So as I mentioned in my post about how to build a blog network, for advanced people you might want to buy aged domains or build your own websites and not just rely on web 2.0. This post is a case study of someone who is ranking for massive keywords and will probably hate me if he ever finds this post but I think this will be of great value to those who want to see what advanced people do and how far you can push SEO. I was doing keyword research in the acne niche and found this website http://www.acnetreatment-reviews.com/ (not gonna link to him to not give backlink.. + he probably is not happy that I reveal his network) ranking for (as discovered thanks to using semrush.com that I explained in this post)
#3 acne treatment (50k exact match!!!)
#1 acne treatments (8k)
#1 best acne products 5k
#2 acne products 4.4k
Impressive rankings huh? He ranks for way more keywords but I just put the ones that jumped in my mind as being very good and only 2-3 words which is usually even harder to rank for. His site has a PR2 and has been registered in 2008 so it’s definitely not super old (you can find that info using http://whois.domaintools.com). It also says his website might be for sale on sedo lol. If true, pretty sure you’ll have to spend a couple thousand if not more depends how much those keywords convert I suppose… Not sure when he started working on his website, it doesn’t show in web archive.
Anyway, if you look at his backlinks with a free tool like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ you can see that he has a lot of sitewide links from high PR links, as high as PR6! (some examples of lower PR ones are http://jodifur.com/, http://www.3daymom.com/) I’m not sure if those are his blogs or hes buying PR links but either way… It does show that sitewide links probably still helps rankings (I do not currently contact people to test this, but I think I should… I’ll never buy PR links though if that is what he does to get those links.. I think that’s very risky especially when he does it from websites that are almost completely not related to this acne website…)
Anyway, what is most interesting is his blog network that if you drill down his backlinks you will eventually find a private blog network. Look at a few of these websites below, do you see a recurring theme ?
http://hzxf119.com/
http://womenscarecottage.org/ (PR 0, registered in 2010 so he does not only buy aged domains)
http://woodreview.org/
http://yserifis.org/
http://cmiiug.com/
http://jeanswhite.com/
http://balerina.info/
He uses sitewide links to pass PR on to other websites in his “backlink” network. He also mixes those sitewide links with some high PR websites like mayoclinic, wikipedia, ask.com, bing.com… etc I guess this is done so the websites also links to high PR websites and not just his low PR ones that are all probably somewhat recent websites. Or maybe he thinks this will make it harder for people from google to notice his network…
A quick scan shows that they are on different hosting accounts, or at the very least IP address. They don’t seem to be shared accounts so he must have his own hosting or pays quite a bit for these accounts, much more than the $8 per month with hostgator.com 😛
Anyway, the links to his “money sites” are done in the form of in text links. You can see that he is in many niches. Maybe he shares that network with some other people doing IM but I highly doubt it’s part of a big public network like UAW or AR. His in content links are done with spun content and if he’s smart (and I’m sure he is) he probably might not even manually upload all these articles.. He might just use a tool like Article Marketing Robot where you can put your own network of wordpress sites and use it to distribute articles to websites you control. This is definitely something that everyone doing a blot network should implement… including me since I currently manually use spun articles from TBS and then post them on each of my websites once a month or so(as I said they have no links to my money site for now), just make sure your articles at least look readable after they are spun… His articles also seem to fit this criteria.
I’m not sure how effective that network is since I’m not the owner but they probably help with his rankings and after looking at the keywords he is ranking for he definitely knows what he’s doing. To me it still seems very obvious it’s a private network used to game google (you do not want google to find that). I imagine he must be making a fortune out of this blog network to cover the related expenses and time investment to make sure some of them have different themes, setting them up, buying the domains with PR etc.
I’m currently doing something similar, I think you are safe as long as you in content link to other relevant websites but I’m a bit worried by how his sitewide links make it obvious those blogs are only meant to game google. Personally I’m still seeing great results from public blog networks like the ones I always mention but I’m still building one as a backup solution for in the future, and also to see how effective they really are once I finally use them. I think I will wait 6+ months and use them for some of the keywords I have a hard time ranking for after all this time.
Hopefully you guys enjoy this post, I often analyze my competitors backlinks in this way, if you guys enjoyed this post I might post more of these case studies.
Very Smart… how much would it cost to pay to get different IP’s? and besides that how to improve the PR of those sites? Thinking about for a blog network of 8 sites PR4 will be wonderful.
I currently use a cheap alternative that works for me which is host nine, it’s $20 a month if you use the reseller package and you can decide on which cluster of servers you want your account hosted on. USeast, USwest, UK, Singapore, US central so you get a lot of different IP’s. I make my websites use private name servers which I think are enough to hide them (I did not want them to all have the same name servers that hostnine gives you).
To improve PR, you just do like normal websites, build backlinks to them and let them age. Do follow blog comments do not really help with ranking but they do provide a lot of PR, I’m considering doing that to my own network.
