SEO Case Study: Month 13 Results
July 26, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzFor the first time since starting this particular case study, I’m not excited about writing this.
I don’t know why exactly. I saw decent results overall this month, so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s the fact that, while I’ve seen decent results, I haven’t seen my SEO efforts convert to overall profit yet.
I started these SEO case study reports back in November 2010, and provide monthly updates on how my various SEO campaigns are faring.
If you haven’t seen them already (or simply want to read previous reports in this case study), you can view the previous months here: Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, Month 9, Month 10, Month 11, and Month 12.
If you want to skip all the details and get straight to the results, scroll down to the last image, as it gives a fantastic overall summary of last month’s results.
SEO Firm Keywords Skyrocketing
I’ve now been using RankPay for 8 months, still targeting the same 2 keywords since I started with them.
While it took a while to get these 2 keywords into a decent ranking range, they’ve really starting to do quite well now.
As a reminder, they weren’t the best 2 keywords to choose for a case study since they both have an extremely high search volume, totalling around 6 million EXACT searches on Google each month. However, since RankPay uses a performance-based system, charging you only once you rank in the top 30 (and tiered the higher you go), these 2 keywords seemed to work best for a case study.
Since the 2 keywords are so competitive, I didn’t expect to rank well for them for quite a while. And that seemed to be the case too, as it took about 5 months to hit the #100 mark.
In my last SEO update on the advice of Plastic Surgeon SEO Geeks, I announced how my rankings finally ramped up for these 2 keywords, and was ranked #32 and #50 on Google for them at the time.
Well, I’m happy to announce that they have continued to climb the rankings, and are now at #23 and #34!
When the keywords were ranked #32 and #50, I posted the following screenshot from my Google Analytics account below:
Those stats were taken from June 25th, 2011, and they show a total of 30 visitors from those 2 keywords.
Now that the keywords are #23 and #34, check out the traffic from these keywords from yesterday (July 25th, 2011):
The number jumped from 30 visits a day to 79 a day! That’s 2,370 visits a month, on average.
And remember: those 2 keywords are still on the 3rd and 4th search result pages (albeit near the top of them). Most people rarely go past the first page (1%), let alone to the 3rd or 4th. Yet, I’m already seeing 79 visits a day as a result.
Can you imagine how much traffic that would grow to once (if?) I am on the 1st page?
Now, to be fair, the bounce rate on both of these keywords is extremely high, but then again, I haven’t really prepared my site for those keywords either.
While I have been hesitant to recommend RankPay in the past, I am now much more confident in doing so. The results speak for themselves, and you can follow my progress with them since the beginning of the case study.
The fact is that I’ve only had to start paying for the keywords now, 8 months in, because you only ever start to pay once you rank in the top 30. I am now on pages 2 and 3 of Google and am receiving 79 clicks a day to my site on targeted keywords as a result.
I worked out a special deal with them, and so if you decide to sign up with them, be sure to use TYLERCRUZ as the promo code, as it will give you an instant $50 credit applied to your account.
New SEO Guy: 3 Months Later
I have now been with my “new” SEO guy for 3 months, and am still happy with him so far. He’s definitely much better than my original guy, that’s for sure. But his latest results, while progressive, are not nearly as explosive as his first month was.
Unfortunately, based on the past month, I saw quite a drop in rankings on my affiliate site (Ex. from 15 to 30). They also, mysteriously, dropped to the 800 range on Google for about a week, before returning to near-normal levels yesterday.
It’s almost as if he can almost ‘instantly’ get anything to around the #18 spot, but then hits a snag and has a very difficult time improving beyond that.
I’ll need to wait another month to see if he can persevere beyond this wall.
Affiliate Site #2
In my last update, I mentioned how I hired my new SEO guy to work on another site for me, which I refer to as affiliate site #2.
I have him targeting 2 keywords which are about medium in competition.
However, instead of paying him a monthly rate on these 2 keywords, I’m paying him on a performance-based structure similar to RankPay. What’s different, though, is that I only have to pay him a flat fee once each keywords is in the top 3 on Google, and then a small monthly fee each month thereafter to keep it up there.
Within days of starting, he already had me ranked #9 for one of the keywords, which then dropped down to #13. The other keyword stayed stuck in the 300’s.
