idea what it is and it doesn't look like a dance as well.

Any tips for me?


Good Luck to you all dear friends!

[imfusa]

1. Exact match domain names have a huge advantage over. Almost all websites (17 out of 18) got indexed in less than 2 days and ranked on places varying from 18 to 68 without any links or content on, just Wordpress installed.

I have an exact match domain and it is a .biz domain.
I want to say that i got on the first 2 pages on google in 1 day.
That is 24 hours.

[markowe]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

the thread is not general enough for the general discussion forum?...

Naaah, trust me, if it's SEO it belongs in here - I am often in the SEO forum, but I like to escape to the Main forum and NOT read SEO stuff

But I didn't want to be unappreciative of the info you shared. We're never going to be able to 'reverse-engineer' the Google algo (apart from anything else there is almost certainly an element of randomness in it for that very reason) but the more we can share our experiences the better picture we will have.

Interested (but not surprised) to see EMDs still doing very well. Though I am seeing similar effects, I am finding it surprisingly hard to make such sites stick on page one. I can't decide whether I might be overoptimising for the keywords (and having too many anchor text backlinks), or actually underoptimising by not really having a wide enough spread of info on the subject on the site! I am leaning towards OVERoptimisation right now and may try to tone it down and see what happens.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by Jason Dittberner

Thanks for sharing. Did you use no follow tag on this outbound link?

Hi Jason,

For now the outbound links are all do follow. I just thought it will look more legit to Google. But now that you've asked I'm going to make a split test and see whether it makes any difference whether I use the no follow tag or not I'll let you know!

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by Andy Yusuf

nice info mate...

how competitive your keywords ?

you said you can rank them within 3 weeks

i'm so surprised

The keywords I use all follow the George Brown's recommendation in Google Sniper. (I am not affiliated in no way with this product, but I highly recommend it).

This means that the keywords have around 4000-6000 exact searches / month and the competition for "keyword" on Google is lower than 100.000

So yes, these are not competitive keywords, it's not difficult to rank for them. However it's easy to make such small experiments just for this reason

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by rinor81

Great post, thanks a lot.

My question is, where do you get/find quality links? Do you buy them from high PR sites? Or come to an arrangement with the webmaster?

I have a couple of sites that ranked high on Google and vanished but I did not have any duplicate content there so it's really frustrating...have no idea what it is and it doesn't look like a dance as well.

Any tips for me?


Good Luck to you all dear friends!

The way I find the sites is by just looking at my competitors. If you'll use Yahoo Site Explorer to check them out you'll see that most of them don't pay for the backlinks. Many use forum profiles, squidoo, blogger, blog commenting, social bookmarking sites etc. - just what everyone else uses. Of course this is only valid for low competition, long tail niches. The situation is completely different as you move higher.

About sites which rank high and then vanish. The only reasons I know are:
1. duplicate content (you don't have to have exactly the same article - it might also be just a poorly rewritten one)
2. you ranked high at first because the site was new, but then time passed, you added no new content and the backlinks you had are actually not enough to rank anywhere too high (this is often the case for websites where you see the date of publishing right before the description)
3. Excessive use of a keyword. This actually happened to me several times. I overused some words and keywords, bolded them or used them in headers too often (too high keyword density). After turning it down a little the site ranked once again A good criterion is to check whether Ezine would accept your article!

Anyway, in my experience Google is great and fast in reconsidering your site. If you remove the thing which wasn't right or change it accordingly you will get reindexed and rank again quite soon

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by imfusa

I have an exact match domain and it is a .biz domain.
I want to say that i got on the first 2 pages on google in 1 day.
That is 24 hours.

Wow! great to hear that Good luck with your site!

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by markowe

We're never going to be able to 'reverse-engineer' the Google algo (apart from anything else there is almost certainly an element of randomness in it for that very reason) but the more we can share our experiences the better picture we will have.

Completely agree

Originally Posted by markowe

Interested (but not surprised) to see EMDs still doing very well. Though I am seeing similar effects, I am finding it surprisingly hard to make such sites stick on page one. I can't decide whether I might be overoptimising for the keywords (and having too many anchor text backlinks), or actually underoptimising by not really having a wide enough spread of info on the subject on the site! I am leaning towards OVERoptimisation right now and may try to tone it down and see what happens.

