One Month of Link Building
This month I have been doing a lot more link building than usual and trying out a few different methods. You can read more about it here. I picked three sites and built links for them throughout the month and now I am going to check how much their ranking improved in the SERPS.
Microniche Site
This was a site with the model number of the product as the domain and it promoted just that one model. The site was thin and had no back links at the start of the month. The site was about one year old.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: 130/not ranked
What did I do: For this site I was targeting two keywords. One was in the domain and the other was brand+domain. I submitted some articles to a few article directories. I got the site bookmarked at 80 social bookmarking sites. I used some other articles to build a ‘link wheel’ for the site which used sites like WordPress.com, Squidoo etc. I then blasted those articles and sites with about 15,000 Xrumer links. None of these Xrumer links pointed directly to my site – just the articles.
Rank at end of month: The site is now number 41 for its domain keyword and 70 for brand+domain keyword.
Evaluation: If I look in Yahoo site explorer hardly any of these links are showing. I’m not sure if that means they are yet to be picked up or have been ignored. Perhaps I need to ping them or something? The site has jumped up the ranks but is still too far down the SERPS to get any traffic. Overall I am pretty disappointed although maybe it is early days and the links are yet to take affect?
Keyword Domain Niche Site
This was a site with a red widgets type domain advertising a single type of product. The site was about 18 months old and had a fair amount of content but never ranked higher than page 3 in the SERPS for its main keyword used in the domain but ranked higher for domain keyword + reviews and things like that.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: 25 for main keyword used in domain & 27 for plural of main keyword.
What did I do: Article submissions, Social Bookmarking, Link Wheels, Pyramids, RSS Feeds & Blasts to Articles (but not directly at site).
Rank at end of month: 30 for main keyword (down 5) & 25 for plural (up 2).
Evaluation: Site actually dropped a few places down the SERPS. There are some links showing in Yahoo link explorer but not as many as there should be. Another fail!
The ‘Big Site’
This was my attempt at a big site started many months ago. The domain does not feature the keyword I am targeting but it has many pages which do target that keyword.
Rank at start of month for main keyword: Not ranked for either keyword.
What did I do: Articles, Blogs, Wheels, Pyramids, Social Bookmarking, etc
Rank at end of month: 108/135
Evaluation: Well at the least the site is ranked now but pages 11 and 14 don’t get you much traffic! Lots of links showing in Yahoo Site Explorer but obviously not enough!
Conclusion
Either these links are yet to take affect, there isn’t enough of them or they aren’t the right kind of links. Not all the links were the best quality I will admit but to be honest I was expecting more from article marketing. Towards the end of the month I did a trial of Article Marketing Robot but did not have much luck with that.
My plan was to work on a couple of sites each month, getting them links, but now that I haven’t had any decent results from this test I am not sure whether to do what I’ve just done on any more of my sites as there doesn’t seem much point.
What do you think readers?
Anyone know a good tool for getting links indexed?
Did you ping the backlinks once they were publically available? – You might get them recognised a bit quicker that way.
Now I’m no expert on the matter, but what you have done doesn’t seem to be very natural to me. Your sites haven’t received many backlinks under their own steam and then one day along comes some articles and then a huge influx of links to them. You leave it for a number of months and then the same thing happens again. It all looks a bit spiky to me.
You know that link building will help so maybe a slower, longer term approach may pay better dividends???
I’ve been working on a slow link building process for a fairly new site. It was static on page 2 for a few months, I then added a couple of links from articles and it dropped a couple of places the day after the articles were indexed. I’m hoping it was just coincidence otherwise I am completely confused!
I would rather suggest you to perform a check on the same data after 15 days, as links usually takes time to get picked up. Also, you didn’t mention details like increase/decrease in the traffic/earnings etc and the total expenses on carrying out the listed activities.
Cheers
Not been pinging to be honest. Well a bit but not sure if it worked as you don’t get much feedback.
Now you know how to get links, experiment and see what works.
Getting 100 links, pointing to your homepage, saying ‘red widgets’ will get different results to
100 links, targeting a few pages, using terms like
cheapest red widgets
widgets
red widgets from redwidgets.co.uk
redwidgets.co.uk
compare red widget prices
widgets in various colours
here
The second gives a lot more natural looking link profile and will yield better results than the first, yet cost exactly the same.
You’ve seen your sites getting ranked and improving from just a single month of link building, so you can see it does works. It’s just needs refining so you can see which bits work and which bits don’t. Once you have worked that out then you can probably get a lot of your smaller sites ranking top with very similar, yet more refined approach.
With regards to your social bookmarking – these aren’t backlinks in themselves, but if Google sees a big social campaign for a website, then sees lots of backlinks appearing then the backlink pattern seem more natural. The bookmarks on there own will do very little. As I say, it’s learning what works. If you only followed them up with a couple of links then you probably wasted your money.
Thanks Ian, some good points there. I will try and mix it up a bit more regarding keywords. Most people I’ve used so far will only let you use one or two anchor keywords per order so I’ve just been doing that.
Good to know that the social bookmarking isn’t worth anything, been doing a lot of that! Will scale it back a bit.
It would be good if there was a service you could sign up to and then choose which types of links your wanted and with what keywords and from where and then let it get on with it.
Thanks.
For getting links indexed try backlinkbooster.com. It won’t get everything indexed but it does help.
yeah and there is a discount code for backlink booster on my site.. I did a review of it a while ago