How I received 3000 visits a day (organic) without any SEO - True story

55 replies
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Hi all,

This is my first post in this forum.
Back to 2013 I've created a french website and didn't performed any kind of SEO techniques, the only thing I did was to pay a freelance writer and I published 460 high quality unique articles (300 to 400 words each) in 2 months.
The resulat was amazing: 3000 unique visitors a day 92% from google, and I was ranked in the first page for hundreds of keywords.

My website was penalized by google updates and the trafic dropped to 1500 visits a day which is still excellent but I've made a very stupid move and sold the website, in that time I never heard about clickbank and affiliation, I only knew adsense. I tried to purchase the website but the price is expensive, but I accessed to the analytics and after 2 years and no updates since 2013 the website is still receiving 1000 to 2000 visits a day !

So my question: Do you think that using only good and massive content is enough to get trafic these days with all the new google updates? Do you have similar experiences?

Thanks
Walid
#day #organic #seo #story #true #visits
  • Profile picture of the author patco
    Content is the most important step, so YES! I agree you can get a good amount of traffic only with Content, but to be #1 for a strong keyword, you should do SEO too!!
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  • Profile picture of the author nmwf
    I heard a story similar to yours (minus the Google penalty) in which a fellow (who was here, in fact) claimed success through content development alone.

    Turns out the guy was running an encyclopedic-type website that stored hundreds of thousands of pages. It also took years to develop.

    So I guess the answer is yes as long as your content is interesting enough.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

    So my question: Do you think that using only good and massive content is enough to get trafic these days with all the new google updates?
    That only ever happened on Field of Dreams (If you build it, he will come.).
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      That only ever happened on Field of Dreams (If you build it, he will come.).
      I am going to replicate what i exactly did in 2013 with 1000 article this time, and I will let you what happened, I really hope you are wrong because the same website is still receiving a lot of trafic while the guy who purachased it didn't added a single article to it since 2013.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

        I am going to replicate what i exactly did in 2013 with 1000 article this time, and I will let you what happened, I really hope you are wrong because the same website is still receiving a lot of trafic while the guy who purachased it didn't added a single article to it since 2013.
        Your not going to rank any pages in Google SERPs for half way competitive keywords unless you or someone else builds decent backlinks.

        If your keyword is fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus, sure you'll rank without backlinks. Matter of fact this forum thread will rank for that keyword shortly since no other person in the world cares about the keyword.
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        • Profile picture of the author markbyrne
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          If your keyword is fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus, sure you'll rank without backlinks. Matter of fact this forum thread will rank for that keyword shortly since no other person in the world cares about the keyword.
          I'm pretty sure Google will not rank this now, out of pure spite.
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          • Profile picture of the author jamesfreddyc
            Originally Posted by markbyrne View Post

            I'm pretty sure Google will not rank this now, out of pure spite.
            It's still #1

            LOL
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        • Profile picture of the author deezn
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          Your not going to rank any pages in Google SERPs for half way competitive keywords unless you or someone else builds decent backlinks.

          If your keyword is fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus, sure you'll rank without backlinks. Matter of fact this forum thread will rank for that keyword shortly since no other person in the world cares about the keyword.
          Haha, It is.
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        • Profile picture of the author Signal512
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          Your not going to rank any pages in Google SERPs for half way competitive keywords unless you or someone else builds decent backlinks.

          If your keyword is fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus, sure you'll rank without backlinks. Matter of fact this forum thread will rank for that keyword shortly since no other person in the world cares about the keyword.
          I just HAD to check....

          Sure thing: this term ranks number 1....

