Our SEO And Linkbuilding Strategy Part 2
Updated on February 29, 2020
Last week we saw some pretty major changes as Google decided to aggressively target private blog networks through deindexing and forced quite a few of them to close their doors, including BuildMyRank, a network we had used quite a bit lately. I won’t get too much into this (For more information, check out what Pat Flynn, Spencer Haws, and Trent Dyrsmid had to say about the issue) other than to say that we’ve slacked off on linkbuilding efforts recently and these latest changes have been a wakeup call for us to revamp our linkbuilding strategy moving forward.
Note: The linkbuilding strategy we’re laying out here is the plan we’re moving forward with as of this week, but this has not been tested and it remains to be seen how successful/unsuccessful this plan will ultimately be. We’ll definitely be checking back in and sharing results in the coming weeks and months.
Linkbuilding ROI
In the past we’ve tried to limit our linkbuilding spend to around $15.00 per site to keep our total costs per site to under $50.00 per site as laid out in our original linkbuilding strategy. There’s no particular reason we started out this way other than we hoped it would be effective, but we’ve come to find that we can expect our average site to eventually earn $9-10 per month on average. Our question is whether improved linkbuilding techniques would improve our ROI from the sites, so our intention is to test that out here. (We’re finding that our $$ per site, per month has actually slipped in recent months, but without holding onto the sites, it’s hard to say. We chalk this up to our cutback on linkbuilding a few months ago, for the most part.) Many others have used a much more expansive linkbuilding strategy than we have and their sites tend to earn quite a bit more as well. Could we do the same? SHOULD we?
We’re in talks with several different providers about a done-for-you service (One is from Virtual Miss Friday for SubmitYourArticle that would raise the cost per site by around $25-30 or so, to an overall site cost of $75-$80. Our costs would be significantly lower by performing this linkbuilding ourselves in-house, but it would require a significant increase to our staff for linkbuilding specifically. Our intention is to test out whether these improved links are worth it and, if they are, eventually bring the requisite staff in-house to take care of it for us. In the meantime, we’d like to take the new hires we’re interviewing and apply them to the process of creating more sites, not building out the sites that we have. It’s hard to find good staff, unfortunately, and we’re pretty choosy with our direct hires. We tried to use Virtual Staff Finder to find content agents in Davao and unfortunately, they thought that would be too limiting due to the geography and skillset. Ugh.
Concerns With Outsourced Linkbuilding
One of the concerns with outsourcing any of your linkbuilding to random websites or providers is that it requires you to reveal a significant portion of your niche site portfolio. This can be a bit uncomfortable, especially when you consider anyone that would understand the linkbuilding process for niche sites probably has their own portfolio of those niche sites as well. You also have to wonder…if they’re effective at building out and linking their own sites…how do they have the time to do the work on yours? When working with outsourced help for linkbuilding, we try to stick with providers or services that are extremely well established and even then we try to silo the work as best as possible between several providers.
What We Are No Longer Using
OnlyWire – We’ve used this in the past as a way to quickly get our sites indexed, but with the volume of sites we’re building we’re forced to create a ton of profiles on a bunch of different social sites to keep up and to separate the batches of niche sites. The rewards for this effort seem minimal at this point. While we may pick this up again in the future, we’re going to discontinue the use of OnlyWire for now. I do like and appreciate the effect of social signals, but I’m not sure this is the best way to go about it.
BuildMyRank – With the closing of their network, we won’t be looking for another private blog network to join. Google is aggressively targeting these done-for-you backlinking services and networks and we’d rather avoid this strategy for now. While there are definitely some private blog networks out there that are unaffected (and will remain that way as long as their owners keep them truly private) any blog networks that are public and actively recruiting new members will always be at risk, we think.
Our New Linkbuidling Plan And Tools
Our New Linkbuidling Plan And ToolsSubmitYourArticle.com (SYA) – We’d been using SYA for quite a while last year, but we ended up falling behind and ultimately stopped submitting articles through this service at the end of last year. In addition to just falling behind, one of the reasons we stopped using SYA was because we’d had quite a few articles denied and going through the process of fixing them and resubmitting was extremely time intensive. In looking at our post-November sites, we see that they don’t seem to be ranked as well across the board as our previous sites had been and we attribute this to our lack of article marketing.
We’ll be ordering original content for our SYA submissions (Through TextBroker and iWriter…click here for more on our content strategy and then having our agents use TheBestSpinner to put spintax on the articles and prep them for submission through SYA. Unfortunately, this is extremely time intensive. While we could use TheBestSpinner to automatically spin the content for the articles, we’ve found that the end result tends to be incredibly spammy and really not fit for human consumption. This ultimately causes us problems with the SubmitYourArticle editing process (and with ezinearticles as well) and is more hassle than it’s worth. We’ve found it better to have our agents go through the article and manually select the spins in TheBestSpinner so that we end up with a useable article at the end.
We’ll have our agents using this process and supplementing their work with a done-for-you service from Virtual Miss Friday I referenced above. We’ve timed this process and found that it takes approximately 3-4 hours per agent to complete a submission and we’re also paying for the original content as well. This means one of our agents can reasonably submit 2 articles per day or 10 articles per week. That means one agent can only keep up with about 20 sites created per week. We’ve temporarily assigned two agents to this project and will be catching up through the use of the done-for-you service providers.
UniqueArticleWizard.com (UAW) – This is another article directory submission tool very similar to SYA that will automatically submit your article to hundreds of article directories. While this service is probably more widely used than SYA, it’s new to us and I’ve been playing with it over the last week so that we can train our agents on how to use UAW to submit articles…or at least the linkbuilding manager. Ultimately, I don’t want to have to assign any agents to this and would rather use a done-for-you service to handle this for us. We’re looking at a couple of different people, both who we trust and know would do a good job on this particular project.
Unlike SYA, UAW requires one piece of original content and two additional re-writes that match, paragraph for paragraph. You’re allowed up to three links for each article, and we’ll be including 3 links in each of our UAW articles submitted. They use a mix of article directories and blogs that have opted-in to receive content, but each of the blog owners can decide certain thresholds, decline to accept content that isn’t readable, etc.
