The following EMD + good content – backlinks case study is something I alluded to in a previous post as a current ongoing test.
One thing I wanted to test out was if a site could rank well (page 1) based on the strength of the domain being keyword-rich. Some scaredy-seo-cats read all sorts of blogs and news flashes by seo theorists and opiners, then they regurgitate/spread the fear and merely add to the confusion some seo noobies might have by telling them that what USED TO WORK doesn’t work any more, or at least not as well as it used to, yet don’t offer to tell people, their “dear” readers…what the reality is, NOW!
But enough ranting eh?
I wanted to see if an EMD could rank well on its own, but I also tried to work the case study in my favor by paying a writer 300 dollars a month to write really, really good, well-researched articles. Therefore I was trying to rank this case study site without backlinks and merely just on the merits of the EMD and good content.
The good content doesn’t make for natural backlinks, that’s still the same, and most likely it’s due to the niche that’s being targeted, it’s a consumer niche not one that see a lot of naturally gained links.
- Anyhow, the EMD’s main domain is page 1 without backlinks.
- The EMD is ranking #4 for the keyword phrase I chose, but it also has an additional keyword in the domain name so it’s not a “true EMD” but it’s obviously close enough.
NOTE: I did age this site with some backlinks as soon as I registered the domain but removed the service form focusing on that site to continue with a cleaner test.
- Why did I pick this particular niche to focus on?
- What could possibly motivate me to spend 300/month on a site yet never monetize it nor build links to it to speed up it’s climb to #1 in Google for all it’s important terms?
Because this niche and particular was one of my best Adsense earners before I got the so-called -50 Google penalty.
When I was ranked #1 with a different true EMD for the aforementioned keyphrase, the site made 75-100/day in Adsense. I also had another EMD which made 50-75/day in Adsense when it ranked well, also.
Nowadays, I decided to avoid those thin site slaps by building a site with better content, and with a lot more content, and I’m going to rank for all those profitable keywords and phrases with just the one site (the current EMD in this case study).
NOTE: The site I mentioned here that ranks well now…only ranks well with the main domain name (the EMD) , and none of the inner urls on this site are ranking well on their own “content merits”.
So, yes EMDs still have SEO value and they do make it easier to rank for CERTAIN keyphrases, but you still have to build links to rank inner urls. One thing I’ve learned from getting a 330/day income stream with Adsense flushed almost entirely down the toilet is that I now know what the profitable keywords are/were, and I also know I don’t want to hire outsourcing staff to write me an endless stream of Exactly 250-word articles for these sites.
I do believe that good content plays a big role in getting sites ranked, but you can easily find plenty of anecdotal examples where crap content (human interpretation) ranks better than really good content. My experience has always been which pincy pennies on one-time costs for content when the content could be the only thing keeping your site from getting slapped?
Another reason I chose this particular niche for my little EMD /good content/no backlinks case study:
I know what ranking #1 or 2 for 2 good money keyphrases with 2 different MFA sites (MFA site = Made For Adsense site) did for my Adsense account as far as earnings went, so now I have a comparison to go by for yet another case study.
The other case study I have going on soon, will be to see how a different monetization method (CPA offers, email marketing of said offers, selling leads etc…) performs versus Adsense earnings.
From what I’ve been told by some master on-site conversion dudes and master niche marketers, Adsense is a good way for newbies to get started with making some coin, but when they saw the keywords I was ranking for BEFORE the slap they told me I was leaving like 300% of the possible income on the table there with those old sites by only having Adsense on them and by having Adsense as the sole monetization method.
This next case study should be interesting, because it means I can build a “safer” income stream niche website, and make more with it, from it by using a safer method, IF the results are there.
If Adsense shows to be the better earner as opposed to other monetization methods, then the next thing to consider is how to safely keep those rankings now that you’ve got Google’s tracking codes stuff on your site, via the Adsense code.