          Boom...LoL
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  • Profile picture of the author surfer30
    I don't know why you seel your websites while they earn you good money even from adsense
    never sell a business that earns you even small pennies online.
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Absolutely agree with surfer30, it was a very stupid move from my side due to frustration when my website was penalized by google.
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  • Profile picture of the author AntonioSeegars1
    [DELETED]
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by AntonioSeegars1 View Post

      I think it's possible for a person to do this if they are inside of a niche that nobody else is trying to dominate by building an authority site for. There's an Internet marketer who did this same thing with a space site.
      The niche was related to jobs and cover letters which is a very competitive niche even in french language, I published 460 cover unique cover letters in 2 months, besides I dont think there are niches where you can receive 3000 visits a day with no competition.
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  • Profile picture of the author Slade556
    Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

    I published 460 high quality unique articles (300 to 400 words each) in 2 months.
    This IS SEO, if you think about it, writing good quality content, with well targeted keywords is actually on page SEO and yes, it's very possible that just by publishing some very well written articles, a website can get good traffic!
    But, can you imagine what doing some SEO work on your site as well might do to it? Your traffic could double, triple... you would be so much more successful if you invest some time in doing SEO work as well!
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  • Profile picture of the author winsoar
    One of my sites got about 300 visits the other day from reddit. When I tried to find the link I couldn't see it..
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  • Profile picture of the author JensSteyaert
    Yeah sure but not with 300-400 word articles. Perhaps because the French market isn't so crowded but usually the longer articles rank for the majority of keywords.

    It could be another reason too your articles ranked, perhaps some went viral and got shared a lot, which is a very important metric these days.
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  • Profile picture of the author erikathomson
    It is possible to get traffic only through the unique content, because content is a king of SEO.
    Your content must be unique, fresh and user-friendly that people love to read.
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  • Profile picture of the author somyasharma
    Yes, I'm fully agree with you, Content is the main important factor than SEO. If you share informative and unique content on your website, then it effects positively for your website. You will get a higher traffic via only sharable and informative content creation.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kalambur
    What about backlinks? I mean, natural backlinks.
    Did this website have links from social media, blogs, other websites?
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  • Profile picture of the author wgrodgers
    Absolutely. Content can without a doubt draw traffic to a website. As long as it's good quality content. 300-400 word articles alone is probably not as good as throwing in at least 20% quality 1000+ word articles to appease the Google monster.

    Combine that with building a list of fans and letting them know each time you post new content while occasionally offering premium content and products and you'll have yourself a profitable business. I believe everything starts from content and expands from there... so yes this is a very good business model.

    Too bad you sold the site but there's no reason you can't start up another one and duplicate the process... good luck to you.

    Thanks for sharing your story,
    Will
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  • Profile picture of the author johnben1444
    You can still achieve the same result if your keywords have no competition. You may want to continue dealing on a regional market. It's pretty much easier.
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by johnben1444 View Post

      You can still achieve the same result if your keywords have no competition. You may want to continue dealing on a regional market. It's pretty much easier.
      Job related niches are very crowded in all languages, for the main keyword I was ranked for in the first google page before I was penalized has 9,470,000 pages with "exact search"
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      • Profile picture of the author moimeme
        Thanks to all of you for your comments, I am replicating the process now, and believe me the niche is very crowded (9,470,000 pages for "Main keyword" in google search), I am already at 30 articles in a week, I will keep you informed about the results if any
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  • Profile picture of the author moimeme
    Originally Posted by JensSteyaert View Post

    Yeah sure but not with 300-400 word articles. Perhaps because the French market isn't so crowded but usually the longer articles rank for the majority of keywords.

    It could be another reason too your articles ranked, perhaps some went viral and got shared a lot, which is a very important metric these days.
    No articles went viral, none of them was shared even once, besides there is no social buttons on the articles

    Originally Posted by Kalambur View Post

    What about backlinks? I mean, natural backlinks.
    Did this website have links from social media, blogs, other websites?
    There is no natural backlinks, only some poor quality backlinks from link exchange websites (5-10), but yes the website has a facebook page, not very active, there is no new publications in it since 2013.
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  • Profile picture of the author bryan2015
    Yes,quality content is everything .We can get ranked and traffic easily with unique contents.
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  • Profile picture of the author multiplecloud
    I'm surprised that why you got penalty since you said that you do not do seo. Is there all Good content or some spam can rank? Could you pls share?
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by multiplecloud View Post