DoFollow Blog Commenting – This is something we’ve done for quite a while. I think our ROI on this is actually pretty limited, but we’re manually commenting on blogs after actually reading the content so our comments tend to stick. I think our real benefit here is that it just helps with link diversity. We’ll build 4-6 blog comments for each site and this is done by one of our agents part-time.
Varied Anchor Text
Recently, Matt Cutts from Google announced they would be targeting sites that were “over-optimized”. What did he mean by this? Well it’s definitely worth taking a look at your onsite SEO. Making sure that you’re not keyword stuffing and that your site has natural content that is built for visitors and not only search engines is a start. It’s also useful to link out to other authority sites in the niche, causing your site to be used as a hub of information. If your site only has inbound links and no outbound links it’s likely that doesn’t look as natural and definitely isn’t as helpful for users who find your site.
It’s also important to consider varying your anchor text links. Obviously, if 100% of your offsite SEO is building anchor text with the SAME anchors where ALL of them are to your homepage, that doesn’t look terribly natural. Our friends over at SEOMoz have a great video that explains the benefits of partial match anchor text:
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It seems a bit crazy to us that partial match is actually BETTER, but these guys truly are the experts and know much more than we do about SEO. If you’d like to find out a bit more about SEOMoz, consider signing up for a free trial of their services here. In that vein, we’ve come up with the parameters we’ll be using to build article marketing links to our site:
- 2 exact match anchor text to homepage (i.e. “blue ski boots” to blueskiboots.org)
- 2 partial match anchor text to homepage (i.e. “cool blue boots” or “cheap ski boots” to blueskiboots.org)
- 2 non-matched anchor text to homepage (i.e. http://blueskiboots.org or “click here” or “check this” to blueskiboots.org)
- 2 partial match anchor text to inner pages (i.e. “cheap snow boots” to blueskiboots.org/discounts-on-snow-boots)
This means 75% of our links will be to the homepage with 25% of the links to inner pages. 25% of the links will be exact match, 50% will be partial match, and 25% will be non-matched.
Wrapping It Up
While we’re far from SEO experts, our intent was to show you an extremely low-budget option you can put together that will round out a linkbuilding strategy for your niche sites. We generally try to avoid some of the more spammy options that are out there and we’re putting more emphasis in our new/improved strategy back into article marketing. There have been some changes in SEO recently. Nothing to be particularly alarmed about, but it’s just another change cycle we’re going through that requires webmasters and niche site builders to look for new ways to play an old game.
With these changes, I’ve read quite a few blog and forum posts where people are screaming and gnashing their teeth, saying the sky is falling and that SEO is dead. We believe this fear-mongering is far from the truth and any experienced SEO expert will tell you this is just one of many changes and cycles we’ve seen over the last 6-10 years.
Lastly, I’d like to add that we’re looking for some SEO professionals to bring on the AdSense Flippers Podcast to discuss linkbuilding strategies for the types of niche sites we build. There are plenty of people talking about how to build 2-Tier links and how to put more robust strategies together, but what about our little sites? We’ve been dancing around with Joseph Archibald about having him on the show, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to call him out! Joseph, buddy, we need your expertise! Let’s set something up?
So there are plenty of you out there building niche sites and using backlinking strategies. What have you found to be effective? Don’t be shy…leave a comment and let us know what you’re working on!
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Discussion
Greetings! The very helpful advice in this particular post! It is the little changes which will make the greatest changes. Thanks a lot for sharing!
Hey David!
Glad you liked the article, this one is pretty old nowadays and probably could use a facelift. Though a lot of the content here is still usable. At the end of the days having high quality content with high quality backlinks is the ultimate key to SEO success in our opinion
Hello,
did you recommend EZArticleLink for nichesite linkbuilding?
No, Peter…we do not.
How do you manage linkbuilding for all your hundreds of sites? As I understand it linkbuilding is something you gotta do everyday, or at least every week for a site to make sure it doesn’t lose rankings.
The answer – we don’t! Since March of 2012 we have stopped all link building activity to our sites.
Hey John,
Joe’s right in that we’re not building links currently! That’s temporary, though…we’re setting up testing procedures for a pretty massive linkbuilding test we’ll be talking about soon. With Panda/Penguin we thought it smart to go back to the drawing board and test some things out for ourselves and share the results…it’s a work in progress!
Looking forward towards that post then. Now I understand you have got employees doing all time consuming things for you, that’s logic and and an understanding way to go once you get the pennies rolling in.
However, for me that’s not really a way to go unless I wanna go broke the first month. I know link building quite well and have been working on a few niche sites a lot and have them top Google but now I wanna expand this. I just don’t understand how I will be able to control 100 sites. Sure, I could spend 12 hours a day which I literally already do but be more effecient but is it possible for one guy to manage this you think?
Thanks for both your answers and it’s fun reading about your success, keep it up!
No problem, John!
Yeah, we were bleeding money on the project for the first few months…it was definitely not profitable from day one. It took around 4-5 months before we turned the corner if I remember right…and we were down around 10K before that happened.
Remember, there are plenty of different ways you can go with this once you have the fundamentals down! Check out Steve’s site at: http://www.stevescottsite.com/
He focuses on an authority site and documents his process, income reports, etc. there. Spencer from Niche Pursuits does less sites and more linkbuilding and is sort of in-between our process and Steve’s. Lots of good information out there.
Still…hope we can provide some additional value for you to get the wheels turning! hehe Best to you!
Yeah, but I guess the bleeding money part you say is quite normal for most newly started businesses, at least from what I have read and heard. However, not all make it to the turning point so that’s something to pursuit obviously!
Authority sites can really be great but I don’t really have one thing to write about I love or am very passionate about. If I had I probably would have tried that. But then I am also very fond of link building even though it’s time consuming so many sites would be a nice way to go.
I’ll check out the links you linked there, thanks for the help!
Hi John, I felt the need to chip in 🙁
yes one man/lady/person can do 100 or even 400 BUT you need to have tools and you need to outsource some work.
using managewp a site replication tool and odesk for content I can build 50 sites a month easily. Its cashflow and risk avoidance that means i tend to do 30.
When th eprocess is established its pretty straight forward. then you have to wait for indexing etc to all kick in.
Without any tools no.