Dumb geeky side note: In the movie Lord of the Rings, whenever the possessor of the ring puts the ring (Adsense code) on his/her finger (website) the Evil Eye of Sauron (Google) tends to zero in on that entity (website/person) a bit more and can cause some distress over time to the code/ring-bearer.
And the same principle applies to Google analytics, by the way, at least for me it does, which is why I don’t use GA. EVER
But here’s what I want/hope you get from my blathering on here….
- EMDs still pack plenty of SEO value as far as ranking the domains fo rtheir keywords/phrases are concerned.
- With EMDs, (true emds hybrids emds or other…), focus more on the content
- With keyword rich domains with good helpful good content on them, be patient with the SERPs and rankings, they will come (inner urls are a different story)
Some final notes since I haven’t written here for a while
MFAs: Made For Adsense sites… These usually look like thing sites with poor content on them and the sites themselves are only monetized with Adsense, therefore they can be deemed as having been Made For Adsense, meaning the site’s there to collect Adsense clicks and not an “MFVs” > Made For Visitors,or MFSs > Made For Searchers.
-50 Google penalty? I’m not even sure what this is, but I’ve heard the term bandied about and in my head -50 means that’s how many places Google decided to drop your site in the SERPs for whatever reason they decided, and in a lot of cases, it’s a precursor to getting an Adsense site or account banned (NOT the case with me though, none of my -50 MFAs did any damage to my Adsense account, except for a loss of 300 plus /day income).
What’s coming next to this space for case studies?
MFAs versus sites that rank for same keywords and phrase just monetized differently. This will take a few more months to complete for a lot of reasons, one of which being…it takes a marketing brain that understands the target audience’s wants, needs and desires to market effectively to that audience and to write effectively for that audience.
Getting hubs, lenses, and self hosted websites (semi-EMDs) ranked highly again after recent Google algorithms dumped some of them in the SERPs. (Added value/content plus persistent link building seems to be working here for some of the hubs, to them, too).
Reviews on:
Submit Your Article (not looking good),
LinkPushing.net (need interface work, but shows promise,
SENukeX ( I got the yearly license and I got people using it for last 2 weeks or so),
a re-evaluation, re-review of MyLinkClub, Unique Article Wizard, Article Marketing Robot, Free Traffic System, Linxboss is always being tested, it’s slowly regaining its past mojo but no definitive exciting proof just yet)
Review on Article Marketing Automation (just another middleman network?)
3 month case study on profiles backlinks (spent around 800 dollars on this one, and I don’t have much hope for it bearing fruit)
And some other stuff I can’t remember right now….
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{ 52 comments… read them below or add one }
Priceless info here .. great post Daniel !
I wonder – does the others in G first page are heavily backlinked or not ?
Also – are there any outgoing links to other (authoritative) sites in the same niche ?
It’s great to hear that you are reviewing linkpushing , i have some mixed results with their service , but i always use their article fetch mechanism … maybe i should start using the service with my own articles.. anyway I suggest you review both ways.
Best regards,
Ron
Ron, damned good questions man, and I sort of skipped over a lot of what I did with this case study site for on page stuff. One of the things I did with case study EMD site, is link out to authority sites via content articles, blog rolls and footers, basically building an MFV or MFS kind of site.
There are some OLD SERPs and sites in top 10, some aren’t great sites, som eare authority sites for this niche, they’re old and rank for other kws effortlessly or so it seems. One thin gI’m finding now is that unseating long-standing top SERPs takes more time and due diligence.
Competitors for this keyphrase use site farms, high PR links, and some meager article marketing links.
LinkPushing said they intend to redesign their interface to make it more amenable, easier for people doing tiered linking, which is best use of this service, in my opinion… If you can be bothered to, use it for tiered or layered linking, use subsequent pushes to link up the previous push urls, and yes maybe use your own spun content to see if that helps, good point there as well!:)
Hey Dan,
What have you done with those sites that got the -50 penalty? Are you still building backlinks to them and if so have you seen any change in there rankings?