      I'm surprised that why you got penalty since you said that you do not do seo. Is there all Good content or some spam can rank? Could you pls share?
      My interpretation and it could be wrong: I was penalized for the main keyword because my domain was an (almost) exact match to the keyword, in that time EMD's were penalized by google. I tried to solve the issue by buying a new domain and rediect it with 301, google considered the redirection and transfered the page rank of the 1st domain to the new domain but didn't restored the ranking.
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      • Profile picture of the author moimeme
        Quick question: what if I was ranked because the update frequency in my website was so high that google considered me as an authority? publishing 460 quality unique articles in 2 months is equivalent to almost 8 articles a day...is that possible?
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        • Profile picture of the author multiplecloud
          Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

          Quick question: what if I was ranked because the update frequency in my website was so high that google considered me as an authority? publishing 460 quality unique articles in 2 months is equivalent to almost 8 articles a day...is that possible?
          IMO
          it may if your content are really good.
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  • Profile picture of the author msabihj
    Interesting - subscribed.

    moimeme do share the progress of your new blog.
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  • Profile picture of the author Adeel Sami
    Content is the most valuable aspect. As you said it was a competitive niche and as Google loves quality content; most possible your all or most articles got indexed and got into the radars of people searching on Google and finding your articles on first pages.

    Content can do real better!
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  • Profile picture of the author AndresNWD
    I am interested in knowing how was your interlinking. If you really covered some subjects extensively and you had a nice interlinking, it could be the reason.
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  • Profile picture of the author guptadeepak2353
    [DELETED]
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  • Profile picture of the author artman77
    How could your website get penalized by Google when you are not doing any SEO?
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  • Profile picture of the author ben184
    I really want to know why your website was penalize by google since your are not using SEO do your content spam.




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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Lee
    Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

    Quick question: what if I was ranked because the update frequency in my website was so high that google considered me as an authority? publishing 460 quality unique articles in 2 months is equivalent to almost 8 articles a day...is that possible?
    It's not that easy... and there are people posting hundreds of articles a day thinking... just a few cents per article and it'll add up.... and getting nowhere.

    What you did is not repeatable. You don't know why it happened, you didn't mention anything about your domain, or anything about your niche.
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by Chris Lee View Post

      It's not that easy... and there are people posting hundreds of articles a day thinking... just a few cents per article and it'll add up.... and getting nowhere.

      What you did is not repeatable. You don't know why it happened, you didn't mention anything about your domain, or anything about your niche.

      Yes it is true, I really don't know what happened, this is why I shared this post to see if there are similar experiences.

      I cannot say say whether it is repeatable or not, if it worked in 2013 and the website is still receiving decent trafic, why not it shouldn't work again?

      The niche is related to jobs and covers letters and resumes, very crowded niche even in french language.

      Forgot to mention that the articles were really good unique articles, I read them one by one and checked if they were unique or not sometimes using copyscape and sometimes just by copy-paste in google.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rajamanickam
    I can say SEO = CONTENT
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  • Profile picture of the author AyeZee33
    Unfortunately for me my sites are getting little traffic because I don't have enough content. But you wouldn't know it from my Analytics. Referral spam has crippled my sites.

    Hopefully your numbers are legit and not spam
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  • Profile picture of the author workhomeplanet
    I think the French market doesn't have that much competition if I compare with the English market, so if you focus on French articles with good content, it should work well... and also create youtube videos that can generate more traffic to your blog...
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  • Profile picture of the author rkahn
    Originally Posted by moimeme View Post

    Hi all,

    This is my first post in this forum.
    Back to 2013 I've created a french website and didn't performed any kind of SEO techniques, the only thing I did was to pay a freelance writer and I published 460 high quality unique articles (300 to 400 words each) in 2 months.
    The resulat was amazing: 3000 unique visitors a day 92% from google, and I was ranked in the first page for hundreds of keywords.