Also ofocurse you need a guide like the free adsenseflipeprs guide and some experience.
Yeah, I don’t plan to write all the content myself, but some obviously and especially the first months when I get started. ManageWP is probably a must to use as soon you get more than 20 sites. I feel it’s a bit hard remembering password and stuff already with my 5-10 sites!
Thanks for your input, it was helpful!
I said something before but I wanna add somet stuff to not get misunderstood:
The 12 hours I spend everyday don’t go to working on only my sites. There’s times I really don’t know what to do with my time and therefor I see it’s a possibility to expand this, but would 100 sites be possible for one to manage, or what’s your thought on this?
Hey John,
I can’t really say whether it would be possible for YOU to manage 100 sites or more. I know that it IS possible when you look at us, Spencer, Mike From Maine, WSO Testers, etc…but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right move for you.
I can’t really say what you should be doing, John…I don’t know anything about you, your skillsets, etc. Are you better at building niche sites or authority sites? Which are more successful for you? Do you prefer building out processes and having others do the work or do you prefer deep research and creating in-depth content for sites? Do you care about that or is it simply a question as to which makes you more money?
Yeah, I understand it’s hard to say what’s possible and what’s not. It’s all depending the person. Thanks for the input you given me, really enlightened some things for me. But I guess it’s not an impossible task then for one person as long it’s done the right way. The right way might be a bit misleading but what I mean is that with the right mindset and to be able to plan out the process I think it’s possible.
Thanks once again!
Hi Justin, when do you guys plan to do an update on what’s working best for your link building? Thanks!
Sorry some if this testing has taken a backseat to other projects especially with the success we’ve had using on page SEO only. However, we have bought a bunch a secondary domains that we can test similar EMD sites with links.
Joe, where can I find the article related to doing on page SEO only. Does that mean you are not doing any link building at all and still get into the top ten? Must be using low competition KWs?
There isn’t an article on it, that I know of. Yes, we have not been doing ANY link building since March of 2012 and still have sites ranking well. And, yes, I try to pick the lowest competition KWs possible that will still make money.
So, you mention that Cutts has talked about over-optimization, and indeed Google did just release more info on “Penguin” – the over-optimization update. But then you also talk about using something similar to Unique Article Wizard. Even if you’re not using that exact program, isn’t submitting articles to hundreds of directories potentially dangerous now? I know that syndication and dupe content are two different things, but Cutts HAS said in the past that you don’t want t over-syndicate. I would think that after Penguin, it would be a better idea to just focus on Ezinearticles, Goarticles, and maybe a few other quality sites.
Hey there,
You make an interesting point…we’ve been discussing that internally and mention in our latest podcast episode (due out today). We haven’t totally fleshed out our plan there, but focusing on only a few, high-quality links is something we’re definitely looking at.
I think with SYA and UAW it’s important to not submit junk and with SYA, try to only submit to article directories and not the blog network they have.
I was getting spectacular results with MAN & UAW prior to the Panda update in late February. Although many of my sites dropped in rankings immediately after the update about half of them are now back up in rankings again and ready to go up on Flippa:)
I am still a little mystified by why only half the sites came back up even though they were all using the exact same link profile, anchor text mix and age. Did a bit of research and came up with a conclusion (although somewhat speculative):
– I was using pre spun articles from simply PLR for all my SEO submissions and some sites probably received more backlinks closely related to my chosen niche and some didn’t as you get a good mix of articles with simply PLR. So, relevancy could be a possible factor in why some sites did well than the others after the update.
Anyway, I am definitely bringing UAW back into the mix and focus on creating a more diverse link profile. I posted a case study here for anyone interested:
http://www.nichesense.com/why-link-building-is-still-the-fastest-way-to-rank-websites/
Thanks for the post Justin!
Hey Anshul!
It could be relevancy…or it could be because you were using PLR, many of your articles were the exact same as many others that are out there. Additionally, it could be that the strength of the network and the directories that MAN and UAW submit to has taken a hit? So many variables or possibilities, lol.
Nice article or case study there…definitely worth a read!
hi guys. long time, first time. loving what you guys are doing.
i’m very interested in finding a detailed guide to seo for these low competition micro niche sites.
in particular i would love to know more about both the do it yourself and outsourced approach.
for the DIY method most blogs are very general about how to find and build links, but as a beginner it would be awesome to have a detailed list of either the exact search strings you use to find blogs and forums to post to, or a list of the best blogs / forums / resource sites that you use. also an idea of how many links you create and the time you should expect to spend on each keyword.
for the outsource method i would be interested to find which sites you use, and any users or gigs that you recommend, how much you expect to spend and how long it usually takes to achieve results.
any way that you can point me in the right direction would be brilliant.
aussie nick.
Hey there,
Did you read the post? 🙂 The search strings you can use to find blogs can be found pretty easy…just google “dofollow blog search strings” and you’ll find quite a few. We have our VA’s do the linkbuilding for the most part…it’s scary using Fiverr gigs to build links, I think.
Wow. I just heard about you guys and what you are doing is amazing. I’m still trying to figure out wordpress, but I added you to my google reader. Great job and keep it up
Great to hear, Mark! Our guide that’s coming out should help you with hosting, WordPress, etc. It will be helpful for beginners, but has some tips/tricks in there for the intermediates as well as that composes a good portion of our audience.
Have you guys thought of making your own private blog network for link building purposes? You have the website creation process down and the managing of a private blog network is a relatively easily systematized process.
From a business stand point I think it would significantly reduce your risk exposure to other link building tools you using being taken down and be a nice “value add/USP” for your auctions.
Good point Jon, we have seriously considered it. Right now though there are several projects in front of it.
HI Admin,
I also want to ask your opinion about bookmarking demon. If we use it wisely, let’s say 40+ social bookmarking on daily basis, is it worthy to use this software?
Waiting for your expert opinion.
Regards
Again, we don’t use Bookmarking Demon so we can’t comment on it either. I can say we’ve stopped using OnlyWire which is a similar service.
Hi there,
I want to ask your expert opinion upon the authority link network.
Please suggest us that should we continue to use it?
Regards
We honestly can’t speak to Authority Link Network (ALN) as we don’t use it and don’t have any experience there.