I hope I'll manage to make them stick on the first page.. anyway all I can do is try out things and see what works.. I find that the bets way to check for overoptimization is see whether Ezine would accept your article for publication I know this is an oversimplistic method, but it sure works for me :P

[GeraldGigerl]

Hey Traian,

looks like a great plan. Right now, we´re also testing the competitors links strategy for multiple sites. Varrying your links is the best thing you can do. YOu just have to be aware of what works and what doesn´t. Getting relevant links is everything and just a few of them can and probably will be enough to rank in the top spots. That´s the concept that you have to get and apply for your own SEO strategy.

Only by testing a method a person can be in the position to judge whether it´s effective or not. If you are never going to try new things, get creative, step out of the old concept which doesn´t seem to work anymore, you won´t move towards spot 1.

Gerald

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by GeraldGigerl

Hey Traian,

looks like a great plan. Right now, we´re also testing the competitors links strategy for multiple sites. Varrying your links is the best thing you can do. YOu just have to be aware of what works and what doesn´t. Getting relevant links is everything and just a few of them can and probably will be enough to rank in the top spots. That´s the concept that you have to get and apply for your own SEO strategy.

Only by testing a method a person can be in the position to judge whether it´s effective or not. If you are never going to try new things, get creative, step out of the old concept which doesn´t seem to work anymore, you won´t move towards spot 1.

Gerald

Hi Gerald

That's so true - varying the links is so important!!

One thing I'd like to add - when you research your competition it's a great idea to apply the 80-20 principle. 20% of their links make 80% of the difference. Most of the backlinks they have are not worth copying. I find that choosing the top 20% (use SEO Quake and Yahoo Site Explorer to sort them by PR, links or Alexa) is the most efficient strategy, at least for me

[GeraldGigerl]

That´s key man! The thing is that your different competitors for different backlinks. I have seen domains ranking on the first spot with less than 20 backlinks for pretty valuable keyword. You have to do the same what the top sites are doing, but you need to do it more.

[Auto Bid]

Rightly said, It is the not that how much you have worked for the website but it that how you have did that. Concentrating on specific tweaks which can yield you result is a wise way to compete with online competitors. In fact at the end SEO is all about a strategy. Which if build properly can make you or will break you.

[Trivum]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

Hi Jason,

For now the outbound links are all do follow. I just thought it will look more legit to Google. But now that you've asked I'm going to make a split test and see whether it makes any difference whether I use the no follow tag or not I'll let you know!

According to Matt Cutts, whether you follow or no-follow a link, it drains the same amount of PR from your site. What a no-follow doesn't do is give PR to that page that you've linked to.

This seems counter-intuitive and frankly, pretty stupid, but as smart as Google is, they still do a number of very stupid things. For one, what this means is that even though you no-follow the links in your comments section if you have a blog, if you have a lot of comments on a post, then that post will lose juice due to all the links that people leave. ... I guess they figure that in some way it will even out because if you have a popular post then it will also attract links, but it's still not the most logical way to do things.

Now, Matt Cutts/Google will simply flat-out lie to webmasters in order to try to control them and get them to be afraid of Google. That said, there seems no reason to lie in this case. It actually looks bad for Google. So this one I assume is true (until it suddenly isn't one day).

[anusales]

Really informative post.

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by traianturcu

Results
1. Exact match domain names have a huge advantage over the competition. Almost all websites (17 out of 18) got indexed in less than 2 days and ranked on places varying from 18 to 68 without any links or content on, just Wordpress installed.

It's great to see people doing experiments, but you have to be really careful about jumping to broad conclusions. In a more controlled experiment, I found the exact opposite of what you're saying here.

Every new site gets a sort of "opposite sandbox" effect, where Google will give a new site a boost for a week or two. Since you only had a generic Wordpress setup on it, the ONLY unique content Google could find on your site was the title. You can't install Wordpress without entering a title for your site, and I'm assuming you put in your keyword as the title. TITLE tags carry a LOT of weight in how Google reads a page, so that coupled with the new bonus for your site is far more likely to be what made your site pop in for that keyword, not the URL.

