Can Crappy Links From Scraper Sites Save You?
- SEO |
Let me first say that I had 25+ of my own Amazon affiliate sites tank during Penguin 3.0
I also have a client with 8 or so Amazon affiliate sites, half of them tanked as well.
In total 5 sites didn't tank at all.
Site 1: (my own)
Received very few links, I think we messed up somewhere with the scheduling of these links. This site's rankings increased further (quite amazing with so few links but well, the numbers prove it). Ranking at #6 for all main keywords for a combined 6k exact searches for a well converting product, site makes about $500/month now based on 15 pages of content and 10 PR3/PR4 blog posts, can't complain about that one. It didn't use any money keyword anchors btw, only URL / domain name / generic ones. Imo it shouldn't rank that high but well.
Sites 2-5:
These sites received links from 90+ domains from me, that customer always places large customized orders.
He does a great deal of anchor diversity, to the degree that he hardly ever uses his main target keyword (in fact only once and sometimes not at all from what I've seen).
He lets me link to tons of pages, where he applies the rule of 60 / 40, homepage vs inner pages and links to maybe 15 pages in total, some receive 1 link, other receive 2 links, his categories receive let's say 5-10 links and so on.
These orders of 90 links are divided like this:
- 60 roll off posts from my old PR3/PR4 network where we link out to 100;s of topics
- 10 Diverse sites (different styled sites like press release, bookmarks, directories etc)
- 10 Relevant sites (though very braod relevant and 5 different CMS)
- 10 perm homepage links on the typical PR3/PR4 network.
So 70 of these links are in fact quite crappy, though on strong domains so they do pass a ton of juice.
So why didn't these 4 sites tank while the other 4 did tank?
For that I had to check his backlink profile to see if there was anything else he did himself that I wasn't aware of.
Let me say in between that one of these sites ranks for a very competitive search term (in terms of Amazon niches), and in the top 3. When I used to rank at #9 in that niche I used to make $300/month. With him in the top 3 I expect him to make thousands a month from that site. But that's just one of them.
Okay I'm drifting off, but just to show you we're not talking about rankings for some lame keywords, so if links would be devalued he would definitely drop in rankings.
So back to checking his backlink profile:
And there I saw that each of the non tanked domains had links from hyper relevant domains, and not just 1 link, no a dozen or so links pointed at different pages of his site.
When I asked the buyer about those links he told me didn't build these but that they were pretty common for him to get when he ranked at the top of Google. Those scraper site links resulted in a total of about 150 hyper relevant links per money site from about 10 domains in total that were heavy keyword rich, for example if you're in a niche named lawn mowers he got links from sites named bestlawnmowersabc.com and such and those scraper sites had 100's if not 1000's of pages linking to all type of authority sites (probably they put a filter to only scrape from the top 3 results or something).
All 4 of the survived sites had in the range of 100-200 of such scraper site links
What about the other 4 sites that did tank?
Those sites were a mix of more recent sites that didn't achieve top positions yet and some were build earlier and never achieved top 3 positions but still decent money makers with plenty of keywords in the top 10. None of these sites received any scraper links due to the positions they ranked on and they all tanked.
Before we draw a conclusion
When I look at other clients of mine the same trend shows up, the ones that didn't tank have quite a few relevant links (though not from scraper sites) as it are complete different niches that don't get scraped much really.
And the sites that did tank only had links from my network, same like my own Amazon sites that only had links from my network and that never ranked top 3 as I was way too passive with ranking them, most hovered around bottom page one, top page two.
Not a single exception that broke this rule and we're talking about quite a significant sample of 100+ sites here.
Conclusion
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that relevant links saved sites from tanking.
You can't solely rely on public blog network sites anymore that are shared with tons of people.
Others have already warned for that a long time but more from the perspective of deindex risks, which are in fact small when you host it properly but that aside, now with Penguin 3.0 it automatically gets you penalized without any need of deindexation so be warned if you solely rely on such links.
