The last site I ranked on the first page of G held position #5 for a few weeks right before penquin. According to serp attacks, the key phrase rating was 75-extremely difficult to rank (not sure how accurate this is). The site was 55 days old when it first appeared on the first page. I followed most of the white hat strategies that a lot of forum members are currently discussing post penguin. I had manually posted original articles to a lot of web 2.0s with backlinks to my home page and interior pages, and yes, I did mix up the anchor text. I wish I would have just stuck to this plan........but nooooo. I had also outsourced some article submission campaigns. These were done with, you guessed it, manually spun articles, then software submitted to thousands of article directories. I feel these and other outsourced backlinks were the cause of my site getting slapped. The main reason being, that it is hard to have any control over outsourced backlinks. Especially links that were once indexed and now the pages they were on return 404 errors.

Enough of the past, lets move on. I set up another site for the purpose of ranking on page one again. The phrase I am targeting is 'fl lotto'. Serp attacks ranks this at 11-very easy (we'll see). Of course, the site has very little chance of ranking #1 because of the authority of the Florida lottery webpage. Why am I telling you the phrase I am targeting? Because, I believe, after the new updates, seo is going to involve a lot of manual labor to rank on page one. If someone else wants to try and rank this term, please do. Just make sure you post all of your methods here, so we can compare notes and learn from each other.

I will use this thread to track my progress as the site 'hopefully' moves up in rank. Since I'm just starting out again, there will not be a lot of activity here, other than on going discussions. I will use similar methods as before, except for the outsourcing. In a nut shell, my goal is to post 5 original articles to site site per week with no internal linking. In the beginning, I will only use my own personal bookmark accounts to get backlinks to each post and the home page. After a few weeks, I will start submitting original articles to web 2.0s. Two backlinks to the site, two images, and a youtube video imbedded. This is supposed to give the article more authority from what I have read in another thread. Not sure what methods I will use to backlink to these articles.

Day 1 - Registered an EMD at godaddy. Set up a new blog at blogger and set the new domain to redirect to the blog url. Is it better to use google's blog platform? Maybe, maybe not. Should I have just used the normal blogger url? Not sure.

Day 3 - Started posting articles to site. Each one will have an image embedded.
-Set number of posts to 5 per page.
-Also ordered more articles. Titles and content will be based on related long tail key phrases.

Day 4 - Placed these items in right sidebar: A poll, Florida lottery gadget, and a youtube gadget.