Alex, do you create private name servers for each domain?
domain1.com => ns1.domain1.com & ns2.domain1.com
domain2.com => ns1.domain2.com & ns2.domain2.com
domain3.com => ns1.domain3.com & ns2.domain3.com
domain4.com => ns1.domain4.com & ns2.domain4.com
Or use one private name server for all domains?
Thanks!
Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not. Mix of everything.
hey Alex , would be great to get case studies for new sites and how they improve their ranking in google with time, why exactly and after how much time it took them for some specific keywords and competitions..(if its possible ofcourse)
….
btw were you check if your backlinks got indexed in the search engines or not…I built backlinks in the last 2 weeks or so…and its seems according to yahoo backlinks that just 2-3 of them got recognized …
Money article.
Does google frown upon using spun article and mass distributing them with AMR. Been using it a lot and wondered if their were any repercussions.
More case studies like this would be awesome. Learned alot
Nah, theirs nothing negative unless you do it too quick. When you use tools like AMR you just submit your article to a lot of websites that willingly receive it. At most Google might eventually discount the links from article marketing (similar to how blog comments are heavily discounted in my experience when I tried those).
awesome case study.
those websites were insanely similiar. …if someone reported that to google would they automatically see that its a link-farm kind of set up due to the similiarity of the websites and ban his ass?
I wonder… I can’t say I’m talking in experience here but I think they would lose all PR or something, maybe get de-indexed.
cool alex, yeh i think they’d be banned for a period of time.
1.so whats your little process when it comes to buying aged/higher PR domains? do you look for a domain with keywords in the url that youre trying to rank for?
where do you go to buy these domains?… do you contact the owner personally?
2.also any more info on how to manage a group of these sites on different ip address’? do you use some sort of proxy shit or have you got a number of different computers available?
im making about $40-50 a day. im looking to create my own product soon… itll take a few months to get that finished so in the meantime i can build up some sort of link network for myself. the niche is similiar to the acne niche. some intense competition
1. Well I look for keywords in URL sometimes to maybe get an exact match but that’s very rare. Most of the time for Pr dropped domains I go to http://www.dropday.com/. I only bought 4 domains with PR many months ago so far. I built about 5 from scratch, I’m curious to see how much PR they will gain naturally before I use them for backlinks.
2. Well if you do not have google analytics (and you should not) google has no way of knowing what IP address is logging to a website. All that matters is a different host IP.
Alex, you should have hidden referrer to his website if you don’t want him find out this post.
For “acne treatment reviews” it shows as 2,900 searches. I wonder why it showed you 15K.
What do you mean he uses site-wide links? You mean links in sidebar or same links in every post? I see sidebar links lead to authority sites while links in every post lead to his money sites.
You said:
“They don’t seem to be shared accounts so he must have his own hosting or pays quite a bit for these accounts, much more than the $6 per month with bluehost.com”
– What do you mean “his own hosting”?
At Hostnine i am required purchasing SSL certificate for $39 per year to get different IPs. And they also do not guarantee C-Class IPs which are the ones you really need.
Theirs no links in this post, no need to fake referrer. Ya not sure what happened to that search number, it probably was another one that was 15k. As for the sitewide links, I see he fooled you. He put a lot of authority sites in mixed in those just for that…
-His own hosting.. well obviously anyone can host web servers, you just need the hardware to do so. I was looking at the location of some of his hosting and it’s pretty spread out. Not sure if the big SEO hosting companies do that or if he just has multiple hosting accounts with different ppl.
You aren’t guaranteed different c class IP’s on hostnine but if you don’t get a different one just choose another server location, it’s that simple. You have plenty to choose from and usually if you wait a few days before re-using a server cluster (like US east or west) you’ll get a new c class ip. Or you can change the IP later on. Not too sure what you mean by the SSL certificate, my servers have different IP’s but they do only offer me the same nameservers so I made private ones.
hey Dave,Alex, have you heard about the serpassist software?
I’m considering buying some softwares to help me with the rankings…. i have max 250$ per month to use, which softwares would you most suggest to buy?
..
btw Alex, i’m in my first month,after 2 and half weeks with 5.65$ revenue haha more than your first month :p
thanks a lot! keep going with the blog its great.
Ya SERPassist is like SEnuke/magic submitter which I all find not really good for the time spent working them. Well magic submitter has a long list of article directories you can submit articles to and you can add your own which is why I used it for a few months but ultimately I changed to AMR because it has thousands of article directories. Web 2.0s can help you rank but not the way they show on the sale pages, that barely works imo.. You have to put a lot of extra care into them for them to be helpful backlinks and most of the time I feel that’s wasted time compared to other tools.
thanks for the answer mate.
can you please expand on your daily work on sites that are already more than 3 month old.I understand that at first you need to submit to the list you gave for article directories, but what are you doing daily, just working with the softwares and scheduling the backlinks with them?…
what would you do daily if you’d work all day to promote the websites?