I built backlinks to some, built backlinks and added content to some, left others completely alone, sold a few of them to people who deleted old site content, put up[ new site content, and they can’t move the site up in the serps, and the sold sites were put on new hosting, have new themes, my Adsense codes off of there etc….
Hi Daniel, Do you have a an aff code for LinkPushing.net? I am thinking of trying it out.
Hi Andy, I appreciate you asking, but since I can’t recommend this service right now as it currently works I can’t give out an affiliate link for it, sorry. They need to make the interface a little bit better and easier to do the tiered linking before i do do enough pushes to give their service a good test. As it stands right now I could do like 20 pushes a month but it’s just not worth the hassle for me to try to download reports, find urls, save them to a text file, create a new push, edit it, add the urls from the previous push, then when that minimal pushing is done, go back over EVERYTHING again, see what’s still there (sticky versus not deleted) and if what’s still there is indexed, then go index what’s not indexed, etc…..
Greg and his biz partner are smart dudes and Greg knows how I feel about the interface, so I’m confident that they’ll make some needed changes
Daniel,
You mentioned: “but it also has an additional keyword in the domain name so it’s not a “true EMD” but it’s obviously close enough.”
Are you telling that EMD + additional keyword in the domain name is almost as effective as EMD?
If I add a hq or something at the end of an EMD (e.g. EMDhq.com) it can be easy to rank with good content?
Gary, good question and yes, in this particular case study, the page 1 serps have similar style EMDs, emdreview.com emdadvisor.com .net. org, hypenateds etc….
If you go the emdhq.XXX, emdadvisor.XXX route, it actually might be easier to brand your site is you made it look super legit, as if you were actually an ADVISOR or site actually seemed like an informational HQ, or it was a true review site etc… it only helps make your life easier if you create those MFVs, or MFSs.
In my situation here with my EMD, I didn’t go after an HQ,Advisor,Review type of word to grab an EMD, I just looked for any word that might bring in traffic when searched for in conjunction with any of the other keywords in the domain name. This lessens my chances of getting site naturally branded, but I’m still banking on type in organic traffic rather than hoping someday my prince will come (aka my site gets type in traffic becaus eits branded so well)
Great article Daniel. Thanks for publishing this kind of review. Was curious and wondered if you could give us a little more insight on why you don’t use Google Analytics. You seemed pretty adamant about it.
Thanks,
Jay
Thanks Dan
Always appreciate your views and reviews.
I am using UAW on your recommendation and have just bought SEO Link Robot (got in at the one time fee, before it went to monthly subscription).
I have also bild a link indexing site from the info in one of your other posts, and that is making a huge difference to my UAW and ohter links getting found by Google, so thanks again.
Cheers
Mark
Hi Mark, thanks for the feedback, glad to hear that it’s working well for you,
Dan
Thanks Dan for an insight on link versus no link. Appreciate all of your “case studies”.
John
Thanks John, obviously this would be better test if I did this with 5-10 different niches and EMD types, but one thing I’m getting from this, and I hope others do too, is…. in competitive niches there tends to be some cut throat SEO stuff going on and by this I mean that your competitors can and will report your sites to Google and if your site is an MFA then G will take a look at your site, and if they see anything untoward about it (thin site, poor content, solely keyword optimized content not an MFV site, inbound links profile is mostly spam links aka profile links) then they might take your site down a notch or -50 and pretty much PLACE your site there and keep it there for an undetermined amount of time. I’ve had some talks with people who did Adsense back in the day, who had same things happen to their slew of MFAs and some site took 6 months to 2 years to rebound.
So what I’m saying here is, if you can remove ANY reason why Google would look at your site and deem in not quality, then we should do so, and seeing as how this particular site is doing, I ‘m pretty confiden tI could put Adsense on it again and recoup those lost earnings, but to me, it’s never really about the money, just the knowledge that can be gained.
