The following post is a case study on ranking for a competitive keyword using nothing but blog network links, SE Nuke, Xrumer and Scrapebox. You can follow my case study at: http://www.makemoneyninja.com/black-hat-seo-case-study/ or follow the thread to see my updates/results here.
A Little Back Story
The website i am going to attempt to rank is in the bingo niche. I am going to 301 re-direct a panda penalized site to a new site, the content is going to be roughly the same but i am going to do a few tricks in order to avoid a panda penalty again.
For the most part this will be out of the scope of this article, i am mostly 301ing the old site just for the link juice. The SEOmoz open site explorer metrics of the domain were a DA:45 and homepage PA: 55.
Previously this site was making in the region of $1500-$2000 a month from ranking for various bingo terms. And was getting in the region of 150 visitors a day. After the site got pandered i pretty much gave up on the site and let it sit for around 9 months whilst working on other projects. A quick check of my stats show the site was getting roughly 20 visits a day after the penalty.
New Site and New Keywords
The new site i am going to attempt to rank for some new keywords. I registered an exact match domain.
I dont want to give everything away, but the keyword will be related to “Bingo”.
The keywords i will be targeting will be:
Exact Match Domain Anchor: 9990 exact searches month.
Partial Match Keyword #1: 880 exact searches mont .
Partial Match Keyword # 2: 880 exact searches month.
Difficult partial match #1: 2900 exact searches month.
Difficult partial match #2: 14800 exact searches month.
I would estimate a #1 ranking for the exact match domain anchor would bring in over $1000 a month in revenue. Although this is hard to quantify right now, that is my current best guess. Ranking #1 will be difficult though.
There is another exact match ranking #3 right now and has a page authority of 51 and 200 linking root domains. I will have to outlink these guys to claim the top spot. It will be hard but i am up to the challenge.
Current State Of Site
After the 301 redirect my traffic jumped up to around 120 visitors a day, now a week later it is settled around 70-90 visitors a day most days.
The site currently has 40 pages of content, a contact page, a terms of service page, a privacy policy page. Each page of content has between 500-900 words and most have relevant images and one or two affiliate links.
I have started my link building spree already. Here are my current rankings as things stand:
Exact Match Domain Anchor: Rank 35
Partial Match Keyword #1: Rank 9.
Partial Match Keyword # 2: Rank 8.
Difficult partial match #1: Rank 37.
Difficult partial match #2: Rank 54.
The Link Building Strategy
The crux of my link building strategy will be throw everything at this site and see what sticks.
I will be using a two tier strategy.
Tier 1: Blog Network Links, SE Nuke Links. Creating manual web 2.0 blogs and submitting articles to main article directories.
Tier 2: Xrumer and Scrapebox links from my VPS.
Essentially i will be getting as many high quality tier 1 links as possible, and then i am going to throw as much link spam as possible at all of those links in my second tier and i will see what happens. My prediction is this will work, and it will work very well.
The blog networks i am currently using are: Traffic Kaboom and Article Ranks. This strategy is simple, but requires a lot of work. I already have a fair few spun articles but i will need even more.
I will update back here once every 10 days to talk about serp movements.