    My website was penalized by google updates and the trafic dropped to 1500 visits a day which is still excellent but I've made a very stupid move and sold the website, in that time I never heard about clickbank and affiliation, I only knew adsense. I tried to purchase the website but the price is expensive, but I accessed to the analytics and after 2 years and no updates since 2013 the website is still receiving 1000 to 2000 visits a day !

    So my question: Do you think that using only good and massive content is enough to get trafic these days with all the new google updates? Do you have similar experiences?

    Thanks
    Walid
    Thanks for this very useful post/query. I'm a writer and there couldn't be more promising news : )

    Did you get these articles posted to the site or elsewhere for maybe offline promotion?

    How did you use the content? I'm looking for more ideas on how I can utilize my writing skills to generate decent and steady income streams...and I'm in no rush, but it's important for me to know that I'm headed in the right direction.

    If someone can point to useful links that answer my query in more detail, I would be truly indebted.

    Cheers to fellow warriors

    To better days ahead : )
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  • Profile picture of the author Knight_Rider
    Make sure your all articles would unique , if yes google love more.
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  • Profile picture of the author Webzest
    Hi everyone!
    Thanks for sharing your views. I am also very new at this platform. In my experience I found only unique or manual content is the appropriate key especially when you have all Google animals so active. Yes! Unique content can play a vital role in escalating any site either its using for back-linking like web 0.2 of directly for site. Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author thumbsup
    If you feel you are the only one who sold a good doing website, I can tell you I did same 2 years ago. I actually never know that other people buy websites too. I though I have purchased hosting, and now I've to pay every year to renew it, and that was expensive for me at that time. SO I just bumped it. Never renewed, and it got de-listed soon from index. It was a railway information related website where so many people would come for information.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andrew Wilson
    We used to run a content driven site monetised solely by Adsense. Over the course of 4 years we grew from zero income to around $6000 per month with a database of articles that had grown to around 250,000 - almost all was user generated and thus had no cost to us. For reasons unconnected with any Google updates we lost all that traffic and revenue when the Adsense team closed our account.

    We rebuilt the site but we got no Google love.Content was being added automatically but direct revenues were zero. After several years, indeed just a few months ago, I noticed that we were getting significant traffic, up from almost zero to over 1000 uniques per day with over 50,000 full content pages. I sat down with my colleagues and we brainstormed how to take advantage of the situation. We reached several conclusions, the first was that we were going to, henceforth, place only content specifically written for the site, that each article would have relevant video (not YouTube rubbish) and good quality stock images.

    We ran some tests and found that the new content was working for us and having an umbrella effect upon the rest of the site. So indexation was much greater, speed of indexing was down from days (if ever) to just minutes and traffic was increasing.

    Emboldened by this result I asked Google if they would reopen my Adsense account - they got back to me and said they couldn't find the account and so I set up a new account using the site as the reference. Almost immediately we were approved.

    We are now seeing revenues from the site but we have not done much optimisation as we are upgrading the whole platform, however we are already seeing an improvement in the quality and type of ads being displayed and this is impacting the CTR and thus revenue per visitor.

    In the 'good old days' we did very little linkbuilding, concentrating upon good quality content. That worked pretty well for us, and the same intent remains - not to say that we will do nothing and over the ten years the site has been up we have a pretty strong link profile.

    So, from what I know I can say that having a content driven site with little active link building can be effective but the results are not instant and the costs are not insignificant. However, although our content costs have gone up considerably it is my reckoning that the money we do not spend on link building subsidises our content costs and the content unlike most backlinks has an indefinite lifespan! However there is a big 'gotcha', the cost of content.

