SEO Case Study – 4 Sites: Blog Network Links

Grand | Jan 03, 2010 | 0 comments

Today it’s been a month since I’ve started my SEO experiment, but anyway the name of the post is not like “1 month update” since the experiment seems not to have been completed yet )

After I wrote my last post about this, it’s been a lot of offline activity that kept me off of doing a lot of work with this promotion, so I went kinda semi-automatic way and decided to leverage the “power” of blog networks for backlings building.

It took me 10 minutes to scrape the Ezinearticles for several shot 250-350 word articles to be used as a source for my posts. I rewrote one of the articles and placed it into the blog network with the main keywords as anchor texts inside my post.

Next, I simplt uploaded my post and specified the # of posts to be posted to the network on a daily basis. That’s it.

All I have to say, after the couple of days I’ve lost all my rankings in top 100 position I previously had. However, in other 2 days, the rankings claimbed back again, but what’s the most interesting? Let’s take a look at the screens:

Site #1 rankings for 02.01.2010:

My main presell subpage is ranking for the main keyword on 66 position and 2 other long-tail variations on positions 84 and 14.

Site #2 ranking:

The root domain ranks on position #8 for my main keywords and also a subpage holds positions for 3 long-tail keywords.

Site #3 dances around 3-5 page of Google for main keyword, still no rankings for long-tail variation.

Site#4 ranking:

Just as I expected, this is my worst performing site so far, it occasionaly hits 7 page for the variation of the main keyword (which is exactly it’s domain name) and sometimes it gets kicked off of his positions, then comes back again.

Overal Result of Blog Network Strategy:

If you compare these screens with the previous post positions, you’ll find that I only hit the page 1 for 1 keyword only, which won’t give me the necessary traffic for making some sales. To be frank, I haven’t made a single sale yet, and this led me to some new thoughts…

As for the backlinks from the blog networks, I can say that I there are some good and bad points that I found after doing this test.

Good points:

1. You need only 250-300 word low quality article + 2-3 variations to create a good spin

2. You may place up to 3 links into each post (that lead to the domains or subpages you specify) – not that strict as with article directories.

3. The process is on autopilot – you just write article, spin it and submit to the blog network – the rest is done for you, posts are spreading out over the blogs automatically, backlings grow every day.

4. Blog network backlinks a good automated way to support your “links wheels”, so you can devote only a fraction of time to your links network maintenance, and submit 1-2 articles on a monthly basis to keep growing your links and maintain your high SERPs.

Bad points:

1. The quality of backlinks is not too good for targeting some competitive keywords, like mine.

2. If you do it wrong, google may actually devalue your site positions (like it happened with me) and even sandbox your site (thanks God it didn’t happen to my sites), so you can say “goodbye” to your fast earnings and wait until the sandbox is gone.

3. Participating in a blog network usually requires ongoing membership fees, which is not good if you’re on a tight budget.

4. Blog network is NOT a one-stop solution to your SEO backlink building efforts, this strategy has its limits, and works well under certain circumstances only.

Ok, I’ve made a lot of work in these days in terms of planning and thinking over my whole busness, and I’ve planned everything, so I’ve got a different strategy for pushing these 4 sites to the top.

As you can see, I’ve done my keyword selection more than 1 month ago, and after 1 month of work I’m still not seeing return (I mean $$$ ). However, I think I’ll write another post soon about some interesting experiment I’ve made secretly )) that gives a KEY to fast SEO success…