If this one site case study is evidence enough that EMDs with good content and natural outbound links from content articles, footer links, and blog roll links can rank well in a stable and consistent manner, then we can save ourselves a lot of time form doing needless link building. Some natural skeptics may view me and this site you’re on now as a site that pushes services and tools on people, but this post here should help people save time from doing stuff there’s really no need to do, if there’s EMDs and good content involved. We should all try to be more patient with SEO and do what some seo gurus suggest, which is give the target audience what they really want; good, solid, helpful information.
Another thing: sometimes it’s inadvisable to write site content to focuses on niche keywords all the time. I know that many martketers marketing to the webmasters/marketing crowd will tell you to write content that is going ot get you more traffic, hence the writing for search engines angle, but there’s lots of other things you can do to make a site perform better in the search engines.
For example: if you write for visitors, if you engage them with content that they actually do want to read, but there’s no search engine traffic for that search term your article ranks well for, then the benefit THERE is… the visitors spends more time on your site, they may read other posts, articles on your site, the search engines see that activity, that search click stream, and they DO record that somehow or another, and in the long run that non kw optimized post served a purposed despite the fact that it doesn’t bring in more search traffic right away.
Sorry if my reply if off topic here, I haven’t written anything on here in a while and have some information I’ve been meaning to share and I gotta get back to writing more to share better.
Hope all is well with you, thanks for stopping in and leaving some feedback,
Dan
Hi Dan
Very good point about user engagement. I have had sites where there should be more than 50 keywords ranked well but because my bounce rate what over 75% Google would then drop my rankings. IT would often take about a month or two to get those rankings back.
My opinion is that the weighinting of the algorithm has shifted more towards engament. In some cases it was possible for me to outrank EMD that had more age and more backlinks.
Hi Dan,
Welcome back!
I would also be interested in your views on Google Analytics. In my Internet Marketing career I went through a stage of building a number of thin sites and trying to get each one to earn something and didn’t put analytics on them as that was the advice at the time. I have now changed my approach to working on fewer sites but really focussing on getting the best results from them. I believe my on-page SEO and content is top class and I am using Analytics and webmaster tools – why not? I reserve my grey hat activities for the off site stuff which still makes me nervous, but playing the game well delivers such great results it s hard to resist the temptation.
Colin.
Thanks Colin.
I prefer to let Big Brother know less about my site because it’s just good common sense, and there’s plenty of other tools out there than can be used to track things better. If you’re using PPC, GA might be a good way to go though since it can integrate well with site and PPC campaigns.
Daniel , from your opinion and experience with on building links , I’m Testing ranking autoblogs with EMD.
Do you think that Autblogs still working ? and could reach top on competitive niches with some “X00″ links?
I would like to hear your answer
What you want to do with autoblogs is start site off with 10-20 quality articles, sometimes AKA “pillar content”, make these kw driven traffic generating articles/pages/posts, stick them on front page of site or make them static, or even separate form the autoblog blog so that means having 2 wordpress installs on same site, then run the autoblog content like you normally would, but use some on-site traffic redirecting techniques for links back to pillar content and money pages.
I have an autoblog in computers niche and its not ranked in first 5 pages for the keywords in the domains, even without spaces between keywords. I did zero link building to the main domain url though, and didn’t put any unique pillar content on it. I think you need some unique content and links to start the autoblog off on the right foot
How much Power from your experience you think EMD + some BMR Backlinks could have ?
I mean , do you think you could rank a new EMD + BMR Backlinks on a Two Phrase Keyword Product?
I would like to know what you think from your experience.
Thanks Daniel
I got a thin EMD page 2 for a 2 kw phrase, CPC 157 dollars, about 5-7k exact searches a month, with about 15-20 BMRs, for 3 kw phrase about 50 BMRs and #7, page 1 for that
Nice men!. Wow. 150 CPC … thats insane xD. Have fun there!!!.
Thanks for the Answer .