Are you sure UAW is still safe after several most popular blog networks got huge slap by google. I bought a service that offers one submission to UAW, AR, and MAN. I used it for two of my niche sites: one built on PR 3 domain and the other from fresh domain. The result for my PR 3 niche site was sort of instant. I got huge spike as I went from 100+ positions to page 2 (#16 spot, I think), now it’s on top 3 for 2 keywords.
But my other 2 weeks old niche site (the one on fresh domain) didn’t have any changes! WTH!! I’m afraid it was deindexed but when I log into my webmasters tool account, all pages are still in google index. and I have not received any dreadful love letter telling me that I have built unnatural link building.
With that in mind, I’m kind of a bit reluctant to use UAW again. What say you?
Hey, Setiawan, thanks for commenting!
The fact that you used 3 different services and they didn’t quickly get one of your sites ranked is not compelling evidence that using UAW puts your sites at risk…especially considering that those 3 networks worked for another site you had.
Our experience is this: Some niche sites just don’t work, for whatever reason. It’s not the tools we use, the content, etc…they just simply won’t make us money. No big deal…we just move on to the ones that do.
Of 10 niche sites you build, how many of them that don’t work? Like you said, it’s not the tool, the content, or anything. They just don’t work.
Thanks
About 2, or 20%. They either never get ranked or have very low CPC/CTR and therefore never make much money. We consider these part of the “cost of doing business”.
Sweet article guys.
I’ve used SYA in the past with mixed results, but back then I was a noob and didn’t really know how to properly use it. I do have my VA submit manually to the major directories, but almost never see those links show up as backlinks…strange.
I am pretty sure that Ezine will reject articles that are link to Adsense sites, but hopefully I am mistaken.
I use a mix of UAW, MAN, Traffic Kaboom, AR and SocialAdr.
Looking forward to seeing the results.
BTW, any update on your process ebook – can’t wait to get my hands on that puppy 🙂
Hey Matt!
It’s weird that your manual submissions don’t get picked up, eh? I know ezinearticles is going to sub-domains for all of their authors in the near future…I don’t really like that move.
The guide’s almost done! I think we’re going to release as part of our first webinar. Look for more details on that very soon!
I saw some sites you had for sale a while back and you were using only the exact match targeted keywords in the page title & url. Is this something that you still do now given the threat of over optimization penalties, or are you padding out the titles & urls to make them seem more natural now?
Hey Dave,
We were adding an extra word or two for a while, but have gone back to exact match in the last couple of months. Nobody knows exactly what will be considered overly-optimized, but my guess is it will be the more aggressive stuff than that.
Great stuff here. I’ve been making a few niche sites but haven’t known where to go with linkbuilding/SEO after BMR went down. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Can someone tip me off on the best free dofollow article submission service? Thank you.
Either SubmitYourArticle or UAW would meet those requirements. We prefer the UI for SubmitYourArticle and are more familiar with it, but UAW seems to be the market leader.
I thought that those services cost $64 a month?
Lol…poor reading comprehension on my part, apparently! 🙂 I don’t know of one that’s free, but that’s a hell of an idea, I think. The only problem is that there is some manual work involved with those services when it comes to QA.
Still, if you could find a way to limit that QA work, offer it for free, and upsell the do-it-for-you part of the service, there might be something to that…hmmmm…lol.
sure. no worries. 🙂
I think I’m going to try to submit my articles to each site (ezine articles, etc.) manually. Since I’m not managing a mass amount of sites and since I don’t have any extra money to spend that’s prob. my best and maybe my only bet! lol.
I found this list of sites where I can submit articles:
http://www.avangate.com/company/resources/article/article-submission.htm
And I temporarily signed up for SubmitYourArticle.com for $1 to see their directory list after reading a review that said 85% of the SYA seo value is in the 6 to 7 main directories. Have you checked to see how many sites pick up your articles outside of those 7 directories? That might be interesting to know. They counted 3 but that was only for one of their submissions I guess.
Awesome Content guys
What do you think about using iWriter and spin them manually with TBS and then let the VA’s submit other bunch of iWriter articles to UAW (3 backlinks per article) (Pat Flyns Backlinks Strategy)
Guillermo
Love it! Though personally I prefer the interface of SYA over UAW.
Hi Again. I’m not ready to pay for an article submission service just yet but I’m commenting on dofollow blogs to get started. I read the blog posts before commenting andI keep my comments on topic and non-spammy.
I would like to know if it’s okay to use keywords in the “Name” field for my comments instead of my actual name as I’m concerned about having so many dofollow blog comment backlinks with my name as a link instead of relative keywords but I’m also concerned that Google may see this as over optimizing.
If anyone can give me some tips or advice I’d really appreciate it!. Thank you 🙂
Most blogs don’t like the use of anything else besides real name for comments. I would vary this by using pen names. Keyword stuff in this field seems overly spammy to me.
thanks for the reply. I’ve been using short keyworded pen names but I’m open to learn whether or not it’s okay. I’m concerned about using the same pen name or name to comment on other blogs as there wouldn’t be any variation.
Do you guys very the pen names you use when you comment on other blogs?
And do you use pen names with keywords or do you use non-keyword pen names?
We vary the pen names and use non-keyword pen names.
I’m so glad you confirmed what I already thought about partial match anchors. Google is getting way too smart to believe that 250 different sites would naturally link to a page. all using the words “natural herbal acne cure” or “gain twitter followers now” or whatever. I like your idea of linking to inner pages within the site too. Great post, thanks!
Yep, definitely think it’s a good idea. It was surprising to me, though, that partial match phrases might actually be BETTER…that seems counter-intuitive. Whatever linkbuilding you do, we think it’s better not to overdo it and that you should try to stay away from the spammy stuff.
Hi guys. I’m using an HP netbook (one of the mini laptops) and the picture in your header covers the majority of your page buttons. I’m using Firefox and I’ve noticed this for a while. It does the same thing w/Google Chrome. I thought I would give you guys the heads up!
We’re aware that some smaller resolutions using certain browsers have issues with the site, but there is not much we can until we through a total site redesign later this year. Thanks for bringing it up though, I will be sure to put the new design through the paces and perhaps have an alternate layout for tiny screens.