I also have a client with 8 or so Amazon affiliate sites, half of them tanked as well.
In total 5 sites didn't tank at all.
Site 1: (my own)
Received very few links, I think we messed up somewhere with the scheduling of these links. This site's rankings increased further (quite amazing with so few links but well, the numbers prove it). Ranking at #6 for all main keywords for a combined 6k exact searches for a well converting product, site makes about $500/month now based on 15 pages of content and 10 PR3/PR4 blog posts, can't complain about that one. It didn't use any money keyword anchors btw, only URL / domain name / generic ones. Imo it shouldn't rank that high but well.
Sites 2-5:
These sites received links from 90+ domains from me, that customer always places large customized orders.
He does a great deal of anchor diversity, to the degree that he hardly ever uses his main target keyword (in fact only once and sometimes not at all from what I've seen).
He lets me link to tons of pages, where he applies the rule of 60 / 40, homepage vs inner pages and links to maybe 15 pages in total, some receive 1 link, other receive 2 links, his categories receive let's say 5-10 links and so on.
These orders of 90 links are divided like this:
- 60 roll off posts from my old PR3/PR4 network where we link out to 100;s of topics
- 10 Diverse sites (different styled sites like press release, bookmarks, directories etc)
- 10 Relevant sites (though very braod relevant and 5 different CMS)
- 10 perm homepage links on the typical PR3/PR4 network.
So 70 of these links are in fact quite crappy, though on strong domains so they do pass a ton of juice.
So why didn't these 4 sites tank while the other 4 did tank?
For that I had to check his backlink profile to see if there was anything else he did himself that I wasn't aware of.
Let me say in between that one of these sites ranks for a very competitive search term (in terms of Amazon niches), and in the top 3. When I used to rank at #9 in that niche I used to make $300/month. With him in the top 3 I expect him to make thousands a month from that site. But that's just one of them.
Okay I'm drifting off, but just to show you we're not talking about rankings for some lame keywords, so if links would be devalued he would definitely drop in rankings.
So back to checking his backlink profile:
And there I saw that each of the non tanked domains had links from hyper relevant domains, and not just 1 link, no a dozen or so links pointed at different pages of his site.
When I asked the buyer about those links he told me didn't build these but that they were pretty common for him to get when he ranked at the top of Google. Those scraper site links resulted in a total of about 150 hyper relevant links per money site from about 10 domains in total that were heavy keyword rich, for example if you're in a niche named lawn mowers he got links from sites named bestlawnmowersabc.com and such and those scraper sites had 100's if not 1000's of pages linking to all type of authority sites (probably they put a filter to only scrape from the top 3 results or something).
All 4 of the survived sites had in the range of 100-200 of such scraper site links
What about the other 4 sites that did tank?
Those sites were a mix of more recent sites that didn't achieve top positions yet and some were build earlier and never achieved top 3 positions but still decent money makers with plenty of keywords in the top 10. None of these sites received any scraper links due to the positions they ranked on and they all tanked.
Before we draw a conclusion
When I look at other clients of mine the same trend shows up, the ones that didn't tank have quite a few relevant links (though not from scraper sites) as it are complete different niches that don't get scraped much really.
And the sites that did tank only had links from my network, same like my own Amazon sites that only had links from my network and that never ranked top 3 as I was way too passive with ranking them, most hovered around bottom page one, top page two.
Not a single exception that broke this rule and we're talking about quite a significant sample of 100+ sites here.
Conclusion
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that relevant links saved sites from tanking.
You can't solely rely on public blog network sites anymore that are shared with tons of people.
Others have already warned for that a long time but more from the perspective of deindex risks, which are in fact small when you host it properly but that aside, now with Penguin 3.0 it automatically gets you penalized without any need of deindexation so be warned if you solely rely on such links.
-
nik0 Banned-
Thanks
{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[9639067].message }} -