    Our content costs are down to similar levels to those enjoyed by large content farms - but I think we have better quality content on our new style pages. The payback period is quite long given that each page has to receive several dozen clicks just to pay the costs of the content. We currently have almost 60,000 article pages. To start from scratch using our current standards would be almost impossible and expecting any real return from a micro site with only a few hundred pages is, IMHO, unrealistic.
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  • Profile picture of the author advent
    Content is King, and we all do seo for web pages for their content. Google to rank Webpages by their content related to their keywords.

    450+ articles. Definitely you did a amazing job but you failed to keep that. xD

    Kind Regards.
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  • Profile picture of the author dragees
    This is a very good technique. Can you tell us how much it costed the 460 articles ???
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by AndresNWD View Post

      I am interested in knowing how was your interlinking. If you really covered some subjects extensively and you had a nice interlinking, it could be the reason.
      It was a joomla website, I added a module that shows related articles in the same category at the end of each article, that is all the interlinking I did, if you call it interlinking.

      Originally Posted by artman77 View Post

      How could your website get penalized by Google when you are not doing any SEO?
      Originally Posted by ben184 View Post

      I really want to know why your website was penalize by google since your are not using SEO do your content spam.

      Lose weight in 3 Weeks... With the 3 Weeks Diet plan system

      Here< www.benuzoma2014.wordpress.com
      My opinion and it may be worong: I was penalized for the main keyword because my domain was an (almost) exact match to the keyword, in that time EMD's were penalized by google. I tried to solve the issue by buying a new domain and rediect it with 301, google considered the redirection and transfered the page rank of the 1st domain to the new domain but didn't restored the ranking. Before the penalty the site received 3000 unique visits a day.

      Originally Posted by workhomeplanet View Post

      I think the French market doesn't have that much competition if I compare with the English market, so if you focus on French articles with good content, it should work well... and also create youtube videos that can generate more traffic to your blog...
      Yes this is true.

      Originally Posted by rkahn View Post

      Thanks for this very useful post/query. I'm a writer and there couldn't be more promising news : )

      Did you get these articles posted to the site or elsewhere for maybe offline promotion?

      How did you use the content? I'm looking for more ideas on how I can utilize my writing skills to generate decent and steady income streams...and I'm in no rush, but it's important for me to know that I'm headed in the right direction.

      If someone can point to useful links that answer my query in more detail, I would be truly indebted.

      Cheers to fellow warriors

      To better days ahead : )
      The only way I used the articles was to publish them randomly on the website, sometimes it took a weekend to publish 20-30 articles, sometimes I published them regularly each day.

      Originally Posted by Andrew Wilson View Post

      We used to run a content driven site monetised solely by Adsense. Over the course of 4 years we grew from zero income to around $6000 per month with a database of articles that had grown to around 250,000 - almost all was user generated and thus had no cost to us. For reasons unconnected with any Google updates we lost all that traffic and revenue when the Adsense team closed our account.

      We rebuilt the site but we got no Google love.Content was being added automatically but direct revenues were zero. After several years, indeed just a few months ago, I noticed that we were getting significant traffic, up from almost zero to over 1000 uniques per day with over 50,000 full content pages. I sat down with my colleagues and we brainstormed how to take advantage of the situation. We reached several conclusions, the first was that we were going to, henceforth, place only content specifically written for the site, that each article would have relevant video (not YouTube rubbish) and good quality stock images.

      We ran some tests and found that the new content was working for us and having an umbrella effect upon the rest of the site. So indexation was much greater, speed of indexing was down from days (if ever) to just minutes and traffic was increasing.

      Emboldened by this result I asked Google if they would reopen my Adsense account - they got back to me and said they couldn't find the account and so I set up a new account using the site as the reference. Almost immediately we were approved.

      We are now seeing revenues from the site but we have not done much optimisation as we are upgrading the whole platform, however we are already seeing an improvement in the quality and type of ads being displayed and this is impacting the CTR and thus revenue per visitor.

      In the 'good old days' we did very little linkbuilding, concentrating upon good quality content. That worked pretty well for us, and the same intent remains - not to say that we will do nothing and over the ten years the site has been up we have a pretty strong link profile.