Hi Daniel i am one of the fan of your site because of the reviews you write on Linkbuilding and i am a blogger at techntricksonline.com i need to build backlinks for my blog and rank higher so is there any wordpress plugin which does backlinking automatically and is there any affordable monthly backlinks service that provides more backlinks in a price of $35 to $40 per month.
WR
Bharath
TechnTricksonline
Sometimes all you gotta do is ask for people to link to your stuff by providing html codes, widgets at end of articles. Make sure you have RSS Footer plugin installed, there’s some plugins that search for related topics and articles and link to them via trackbacks, but what you link to tends to change, so you’re giving false trackbacks sometimes, and this could be misconstrued as spam linking.
Maybe try RSS plugins, RSS footer, WebTrafficGenius, Automatic Backlink Creator, etc…
Hey Dan,
It would be cool to see some more tests on LinxBoss. I used LinxBoss on a brand new domain and ended up with a -950 penalty. Been trying to figure out how to get it back up ever since. My situation is very similar to what happened with this guy: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/03/what-happens-when-you-build-10000-dodgy-links-to-a-new-domain-in-24-hours.html#comment-125703.
Hey Tony, I agree, and have put in 5-6 new inner urls into Linxboss lately and they’re responding well, but today and yesterday there seems to be a lot of bouncing around, re adjustments going on, with all sorts of sites, MFAS, pure whitehat sites, sites with mixed inbound link profiles etc…
About the linked-to url you posted, it’s got nothing to do with LinxBoss since you can’t get 10k links to one domain in 24 hours using LB. That post is sort of misleading because 10k links in 24 hours doesn’t mean any search engines saw those all at once, and only a small percentage of those will EVER be seen by the SEs, and that person most likely used profile spam linking which is pretty much a dead linking method, or at BEST, a not very useful long term direct linking method.
Hi Daniel.
I’m a long time reader of your blog and thank you for useful information you are giving.
A little tip for you and rest of community if you guys don’t like Big G analytics you can use Piwik for site analytics I find it even better
Thanks for the reference Kito, looks like Piwik does what GA does, but without giving G access to everything about our sites’ traffic
There is another analytics package that is quite comparable to GA. It is called clicky (getclicky.com) and they offer a comparison against all the top stats sites/services.
Hi daniel today 25/april a lot of my main keywords from different sites went down 5-10 positions,all this keywords had 99% of links from blog networks.Even keywords that was holding 1# for more than 6 months dropped.
Did you noticed any changes on your sites ?
Hi yes, good question, and I’m surprised the forums aren’t a-Twitter about this yet. I’ve had sites of ALL kinds affected, some old ones, new ones, thin EMDs, authority sites, articles, web 2.0s, they all got affected, and they all had different linking methodologies applied to them, form no linking at all, to tons of spamlinking and to everything in between. Consider this a Google shuffle and be patient, the good sites will recover…
I think that google is just testing several stuff for giving the right rank, but if you are doing the correct method you will be ok…
“…that person most likely used profile spam linking which is pretty much a dead linking method, or at BEST, a not very useful long term direct linking method.”
should i continue my sick marketing subscription as i mainly use it for profile links, and i see mix results sometimes rankings improve and mostly no change in serps, should i unsubscribe to this service if is really a dead linking method?
I read the article and the comments, the site mentioned, got dinged and then came back. But it was a new site that started getting links all at once and stopped. That alone is a huge indicator to Google that something “unnatural” is going on.
Spam Links:
Profile links by themselves are dead. However, profile links with comments on the profiles has value.
Blog Comments have value, it is very natural (as you can all see) for people to comment on blogs. Google, Yahoo and Bing realize that most sites regulate their own blog comments. Blog Comments aren’t all that strong, but they do help build relationship with sites, which can lead to guest blogging, which Google loves.
Article Directories still have a small value to them. If you are in DMOZ, Yahoo, or Business.com they have a little bit more value. Because article directories were spammed in the past, Google came down on them, but since Google has changed from a negative approach to “discounting link value” approach, this has allowed a certain level of link juice to Article Directories.