Awesome stuff guys. My bud Jo A recommended me comin to see you guys and I am not disappointed. Great stuff – especially the plain fact of reinforcing the fundamentals with the Whiteboard Fridays, partial match anchors (who woulda thought they were MORE powerful?) and getting back to basics in light of the demise of BMR. Back to basics…no shortcut tricks like blog networks? WTF??
BTW, I pinged the reluctant Scotsman hoping he gets on your podcast—-I hear it may be in the works 😉
Thanks, Ralph…appreciate it! Yeah, back to regular/boring linkbuilding I think, hehe.
We definitely want to get your buddy on and he seems keen to the idea. We’re going to selfishly hammer him about his thoughts on linkbuilding for our types of sites! hehe
If we double team him and then promise him cigars and scotch he’ll come on, no question! BTW listened to just about all your podcasts the past week, awesome stuff man, keep up the fine work. Tell your partner I love the hawaiian shirt dude flippin the coin logo too…its money.
Yeah Ralph, you do have an idea there – cigars and scotch may just do the trick rather nicely 🙂
Incidentally, this post is turning into another Pat Flynn “The Backlinking Strategy That Works” epic – comments are constantly on the rise. A sign of things to come for this blog – congratulations gentlemen!
When are peole gonna smarten up and realize that “Pat Flynns Backlinking Strategy” (and I place those quotes 100% facetiously btw) was pioneered by the Scotsman in Kuching….Jo Archibald???
For anyone who forgets (and Pat to his credit tries not to take direct credit – although it has pumped his online rep considerably) he gves the credit for the invention the Backlinking Strategy that works to the 40 Day inventor Joseph Archibald?
And let me tell you, forget BMR, this is still THE backlinking startegy that does work and keeps you off big brother Gs radar because its at its core, white hat.
So Jo
When are you going to make an appearence?
Steve
Mmmm…cigars and scotch. I’ll buy, but those don’t typically last long around here! 🙂 We’re talking to some guys about doing a little graphic/cartoon with the guy on the beach, lol
You might find it more cost effective to take all linkbuilding in house and then doing some of the things found in the following article:
http://genuineseo.net/build-my-rank-alternatives/
Some reasonable alternatives there, for sure. You’re right about taking things in-house…so much cheaper for us! Still, it’s worth testing things out at a higher price before going through the hassle of finding and bringing on new staff, I think.
great article. One comment apart from the article – is lately, when I am on your site reading an article
a popup comes up ( and I am already subscribed to your newsletter ) and it is so large
that I cannot scroll to the right side of it to click on the X to turn it off.
This happens every time on your site and it has happened two times already just
writing this comment – and then I have to reload the page to make it go away —
not sure how to fix this problem. Any suggestions ?
Thanks.
Fred B.
Hey Fred,
We use pop-up domination. I currently have it setup to pop-up for new visitors or those who haven’t been on the site for a week. It’s normally only slightly annoying, so it’s worth it for the additional email sign-ups, but your situation sounds worse, hehe. Are you opening it on a very small window or low resolution…that might be why.
What resolution and browser are you using?
Google is a mess IMHO. I sincerely hate the way google is trying to take over the internet. I just wish guys will learn to stop depending on google and let’s get traffic from other means. Spending $50 on SEO to me does not worth it. Just spend $10 and use $40 on facebook ads its better like that.
Sheyi
Hey Sheyi,
I hear what you’re saying about being dependent on Google for traffic. Still, most of the other methods for traffic are extremely spammy, don’t get you targeted visitors, etc. My “wish” would be that there would be more competition between the search engines…a more even split of traffic.
The use of paid traffic for AdSense sites is dubious at best and will make the resale of sites tough.
Good stuff… the Over-SEO penalty is definitely something that’s gotten us quite intrigued on this end. Key is definitely to focus on quality above all, on-page SEO is finally getting it’s due and for good reason. SYA is def great, been using it a long time but we always use TBS manually and put in that little extra time to spin – never had a refusal yet on SYA that I can recall. Can’t speak for UAW as we speak… haven’t been ’round ti lately.
I’ve noticed focusing on longer, better articles targeting niche groups of keywords is definitely the ticket. Great post – keep up the awesome work!
Manual use of TBS is useful. In the past, we’ve had our agents manually spinning without the use of TBS…way too time consuming, even for cheap labor. Tools are better there…just have to be careful when it comes to the quality. Still…would never put spun content on our own sites.
Interesting what you’re saying about longer/better articles. I’ve been reading that 1,000-2,000 word articles on the home page is quite effective!
Hey there Justin. Great stuff again, as always, thanks!
I’ve still got two questions regarding your new strategy:
1. I was wondering since you’ve dropped OnlyWire, how does this affect the overall scheme? Does this still mean that you start your article marketing around 2 months after finishing the site and blog commenting around 3 months after creation?
2. How do you make sure your sites are indexed within a reasonable amount of time now? Are you now manual adding them to Google, Bing and Yahoo as soon as they’re finished?
Keep up the good work, loving your podcasts, inspiration and overall working spirit!
Hey, Steven…thanks, man!
1. I think we’ll be pushing up the blog commenting and leaving article marketing where it’s at. One idea is to use SYA at 2-3 months and use UAW at 3-4 months? For now, will be using both in parallel at 2-3 months.
2. I’m not sure, to be honest! I’m thinking that if we lost a week in indexing time, but got to avoid the additional work it might be worth it. I’m not entirely sure here, though…we may go back to OnlyWire.
I’m all too familiar with the process of trial and error… Curious how this new strategy will eventually work out, so I’m definitely looking forward to future updates on this. Thanks for the super quick response!
Have you ever thought about just using a site indexer to get your site indexed? It submits your site to a bunch of the web stat sites which are crawled hourly. When I do this I usually see my site indexed within a few hours to as much as a day.
— Jeff
Aren’t you concerned this sort of trick could get your site flagged in Google’s cache? I would rather get indexed naturally — better to be safe than sorry!
Hi Joseph
If you add to things like ismyblogworking and aboutus.org they are valid things to do. and tend to ensure a site gets indexed.
With you rprocess though im sure you dont need to do that at all.
But I would avoid site indexers myself they are a bit of blast which i dont like!