      So, from what I know I can say that having a content driven site with little active link building can be effective but the results are not instant and the costs are not insignificant. However, although our content costs have gone up considerably it is my reckoning that the money we do not spend on link building subsidises our content costs and the content unlike most backlinks has an indefinite lifespan! However there is a big 'gotcha', the cost of content.

      Our content costs are down to similar levels to those enjoyed by large content farms - but I think we have better quality content on our new style pages. The payback period is quite long given that each page has to receive several dozen clicks just to pay the costs of the content. We currently have almost 60,000 article pages. To start from scratch using our current standards would be almost impossible and expecting any real return from a micro site with only a few hundred pages is, IMHO, unrealistic.
      Thanks for this post, it looks like this method could give good results after all.

      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      Your not going to rank any pages in Google SERPs for half way competitive keywords unless you or someone else builds decent backlinks.

      If your keyword is fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus, sure you'll rank without backlinks. Matter of fact this forum thread will rank for that keyword shortly since no other person in the world cares about the keyword.
      See post above

      Originally Posted by dragees View Post

      This is a very good technique. Can you tell us how much it costed the 460 articles ???
      It costs me like 1000 dollars, but I found a very good, even excellent french writer at very low cost. French freelancers are not as expensive as english freelancers.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andrew Wilson
    Moimeme, actually, I am encouraged that this worked for you in 2013. We are still on a path back to where we were years ago. Early results have been encouraging.

    There's several things that we learned over the years:
    1) Google, in particular, hates on artificial link building - that's not to say it should not be done though.
    2) Google's goal is to discover and ascribe value to content without the use of backlinks. They are trying to move away from the backlink and PageRank paradigm they invented almost 20 years ago.
    3) The 'if you build it they will come' paradigm was true back in the mid oughties and is increasingly true today - as long as one can offer what people want to see.
    4) If relying upon Adsense and other ad forms then one needs a HUUUUUUGE amount of content in order to have a decent chance of getting enough traffic across the site to give an economically viable output. That means that we will be investing in content on an ongoing basis and then allocating a fixed proportion of gross revenue to content creation.

    In addition we are rebuilding our main site with a view to enabling good quality user generated content. We already feature curated video and images with our commissioned written content. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling out our 'Groups' functionality giving people the opportunity to set up and run their own private, public and semi-private areas within the main site where they can use our content and add their own within blogs, forums, video and audio libraries using embedded and our own resources.

    The goal has to be to maximise the number of viable content pages, synergise content by re-using it across the property and reduce costs by virtue of that re-use.

    The thing to remember is that with enough content that the low traffic 'long tails' will form most of the traffic, but that when that comes one will find oneself climbing up the tail. For example one might get ALL the search traffic for: fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus. The one will start getting slightly more people searching on wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus then wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus and eventually to the high value term unicorn asparagus.

    I recall that among our articles we had one about Cisco Training Certification that went viral. God knows why, the article was not exclusive to us, but after being featured on host of sites, including CNN we started to see increased traffic to all of our computer training content as we climbed the tail from long to short.
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    • Profile picture of the author moimeme
      Originally Posted by Andrew Wilson View Post

      Moimeme, actually, I am encouraged that this worked for you in 2013. We are still on a path back to where we were years ago. Early results have been encouraging.

      There's several things that we learned over the years:
      1) Google, in particular, hates on artificial link building - that's not to say it should not be done though.
      2) Google's goal is to discover and ascribe value to content without the use of backlinks. They are trying to move away from the backlink and PageRank paradigm they invented almost 20 years ago.
      3) The 'if you build it they will come' paradigm was true back in the mid oughties and is increasingly true today - as long as one can offer what people want to see.
      4) If relying upon Adsense and other ad forms then one needs a HUUUUUUGE amount of content in order to have a decent chance of getting enough traffic across the site to give an economically viable output. That means that we will be investing in content on an ongoing basis and then allocating a fixed proportion of gross revenue to content creation.