RSS feeds are still useful.
Pinging has its place
Social Bookmarks, have a max value, and after you get so many social bookmarking links back to a page on your site, you will get no more value from the social bookmarks.
Don’t even worry about ping backs linking.
The old style of Article Marketing has lost its luster and much of its link juice. The original article still have value, link juice. But links generated from the article linking back to your money page, has very little value. If you don’t believe me, listen to Matt Cutts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY&feature=youtube_gdata
Notice, he doesn’t say Good Articles have no value, he said poorly written articles, or links generated from the syndication of an article has little value.
Please also note, that doesn’t mean don’t use the software you have for article submissions, rather you need to come up with new ways of doing it, including ensuring your content (if spun) is high quality, makes sense, and the spelling and Grammar is correct.
Be very careful if your in blog content network.
A good one will require a new post for each and every blog (per keyword). If they don’t run far far away.
Blog Content Networks are mostly easy to figure out for Google. Mostly because those who use them, spam the crap out of them, with crappy articles, and they are the same people who do it time and time again. (If your gonna do one, get into a private one, with strict guidelines).
Press Releases are still good. But they only last 2 to 5 days.
Video’s are great. But like a Press release they might only last 5-14 days.
Buying/renting links can be effective, but also carries risk with it.
Well written content on your site is also helpful, while other quality back linking is going on.
I have 7 EMD’s that all have good original new content on each one. Each page has quality Article and Web2.0 links linking back to them (no spam links) In 4 months since they were created they are all on the first page for 3/5ths of their keywords. More importantly none use Google Adsense and are doing just fine.
If you do link building in a natural looking way, your site(s) will do just fine. Sometimes it takes longer than the spam linking, but in the long run it is well worth it!
Hi there!
This is my first time leaving a comment here. Just wanted to say great post and I have been following your stuff now for a while.
I do have one question though… You said the following: “NOTE: I did age this site with some backlinks as soon as I registered the domain but removed the service form focusing on that site to continue with a cleaner test.”
Can you please clarify this statement? Particularly the “I did age this site with some backlinks”.
Many thanks!
Duncan
Aging a site with backlinks means getting any type of credited links to get it on the map, and when it’s an EMD even just a few low quality indexed links can propel it forward a bit faster to the front of the line, than without links. It’s always good to get some links to a new site ASAP to start developing a link velocity history, too… Instead of building a site, waiting for spiders to index content, then once the majority of your conten ti sup, to start building links all of a sudden to achieve rankings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I believe it’s IMPERATIVE nowadays that you get social links to content ASAP for all content on site but especially new content because if your site content gets indexed AFTER a scraper site scrapes your content then gets it indexed firs,t it affects your site in the long term.
This has nothing to do with this case study above, but just saying…. it is definitely recommended that you get links to your content ASAP upon publication.
Hi Daniel,
You’ve got me thinking about this “domain aging technique” it sounds really good.
Do you have a post on how to do this ste-by-step? Or know of somewhere that does (I have “Googled” but found nothing).
Do mean you start sending links before the website is even up? Won’t Google discredit these because the domain is not up yet?
Really looking forward to hearing more on this.
Hi Duncan, you can’t game AGE unless you buy domains before they expire, but what I meant was, just let the site sit, or add content to it here and there over the course of a few months or a year even, then start a content and backlinking campaign once a site is maybe 3-6 months old…
Dan have you seen any recent movement over the past few days/week in your EMDs? Over the past week we’ve seen some significant declines in some families of EMDs in very competitive niches. What has been odd is that some niches seem untouched whereas others have gotten hammered (travel, financial, education). We have dominated one EMD market for over six years and have noticed over the past few days that nearly all EMD related sites are gone and are replaced by big brand sites versus other niche competitors. We have followed the same strategy you outlined of focusing on quality content combined with conservative promotion and natural social promotion. Just curious if you’re seeing any movement?