Past month or so I was on vacation in miami and only was scheduling work for my employees and making them do articles and spinning them for my blogs. Right now,since I am back in my hometown I’m doing keyword research, I want to start some new websites for later on. After 3 months what I do is keep (hopefully) adding articles for keywords you haven’t covered yet on your website related to the topic. I also every so often submit articles to the networks in the backlink strategy post to get them ranking.
you can tell this dude is a pretty experienced IM’er. Lots of old school knowledge at play. Though he shouldn’t be using GoogleAnalytics — you can reverseinternet his network and see a bunch of his (no doubt very profitable) affiliate websites….
lol wow, I did not even look at his analytics because I assumed he definitely would not have it between his niche sites. So I guess his money sites share the same analytics but his blog network is not part of that. I had seen a lot of those niche websites that share that analytic # in a lot of his in context links so he probably uses that network for most/all his money sites. That seems so risky….
(You can use a tool like http://spyonweb.com/ to check out other ppl’s websites that share an adsense/analytics/ip address.)
Alex:
“You aren’t guaranteed different c class IP’s on hostnine but if you don’t get a different one just choose another server location, it’s that simple. You have plenty to choose from and usually if you wait a few days before re-using a server cluster (like US east or west) you’ll get a new c class ip.”
Can you explain that? If i choose different C-Class IP then that means i will need to rent another hosting server?
Why do i need to wait few days?
No, you can put a website in many different US clusers as I mentioned (west,central, east). C class IP’s that new domains go to in each of these clusters rotates frequently, if you happen to have 2 websites land on the same IP (happened once on 20 websites or so for me) than just delete it and re-host it… takes 1 minute. It could be a minute, it could be an hour who knows. I did not add 20-30 websites to my hostnine account in one day, so I know that if you add a few a day they definitely have different ip’s.
Alex,
What you could do is find a network of 50 IMERs, get x50 different hostgator accounts (buy 1 each), get a filipino to login to each of them and install 50 blogs on each, give him your spun articles and get him to post them with sitewide links.
Then, hey presto – all 50 of you each have a blog network of 50 blogs, each blog on a different IP address. All for the price of a hostgator account and 1/50th of the cost of a filipinos time for a few days.
Ya I’m considering something of the sort, but I think it would be easier to manage between 2-3 individuals that I trust. I’ve been spotting networks of sites again these past days and they seem so easy to spot nowadays with all the spying tools people can use., it’s giving me great ideas on how to proceed.
“Alex,
What you could do is find a network of 50 IMERs, get x50 different hostgator accounts (buy 1 each), get a filipino to login to each of them and install 50 blogs on each, give him your spun articles and get him to post them with sitewide links.
Then, hey presto – all 50 of you each have a blog network of 50 blogs, each blog on a different IP address. All for the price of a hostgator account and 1/50th of the cost of a filipinos time for a few days.”
Steve, each blog cannot have its own unique IP. I think you meant “each blog network”? There are only 50 accounts, each with unique IP on which 50 blogs located.
this guy is ranking #1 for ‘best acne products’ even though the only matching word in his url is ‘acne’. …no ‘best’ or ‘products’.
Is a lot of the influence for him being #1 for this keyword coming from his on-site optimization (as well as link farming/backlinking)?
Keyword in URL is not as important as some people say it is honestly. What is most important is having it in your title and in the body a few times. Strong backlinks definitely help him.
Hmm… Yeah, gotcha Alex.
Hey, would the linkfarm be more influential for ranking power if the domains were acne related (e.g. http://www.acnesolutionsforyou.com) rather than what he had (i.e. http://www.jeanswhite.net, http://www.woodreview.org) ??
Probably, but you can’t know for sure unless you try. Either way it’s still very strong links.
You say not to use Google Analytics… why would you not?
What do you use for tracking instead?
Thanks!
Simply because if you have one website using analytics anyone can find all the other ones using that same account. Fingerman put some google analytics alternatives in this post.
Is what you just described in this post basically the same as the post found here at the Warrior Forum:
http://www.warriorforum.com/offline-marketing-discussions/318731-how-build-local-search-engine-optimization-empire.html
Ya it`s very similar except he does not use them for local SEO.
Why do you only post one article a month? I would think one a week at least would be ok, no? My thought would be that a somewhat deeper site (more pages) would be better ranked than a thin site with only 2 or 3 posts on it, especially at the beginning.
I’m super new to all this, but that is my gut feeling – and if it’s wrong, I would like to know so I can change my guts!
Thanks again, I’ve learned a lot on here today.
I’m not sure where you read one a month but if I am starting out a site I would try to do one article a week too, if only to motivate me to get some content on it. Until it’s at at least 5 pages of content.
But ultimately the site’s size is not all that important to Google.. I just like to do bigger sites because I target a lot of keywords.