If you want to do a really controlled experiment on this effect, you'd have to take two or more keyword stuffed URLs and two or more non-keyword stuffed URLs with the exact same content and backlinks and see what happens. I'm 99% sure you'll find the URL has no effect under these conditions.

You state that Matt Cutts flat our lies? Can you please provide ANY hard proof of this? I've found his statements to be very true to my SEO experiments. Sometimes you have to read between the lines to find meaning though. He has stated time and again that Google does not give your URL itself any keyword weight, but when other people link to your site with the URL, the anchor text will have your keywords in it and that DOES have an effect. So example.com with no links would perform exactly the same as keywordstuffed.com. But as soon as you get a link to "keywordstuffed.com", Google sees that link text and uses those keywords. So yeah, keyword stuffed URLs are good, but not for the reason you think.

Just because your experiment didn't match what Matt Cutts said doesn't mean he's a liar. It's far more likely your experiment is lacking in true scientific controls and your results aren't what you think.

When that new site bonus goes away if you haven't done enough good linking your site would drop off the map. This is why people think there is a sandbox effect, when really it's just the removal of the newness effect.

If you want to see my results of my experiment complete with weekly data, check out:
The Great SEO Link Building Service Experiment of 2011

[traianturcu]

I'm definitely going to follow the results of your experiment! It seems really cool!

And yes, I completely agree with yoru point about jumping to conclusions

[delfinparis]

Wow - what a great thread!

I'm curious what vendor you use for the 10 high PR do-follow links. Care to share?

[Trivum]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

You state that Matt Cutts flat our lies? Can you please provide ANY hard proof of this?

Well, it's been awhile since I followed the ins and outs of SEO and Matt Cutts closely, but I can tell you there are a number of examples of Matt Cutts saying one thing and then some very well known internet marketers/seo types such as Shoemoney and Greg Boser offering empirical evidence that it simply isn't true.

I'm sure you can find these examples and more if you care to. They're out there. I've seen them. I can't be arsed to look them up now, however. I have no need to.

[alcymart]

Thank you for sharing. Great info. Take care...

Bernard

[PAULANEALMOONEY]

How do you get your edu and gov links? Just thru comments on edu and gov blogs?

[rbrShorty]

Really nice experiment and nice of you to share the results. Please, keep us updated about the process. Btw, I sent an e-mail with subscription too.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by PAULANEALMOONEY

How do you get your edu and gov links? Just thru comments on edu and gov blogs?

Actually I found that edu/gov blog comments usually don't help that much unless they are on some undiscovered blogs..

In fact what I did is I bought a package of 25 high PR gov/edu/mil wiki's for $17 some time ago They work great!

[faysal969]

Originally Posted by imfusa

I have an exact match domain and it is a .biz domain.
I want to say that i got on the first 2 pages on google in 1 day.
That is 24 hours.

Congratulation for your success. It is inspiring and attractive. Hope your great success in future.

[IM Ash]

Fantastic work dude. The blog network results is quite interesting. I still do thin a network like BMR still offers considerable value and that is mainly due to submitting unique articles.

It would've be great if you added a .info to the mix because there is still alot of controversy regarding that extension.

Thanks for your hard work!

[john smith1]

great info thanks for sharing

[pikeman]

Good tips.

When was the domain TLD comparison done? I read something the other day that suggested that .net worked better for some niches, such as Networking niches. Although that study was far from scientific.

[samuel.johnson]

Interesting.Thanks for the share.

[traianturcu]

Originally Posted by Eleva8

Fantastic work dude. The blog network results is quite interesting. I still do thin a network like BMR still offers considerable value and that is mainly due to submitting unique articles.

It would've be great if you added a .info to the mix because there is still alot of controversy regarding that extension.

Thanks for your hard work!

Yeah, I should have added some info domains too... Especially since I see some info domains ranking really high in this niche. However none higher than 9th or 10th place..

[shiwak224]

This is wonderful stuff which u talk about, But does IP really matter? And How can I link to wiki? I am having problem as i am new at it.. :-/

[seorules]

Hi traianturcu you did share a great tips to all, thumbs up for sharing your successful experiment reading more comments from you is getting more interesting. It is good that they got the idea free from you good luck pal and post more of your successful tips.