The EMD mentioned here dropped to #11 recently, and I think it has more to do with the fact that I messed around with the site navigation than anything else. I have a medium comp kw/EMD that’s maintained its page 1 ranking (travel niche) and it’s a thin EMD with mostly BMR links. There seems to be an almost constant shuffling going on in SERPs with Google these days.
Regarding branding, I think have naked links, full urls mentions without anchor text helps with branding a site so you might want to diversify anchor text for the EMDs to make them seem like a branded name for the site
i agree with you Daniel, i have some EMD and they are doing ok, they are a little bit dancing cause of some backlinks built with Alex Rank Builder.
But im writing some backlinks on buildmyrank and they are helping me come back to the top.
Yeah google is like testing something that sometimes sites start jumping around…
Daniel i have a question for you.
Do linxboss work good for EMD and rank it for the domain keyword?
Also what is the lowest price you have paid for someone write your articles for buildmyrank ?
Another question, i have being reading your blog and i see that you make a lot of money from adsense , i would like to know if you follow someone product guide , or you just developed your own strategy ? i would like to have some guide to follow and start building some adsense sites, about the cpc keyword etc etc.
thanks for the help daniel
I followed the outline here for Adsense income, but the thin EMDs all got whacked hard and I no longer make good money doing that. It was fun while it lasted, and was almost TOO easy doing it, but then a slew of algorithm updates, combined with Google code being on my sites, combined with other things that made the 300/day go down to 3-5/day…. the sites haven’t recovered and I’m doing things differently now, and will build out a whole slew of REAL sites in next few months for Adsense and other monetization streams.
Moving forward with Adsense sites, the best thing to do seems to be writing good content, and mixing up the site monetization and not using Adsense only on the sites, build a list, use Amazon, ClickBank, CPA offers, banners, affiliate marketing stuff etc…..
Thanks for the info.
Well im using my EMD for promoting some amazon products , but the thing im worried about is that in the point i started internet marketing everything have changed , i mean , the things used to work for others stopped working so i have to adapt to a new stuff and this means time.
I will keep building links to my EMD and promoting amazon and see what will happen…
I am finding I am beating most of my competition by using more content than they use (400 words+ per post compared to their 150 words) having it well optimised and good, rich, useful info.
Also done a fair bit of off site SEO for the big key words but site seems to kick ass for long tail. Hits the top 3 literally a day after I post something and target a phrase. The site is real estate related.
Have some mortgage websites which are only 10 or so page sites and they don´t seem to have suffered or moved. Noticed a lot of competitor sites have disappeared though, maybe because they havent been updated for a while?
Andy, thanks for chiming in… While there are many anecdotal references we can choose to select from, to warrant our theories on what works one way or another, I think it’s best to look at what works and why, so like you mentioned, your site with lots of content and longer content does better than your thin sites, and competitors’ thin sites are getting hurt, too.
But if comp is low, and site is ranking in a non-threatening SERP, like top of page 2 or near bottom of page 1, then it stands a good chance of remain somewhat decently ranked due to still being under the radar, or just that there aren’t any better SERPs or site alternative for the engines to display.
I’m just saying, advising, look deep but not too deep as to why some sites do well and some don’t. It has an awful lot to do with onpage seo, the quality of your competitors, or competing sites for those keywords, or lack thereof, even…
I took a 1 year hiatus from creating any “passive” income streams. I have come back to find a lot of stuff changing. What used to work now doesn’t, what didn’t used to work now does, lots of new tools and lots of people talking about Google rule changes and penalties. My head is spinning.
I recently picked up a couple of exact match domains with decent search volume and high (about $4.00) CPC as estimated by Google Keyword Tools.
One of them has a search volume of about 2400 locally and 4400 global and I was able to get the .com for that 2-word domain. The other was a much better catch with over 12k local searches and 18k+ global searches per month. I was able to get the .org version of this 2-word domain.
Unfortunately, I’ll be competing with a full front page of aged medical authority sites (webmd, etc)… some of them with higher PR. Luckily, not many of them are optimized for that keyword and very few of them have over 200 backlinks.