Hey Steve,
Honestly, my thought process has switched here a bit. So what if our sites aren’t indexed right away, right? Google will find them naturally in time anyway and we’re not in a big rush.
I’ve been really trying to stay away from blognetworks too. Too bad as it was just so good!
Trying to focus more on just general article writing and get my articles out there.
Triberr.com is a great tool for that
Hey Ralph!
Interesting concept…I LOVE their domain name, hehe…will check them out!
I think the post is great. I am relatively new and have two sites up currently. I have been discouraged by the constant rankings fluctuations that I have seen. I was using BMR and stopped when they shut down. I was as high as 13 but have nosedived down to 50th in the 4 or 5 days since the BMR demise.
I should probably search about here but what would benefit me is some sort of baseline or benchmark competition analysis that you may do prior to deciding to launch a site. That way if I analyzed my site(s) I could then judge the potential success or shortcomings of any back linking campaigns done when I have an idea how to compare our site at the base level. While I find the information you have outline extremely helpful, I do know that it is difficult for me to compare our sites and what may work excellent for you may not work have as well for me because you may have targeted something easier while I may have targeted something harder (accidentally or otherwise).
Hey Rob,
You might want to consider trying out our Niche Site Profit Calculator:
http://adsenseflippers.com/niche-site-profit-calculator
This is a nice, standardized way to estimate the profitability of a site before you built it. It’s going to give you a REALLY rough idea…but it’s good for comparing one site against another.
Pretty cool that you’re, basically, switching up your approach almost completely. I’m taking notes! Like everyone else, very interested to see what kind of results you get from this. I like your split on anchor text.
I’ve also reviewed some of my sites to figure out if any are over-optimized. Probably better to edit when in doubt?
Hey Johan,
Yeah…really tough to judge “over-optimized” isn’t it? hehe I’ve seen pages that are totally keyword stuffed that could probably be at that level, but we’re wondering where on the spectrum our sites fall, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, the “standard” seems to be at 1% density (1 for every 100 words) but is that too much? It’s hard to tell, and I don’t know if Google has started to roll out this update, or if it’s still a few weeks away, and if so, how will you ever know/find out?
Really hard to say, for sure. We add 4 exact match phrases per 500 words, so we’re a little under the 1% you stated. We do include some targeted longtails, though, but they typically fit pretty naturally into the content.
Great evaluation guys! I’ve had lots of trouble with over optimisation lately and turns out it was growing too many links, too quickly with close match to my targeted term. Love the simple approach to building small, varied and targeted links as this has been my practice for the last few months.
Now once I’m ranking I really trickle my link building and vary it up to the max!
Cool, Gordon, great to hear you’ve got that fixed!
@Gordon McNevin
I’m intrigued with your blog post and I’d love to know more about what your doing. I’m trying to do some SEO for my wife’s fashion blog but I’ll have to do everything manually as I don’t have any money to invest in tools or article submissions services.
May I know how many back-links you add each month and over what sites, or networks you very your links?
Thank you. I’d appreciate a reply from anyone including Joseph or Justin.
— Chris
Hey Chris,
We sort-of lay out which article directories we’re going to be using in the post above. 🙂 We’ll be using SYA and UAW and trickling the links over 30 days. Our linkbuilding is usually done somewhere between 60-90 days after the site was created…not an absolute rule, though.
Just a word on “social signals”. As we all know, they don’t tend to fit in well with many “niche” type sites. Andre Garde wrote a wise comment about that on my blog the other day as a matter of fact. If someone like Angie Jolie were to bring media attention to the fact that she liked a certain type of baby stroller for example, then that would create a lot of social attention to a particular group of niche sites.
What’s more though, IF Goog are wise enough, why would a site that’s fairly immature and not ranking for anything as of yet be in receipt of social signals, other than if the site owner were a very regular Twitter user or Facebook type of guy or girl. Social signals would tend to occur only once the site is gaining fairly regular visitors, and even then – as mentioned, most “niche” sites will not to attract any social interaction other than a few comments.
On the one hand, I’m of the mind that going more natural in terms of backlinking strategies is a workable philosophy, because that’s what Goog are telling us they want, and have been for a long time now. But on the other hand, you still see the same old high end sites ranking happily at the top of Goog, and they still use tons of crappy backlinks to gain and then keep their rankings steady.
Fact of the matter is that very many folks who work in SEO know full well that Goog care about the searcher and want to show the “best” results to keep the searcher happy. Thus we are making a huge effort to provide really top level content on our sites which creates a very relevant and attractive experience for the potential site visitor. But yet, even though Goog are telling us this is what they want (c/o Mr Cutts etc), they are still much more than happy to dump tons and tons of great sites, which are then replaced by crappy offerings instead.
Goog have got a long long way to go before they get things right.
Hey Joseph!
Agreed with niche site social signals…it would definitely be overkill for ours if one of them were to go “viral”, lol. It’s funny…maybe that’s a test as to whether a site’s an authority site or not?
Then again, probably not…there are lots of niches that lack the ability to go viral just because of the subject matter…but it doesn’t mean they don’t have value or aren’t important. That’s why I think it would be hard to make social signals a MAJOR indicator for rankings across the board. If I have an elevator or auto glass business…how “viral” would my site really be, right? Still…if I provide a valuable service people are looking for, I should still be ranked.
Ultimately, we view our model as filling the gap in areas where Google simply can’t find great content. Many of our niches are successful because there’s so little good information written about that very particular subject. Of course, if someone were to start writing epic content in that niche, I’m sure they would outrank us…but it’s so niched down that particular subject is often overlooked.
Hi Justin
“If I have an elevator or auto glass business…how “viral” would my site really be, right? ” thats exactly the point isnt it.
For a real world business the social signal thing is rarely applicable (resturants and hotels might be good exceptions).
And i think that even good solid info sites will find it tough to go viral with social signals.
So yes it should be part of the algo signals but thats all. If two sites are equal thne it could be used.
regards
Hi Justin!
Great results – you definitely have a system in place, and that’s what I lack to finally start making more money.
