Google Acting Strange - inconsistent results based on exact same sites - link building
- SEO |
A couple of weeks ago I started a link building campaign for 10 of my own Amazon affiliate sites.
All the 10 sites were purchased from someone on this forum and have the exact same setup:
- Homepage, 10 review snippets with star rating, read more tag to have a sentence or two visible from each review, optimized for "best product" keyword.
- Best page, 5* 100 word summary of the product with intro and conclusion on the same page. With 5 links to the individual reviews, optimized for "best product" keyword.'
Identical setup on all 10 sites, just different niches.
Now as about the link building:
- All campaigns the exact same amount of links
- Homepage target, 40% brand anchors, 60% money keywords
- Best page target, 100% money keywords.
The homepage money keywords are like "best product", "best products", "product review", "product reviews", "best product 2014", "best product in 2014".
The best page money keywords include the above 6 + some variations with "top rated" "top 5" "2014" included.
Each page received 10 links, so 20 links in total per site. Same type of links, high PR blog posts.
Now the odd part:
- Half of the sites rank for the "best product" keywords with the "best page" URL.
- The other half rank for the "best product" keywords with the "homepage" URL.
It's been 4 weeks since the links are placed.
Few reasons I can come up with:
- some sites in my network are much stronger and the pages that received those dominate
- Google has a preference to rank the page that received links first (however that's a bit odd as all my instruction files are setup in such way that we start with the homepage and after the inner page, however they were all placed in one single day so with indexation time taking into account that seems hardly possible.
- some sites in my network deal with some sort of a penalty and prevent the target page from ranking? sounds highly unlikely to me though as all sites do rank, but always either one page or the other and if it was caused by penalized domains linking to it, then it should have also occured that some sites don't rank at all, statistic wise, and that's not the case, they all rank.
- the homepage has more content then the best pages, although the best pages are better optimized so Google just has a tough time figuring out which page to rank, however then you would think I should have double SERP listings, which is not the case.
Anyone else has some opinions?
All the 10 sites were purchased from someone on this forum and have the exact same setup:
- Homepage, 10 review snippets with star rating, read more tag to have a sentence or two visible from each review, optimized for "best product" keyword.
- Best page, 5* 100 word summary of the product with intro and conclusion on the same page. With 5 links to the individual reviews, optimized for "best product" keyword.'
Identical setup on all 10 sites, just different niches.
Now as about the link building:
- All campaigns the exact same amount of links
- Homepage target, 40% brand anchors, 60% money keywords
- Best page target, 100% money keywords.
The homepage money keywords are like "best product", "best products", "product review", "product reviews", "best product 2014", "best product in 2014".
The best page money keywords include the above 6 + some variations with "top rated" "top 5" "2014" included.
Each page received 10 links, so 20 links in total per site. Same type of links, high PR blog posts.
Now the odd part:
- Half of the sites rank for the "best product" keywords with the "best page" URL.
- The other half rank for the "best product" keywords with the "homepage" URL.
It's been 4 weeks since the links are placed.
Few reasons I can come up with:
- some sites in my network are much stronger and the pages that received those dominate
- Google has a preference to rank the page that received links first (however that's a bit odd as all my instruction files are setup in such way that we start with the homepage and after the inner page, however they were all placed in one single day so with indexation time taking into account that seems hardly possible.
- some sites in my network deal with some sort of a penalty and prevent the target page from ranking? sounds highly unlikely to me though as all sites do rank, but always either one page or the other and if it was caused by penalized domains linking to it, then it should have also occured that some sites don't rank at all, statistic wise, and that's not the case, they all rank.
- the homepage has more content then the best pages, although the best pages are better optimized so Google just has a tough time figuring out which page to rank, however then you would think I should have double SERP listings, which is not the case.
Anyone else has some opinions?
If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.