In the past, my strategy for sites has been to use some sort of slow, steady backlinking for about 3 or 4 months (using UAW or something similar). That would typically cause my site to “bubble up” slowly to the front page. From there, I would usually try to get some higher PR links and links from video sites to get the site all the way up to the #1 position.
Do you think this is still a good technique for getting a site up to the #1 position? Also, which site should I start with… the .org EMD domain with more search volume, or the .com EMD with fewer searches?
Hi Dan, following you from months a go, and want to congratulate you for this great site and the info you are sharing with all of us your testing results.
I want to introduce me as a fellow IM’er and SEO’r, little less than 5 years in the affiliate world and many fails, but also many successes. I want to introduce now my new backlinking services to all of you guys, and want to take the risk and be evaluated by you Dan, and other 3 of your best guest people here at your blog.
My offer is to give you guys a free test of my services during 6 months. I need one URL & KEYWORD per each customer, that’s all. The only condition is that you MUST NOT BE BUILDING ANY LINKS TO THESE URL.
Please let me know what you think and how can we do this interesting to everyone of your readers.
Thanks.
Julio
I can attest to the fact that emd’s are very effective. We recently bought several domains, and put content on them. With in 1 day we were ranking for each of the emd’s “keyword”, it was awesome.
All where .com’s
HI Dan, your blog is a great resource.
First thanks for taking the time to give us a lot of valuable information. Sometimes I am a bit confused, but that is probably just me. Your comments about big brother analytics and ads from them ( I’m even scared to use the name now ) really rings a bell with me.
I have been trying to make some money online for nearly a year having previously been only able to get email and use you know who to look for things.
Initially I was thrilled to just get a website up and running on WP but that wore off after a while and i have been trying like mad since then to make a few bucks.
Anyway, so I don’t bore you or anyone else reading this. My sites did the famous dance, which I had read about and then I had 4 of my 8 sites settle down on Page 1. I built backlinks by commenting on blogs and a few forums.
Well, two weeks ago I checked webmaster tools which I had not done for months ( pre-page1 visits) and discovered that I was being asked to re-verify. Somehow the verification code disappeared, perhaps when i changed themes.
So I re-verified and less than a week later my sites went from Page 1 to page 66-68. What a drag! I was actually starting to think that it might be possible for a complete newbie and one who doesn’t really understand what he is doing to make some pocket money.
I will persevere, but this has been a dispiriting experience. BTW I looked around your blog and didn’t see the answer. What are your thoughts on hyphenated domain names?
Thanks.
Also wanted to ask a question. I have a site that I’m building good, in depth content on and is a real life interest of mine. It has an EMD but my inexperience is in getting the inner url’s ranked like you mention here. Do you have some advice or a post you can point me in the direction of? Thanks in advance.
Daniel, thanks for your answers to my previous questions about HPBL. Now some more q’s
First, just to clarify: new emd’s are still ok for ranking (post was written 7months ago…) ? How about emd.info? Or is emdblog.com better?
Would you prefer a new emd over an aged high PR domain that has nothing to do with the keyword?
Let me put my questions in a bit of perspective: I used to rank for KW. Got me $300-$500 monthly with no effort. Along came panda and slapped it into oblivion.
Now I’m not about to try to resurrect the old site. But I know this obscure kw is profitable so…. just trying to decide my next course of action. Would really appreciate your advice/thoughts/opinions on this
Hi Aldo, the point I was hoping you’d have gleaned form this post is that EMDs in medium to easy kw competition range don’t need ANY work to rank, and that the inner urls are where your efforts should be focused since those are getting less benefit, if any at all, from the “power ” of the EMD being keyword rich.
If your EMD Kws are competitive then yes, keep linking them up, add as much variety and natural-ness as possible (naked links, brand mentions, social links with and without anchor text etc….)
Daniel Thanks for making my point clear!