As for SEO – this is all not a new stuff (what google does today) – my sites are mostly stable in high rankings because of the strategy that doesn’t magnet google radars and leads to penalties…
As for the UAW streatgy that I use – may be your VAs find it useful, it takes around 20-30 minutes of work and works for months of links building, giving me a nice array of various anchor texts – http://grandonlineprofits.com/creating-bulk-unique-variations-of-the-resource-boxes-for-your-article-marketing-campaigns/ BTW, UAW also allows 2 links in the article body, plus 2 links in the resource box. So, linking back to different sites from 1 article is a breeze. URLs can also be spun just like anchor texts.
Like {anchor1|anchor2|click here} etc… 😉
Hey there!
I like the spinning strategy you lay out…it seems much faster…but when we do these auto-spins it seems to put out REALLY crappy content. When we go through and edit them to make them look much better, it tends to take a lot of time, heh. Agree with spinning anchor text, of course…we’ll be doing that with our article marketing for sure.
Nice article, this seems to be all people are talking about with the recent blog networks hit, to be honest I never liked that sort of linkbuilding, if it doesn’t add at least some value to people who might read it I just stay away.
I do like and use UAW myself, its a good tool, personally though I just get 1 original and 2 rewrites, again its better quality and its cheap enough.
All I seem to be hearing recently are people claiming SEO is dead and scare mongering in the forums, the fact is everything I read in forums I take with a pinch of salt, I tend to find 70-80% of people just comment on things they don’t understand, at the end of the day things change and this wont be the last time Google make changes the farmer update back in 2011 effected 18% of searches but surprise surprise, we are still here making money.
I think the key is just a good amount of link diversity and to an extent getting back to basics with some manual link building
Keep up the good work guys 🙂
Thanks, Carl!
I definitely agree with you on link diversity. It’s tough with such a small budget, of course, but I think it is the best course of action. We typically ignore those that say the sky is falling for SEO. One interesting post I read though was the one stating “Winter Is Coming” in regards to SEO…was interesting.
One of the reasons we want to try the more expensive services through Virtual Miss Friday is we’re hoping we’ll have higher-level content submitted in a non-spammy way. We’ll see!
Hi Dano
Qudos for shring.
My gut feeling on your lower cost package WAS that the Senukex $5 are at best worthless and at most a bad idea. (I see youve dropped them). And also the same for the High PR society stuff.
The $29 price point is just fine but the margin is tight for sure. The reality is that it works great for launching a niche website but pointless for trying torank a competative term. My policy would be to refund for sites where its just not going to do anything. Having tried to exaplin that in the sales copy.
regards
Well it did do something but not much and I removed that package already. I even added a money back guarantee when people see no improvements in their rankings. Although that sucks a little bit cause now someone bought a package to increase him for search terms like:
seo
seo service
and other tough 2 word keywords :S and he is ranking at page1 and 2 for all 6 of them so wish me luck.
Hi
So your really going to focus the backlinking process down to UAW and SYA? Similar to Spencers strategy?
With no soical signals at all?
With your cost of link building going up to $30 approx?
Ive been using the Junk links at 40% for the last 6 months. with only 25% the exact match.
With michelles service (hi michelle really nice idea there) that your going to be using (correct me if i miss read that) which package are you taking as the costs on the site are much higher than suggested here?
KNowing you guys Im sure this will work and work well, the nature of your Keyword research, selection and the low comp will sure work out.
I agree the skys may not be falling. However I do think we need to vary ur strategies more. Im a fan of doing authority (reall authoirty large sites) that wil become real brands with mass market appeal. as well are micro and nice sites. mix everything up.
Thanks for the insight guys.
regards
P.S Come oe Joesph Step up dude 🙂
Hey Steve,
Boring, I know! 🙂 Our strategy is basically a Spencer linkbuilding “lite” campaign. I don’t know how well it will work out, but we’re definitely going to give it a shot!
The cost through Virtual Miss Friday for an article written for us, spun extremely well, and submitted is just under $70.00 with our 10% discount. (Ouch!) But we’ll be using one article for two different sites, putting the cost at around $35 per site. We’re hoping to get the UAW submission done well for around $20-$30 per article…not sure there yet.
I agree with social signals, but think the effect there is still limited. I think it plays a higher priority in competitive niches where everyone is well optimized with their on-site SEO and are maxing out their off-site SEO.
Yikes Ok now i understand!
No its not boring but a sound approach. Just getting clarity in my mind as to the way your going.
As you know i respect your business and ideas.
SocialBookmarking is extremely cheap. like no cost really. I look at it this way. It adds to the link diversity so thats a good thing.
I look forward as always to following your journey
regards
Wow $70 for a well spun article, seriously I think its a big waste of money. This is how I spin articles:
– Scrape 10 articles from Ezine
– Cut each of them into 4 paragraphs, so 40 paragraphs
– Take the first paragraph of all 10 articles and insert brackets to spin, repeat for the following paragraphs in the same order
– Run it through TheBestSpinner and select from the user favourite database only the nr1 best synonym, so max 1 synonym
This produces perfectly readable and high unique articles
You know what, I’m gonna make you a good offer here, I’ll make a custom package for you for $70 that will target 2 sites at the same time that will rank you a LOT higher then what you are now planning to do cause I really think it’s a huge waste of money and will get you nowhere where I will get you. Don’t beleive me? Setup some split campaign and you get the first package based on no cure no pay 🙂
It will contain all of the links that I mentioned in my previous post.
Personally I sold $25 linkbuilding packages at the WarriorForum, my experience was that it didn’t do much for most niche sites (must admit that had also to do with the noobs ordering it and targetting to tough keywords, mostly Amazon style). But still I think a $25 budget is too tight to really make a difference. Anyway let me show you what they got cause it might be good enough for your sites and the costs are around $12,- (hey I had to make some money as well):
1 submission to Article Ranks
1 submission to My Article Network
1 submission to Unique Article Wizard
$5 at Fiverr for all of those 3
50 Web2.0’s $5 at fiverr , they used SenukeX
50 Articles posted to High PR society $3.75
So that is $13.75 I could get subs to these 3 article networks myself and buy SenukeX but when I add the time it costs me to submit it to these sites and fill in all the detail boxes I thought I would be better off by just outsourcing it to Fiverr (which costs me 3 minutes).