      In addition we are rebuilding our main site with a view to enabling good quality user generated content. We already feature curated video and images with our commissioned written content. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling out our 'Groups' functionality giving people the opportunity to set up and run their own private, public and semi-private areas within the main site where they can use our content and add their own within blogs, forums, video and audio libraries using embedded and our own resources.

      The goal has to be to maximise the number of viable content pages, synergise content by re-using it across the property and reduce costs by virtue of that re-use.

      The thing to remember is that with enough content that the low traffic 'long tails' will form most of the traffic, but that when that comes one will find oneself climbing up the tail. For example one might get ALL the search traffic for: fuzzy wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus. The one will start getting slightly more people searching on wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus then wiffle ball bat unicorn asparagus and eventually to the high value term unicorn asparagus.

      I recall that among our articles we had one about Cisco Training Certification that went viral. God knows why, the article was not exclusive to us, but after being featured on host of sites, including CNN we started to see increased traffic to all of our computer training content as we climbed the tail from long to short.

      It makes sense that google ultimate objective would be to ignore backlinks or at least decrease their weight for ranking a website because there will be always artifical links and they will always alter the results, meaning that the first result is not necessarly the best which is against google objective.

      Your project sounds very promising, thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts, it is encouraging, I will keep you updated about the results for my website, I am already at 30 articles published, planning to reach 1000 articles this year...in all cases I think that the website wil be ranked first for hundreds of long tail keywords as you said, this time I will also introduce some affliation links and adsense to compensate the expences

      Good luck
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  • Profile picture of the author Ascended
    I think the whole system favors those who pay $ for advertising. The internet was not like that even as recently as 5-10 years ago.
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    • Profile picture of the author Andrew Wilson
      Originally Posted by Ascended View Post

      I think the whole system favors those who pay $ for advertising. The internet was not like that even as recently as 5-10 years ago.
      We ran some experiments using Outbrain (One of the providers of those little boxes with pics and headlines and labelled 'Seen on the Web' seen all over the Internets these days).

      When we tweaked our headlines and images we got quite inexpensive clicks but frankly the cost was not economic for us to use all the time. We got some really good insights into headline writing though.

      I agree that Google wants us to pay for advertising, it is similar to how we used to be in the newspaper biz lots of years ago. We called the classified ads (Adwords equivalent in print media) 'Paid News'. Often people wanted to get into the paper for free and the editorial department had the job of making sure that people who should have been advertising did not get free editorial space. I think that in the long term Google (and others) will seek to raise the cost of organic SEO to the point where pound for pound/dollar for dollar the cost of an Adwords campaign is about the same as an equally effective organic search campaign. The thing is though that Google depends upon webmasters and content providers to provide the content that fills the search engines. That's why good content is ever more important. We don't commission 'filler' or 'SEO' content. EVERY article we commission has to have clear points of learning OR tell a story that creates an emotional connection.
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  • Profile picture of the author wayofsucess
    Content is the most important step
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  • Profile picture of the author anwar001
    A lot of people, after reading such posts, will think that if they just put up 100-300 articles on their site, the sites would start receiving lot of traffic and make them good money. However I think more than the number of articles, their quality is important.

    Even if you have 50 good articles which teach people something useful and which serve some purpose and stand out from hundreds of other similar articles in some way or the other, you might get decent response from your site readers. They may share your articles with others which can help in building backlinks and getting traffic to your site naturally.

    So the articles have to serve some purpose and should really teach something useful from the end-user point of view. It won't be helpful in long term success if you just pay $5 a pop to get 100 odd articles written and put them all on the site.
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  • Profile picture of the author lovethegreen906
    Yes, Content is always kind for website ranking and traffic. You just need to post 2 to 3 article in a week after some month you can see amazing traffic on your site and many keyword will rank on google.
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