Later on I found out there are better web2.0 gigs as the index rate after 3 weeks was only 3 out of 50 and I found 25 got deleted cause of spam. Then I hired anohter guy through Fiverr who did 30 some sort of web2.0 profile links and 30 real web2.0’s, his strategy was to put 3 links in each article to 3 different clients and rss feed all the links and something else like pinging, when I checked these 60 links 25 of them were indexed within 5 days.
My linkbuilding is quite diverse as I use ALN as well for my more expensive packages ( I removed the $25 one, it’s not worth the time for $11.75 minus paypal fees so actually $10,- profit). After HighPRsociety got deindexed 90% and ALN also lost like 25-30% I haven’t seen a single drop in rankings at any of my sites or my client sites which is pretty amazing. I did enjoy the ranking boost mainly caused by HPRS and ALN, but I didnt experience the drop afterwards. So people can scream murder&fire, I’ll just keep doing what I always did and it still works. Okay I did drop for exactly 4 days but all recovered after that and actually ranked higher without additional links.
My more expensive packages include
– Manual socialbookmarking
– Manual dofollowing commenting at PR3+ blogs with less then 75 OBL
– Submitting my link to 15 aged social sites through Ping.fm
– Editing high PR wiki spaces (nofollow)
– Facebook fanpage commenting (nofollow)
– Disqus commenting (nofollow)
– AR, UAW, MAN, HPRS, ALN
– Web2.0’s
Keep in mind I only do about 5 links on each of the nofollow platforms
Damn what a long post again, but anyway, I think mixing it up with as many IP’s and diversification as possible RANKS and it ranks damn good and that is exactly where these 5 different blog networks are good for.
If one blognetwork drops I still have 11 other platforms to back it up.
Hey Dano!
Those are definitely diversified packages! I worry a bit about the stick-rate with Fiverr gigs…and know that the love/care they put into it will be minimal. You’re right, though, trying to do this on a budget gets pretty tough…it’s hard to squeeze enough value out with a small spend like this.
Well, if you build these web2.0’s yourself with SenukeX or you let someone on Fiverr do it, whats the difference? Same with AR,MAN and UAW, I supply the article myself so no difference if they submit it to these networks or I would do it myself.
The ALN/HPRS submissions I do myself and the rest of the manual work is done by my VA
This seems weird but I find that one of the best SEO techniques is to have killer content, I had an exact match .org overtake the exact matched 2 year old position 1 .com with only 4 web 2.0 links. It was strange, every time I’d add a new page of content, my rank would move up by 1. The site is now at number 1 in google and making $500 + a month. I did start adding Build My Rank posts to secure the position, they’re obviously gone now but there’s no shift in the position, in fact, it now ranks for position 1-3.
Other sites that are competing for far easier keywords that I have focused more on back links than content have not done as well. I really think google are noticing how good a site’s content is now.
I know it takes longer to create content than it does back links, but the $500 a month site has 16 pages of content probably only took a day to write or edit (some was written by me, some by an outsourcer). I think it’s worth putting in this amount of effort, even if the site only makes $200 a month.
Still, I am experimenting with other link sources, I’ve just started using http://BloggerLinkUp.com/ to get some guest posts on other blogs in my niche. It’s a free service and seems pretty good.
Thanks for the great content guys!
Hey Luke,
I agree regarding the killer content in principle…but am a bit scared to roll out with niche sites still, honestly. Killer content doesn’t come cheap and requires quite a bit of time, effort, and energy. I want to make sure we get paid back well for that spend, you know?
Yeah, I see what you mean. I guess you guys kind of do killer content already, only it’s with this blog. I actually write most content myself these days or heavily adapt it from what one of my VA’s has written. If I were to find someone to put as much effort in as me, I bet they would be expensive.
Also, I find keyword research the most boring and hard part of niche site creation, I guess that’s why I’m really trying to squeeze the most revenue out of the good keywords I do find.
I really think Luke & Archibald (previous post) have a GREAT point about content. Seems like Google is starting to pick up more and more on what is really valuable on the web. I personally LOVE content that is captivating and has real personality (not the dry boring stuff). I’ve launched a bunch of sites in the past and the only one that has stayed solid in rankings over the long run is the site that I personally wrote and put a lot of time/effort into (with very personable content & photos, outbound links, etc.). I even watched a competitor site drop in rankings in that same niche and it had more age/links, but the content was dull. Fantastic content also adds value to the web which results in that nice “I’m really helping people out” feeling. 🙂
Does Dofollow Diver still work properly? I was testing it out the other day looking for blogs to comment on, but what I found was that all blogs on the niche I was targeting were all nofollow. Am I missing something or is their database stale?
I believe it’s still working for us, but I’ll check with the agent that’s doing the blog commenting. Maybe it was just that particular niche you were targeting?
Possibly. The broad niche in particular is education, so it brought up a lot of old, stale blogs with closed comments. The new blogs that it did bring up were all nofollow (checked about 5-6 manually).
I look forward to your results. Will you report them?
Of course we will! We’re pretty open about our successes and failures. Hoping we get a good ROI from this one…it would be a painful (and expensive) test if we don’t, but we’ll report on it either way…
Thanks for the write up, I’ve been wondering what the next step in a link building process would be after Google deindexed BMR!
Looks like I’m going back to basics and building links using blog commenting!
Ouch…blog commenting is definitely not “sexy” SEO work, heh.
With UAW make sure you spin your anchor text in your resource box using the Step-by-step wizard. It takes 2 extra minutes but will make a huge difference.
I’m sure you guys have heard but a lot of the best SEOs are recommending using anchor text such as “click here” or “visit our site” more often then your keywords. It makes sense but I don’t think anyone has conclusive results on it yet.
Hey Nate, thanks for the tip!
Yes, 25% of our links will be “check this out”, “this site”, etc. to mix it up. Good policy, I think.
How long does it typically take to see results from UAW? I tried it out and did a submission to about 5 different sites 2 weeks ago and have had zero results so far and no links yet. Are you just submitting once per site? Are multiple submissions?
sorry didn’t proofread, meant to ask – are you submitting one time per site with UAW or multiple times?
I’ve had some pretty good results within 2 weeks. However these sites were mainly ranking lower than 60 to begin with. It’s been over 4 weeks now and most are holding steady even after the campaigns ended.