Unfortunately, these 2 keywords saw absolutely no improvement in the past month, so I’ll have to ask him about this.
SEO Income
Since this case study series is beginning to collect more data, I am now displaying the SEO income from my affiliate site in a table format for easier viewing:
| Month of SEO | # of Leads | Approximate Value |
| Month #6 | 5 | $300 |
| Month #7 | 1 | $60 |
| Month #8 | 2 | $120 |
| Month #9 | 5 | $300 |
| Month #10 | 5 | $300 |
| Month #11 | 4 | $240 |
| Month #12 | 1 | $60 |
| Month #13 | 1 | $60 |
*Please note that since I don’t always publish these updates every 30-days exactly, that these numbers are a bit off due to overlapping, having a bit of a gap, and whatnot.
Man, what is going on? Another 1-lead month, even though I had 74 clicks to the offer. It’s just so odd, since I used to average an 8-10% conversion rate. The advertiser’s landing page is the same… and you would think that natural traffic would convert better than PPC traffic…
Month 12 Update
Please note that I am currently tracking 15 keywords across 3 different websites and search engines, so I won’t be able to focus on every single keyword, and will therefore focus only on the ones that show the most change, whether that be good or bad:
Overview Chart
And last but not least, here is a very nice overview comparison chart of all the keywords in my SEO case study from both 1 month ago and 6 months ago, as compared with today. I have decided not to include my more recent affiliate #2 keywords here yet, as they haven’t seen much change yet and simply make the image too large.
I use RankTracker to track and graph all my keywords, and absolutely endorse and recommend it 100%. A lot of you have already purchased it based on my recommendation. Feel free to comment on what you think of it yourself.
Anyhow, here’s the overall change over the past 1 and 6 months:
The big winners this month were the 2 movie RankPay keywords.
Don’t be mislead by the affiliate keywords, as most of that improvement was just healing from being sandboxed for a while the previous month.
While things look positive as a whole, I’m going to need to see continued improvement and new ranking high’s, in order to make all this SEO investment worthwhile.
That’s the update for now. I’ll have another one for you in another month from now, as I always do.
Doesn’t look like skyrocketing to me.. Anything above 20 is not worth reporting. You’re spending way too much time analyzing all this SEO data, if instead you’d be busy creating new content (targeted at key phrases), I’m sure you’d be much higher in the rankings already (assuming it is valuable, link worthy, unique content).
Agreed.
Give that man a prize!
While it’s nice to have 20+ rather than 100+, these people are right. As a full time SEO myself, these rankings are pretty irrelevant and you’re wasting your time putting so much emphasis in them.
“The advertiser’s landing page is the same… and you would think that natural traffic would convert better than PPC traffic…”
Are you dense or just not that smart when it comes to SEO? Google released what was called the Panda update in February. So, naturally, your “landing page that hasn’t changed” probably isn’t going to do as well. Specifically, I don’t think landing pages are the way to go because they’re carbon copies of so many others.
Your best bet is to create a totally unique landing page and then put some uber fresh content on them. Hire someone for $20 an article to write you three articles and that’ll give your new site a little bit of a push. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and your money.
I don’t think he meant that the page isn’t doing as well ranking wise.
I think he meant that the page isn’t converting as well.
Panda Update didn’t affect conversion rates.
You guys might as well save your breath. Tyler’s dedication to eating pie and lighting money on fire is too strong to allow him to listen to any practical advice, and implementing any of the changes you mention would required actual work on his part.
He’s been told constantly that he’s wasting money and time on any ranking that’s not on the first page of results. He’s been told constantly that every SEO “guru” he’s hired so far is taking him for a ride. He’s been told constantly that he needs to invest the minimal time necessary to understand the basics of SEO, else he’s just going to be taken for a ride when he hires someone to magically make his sites rank well and make him tons of money.
The only new development here is he’s now going to be paying for the crap traffic from the RankPay keywords, yet he chalks that up as a win (or pretends to, hoping enough idiots click through his link and sign up at RankPay to generate commissions for him).
The whole RankPay thing is pretty hilarious, and a great example of the depths “Internet entrepreneurs” will sink to to try to scrape together a few commissions.
At no point is the obvious question addressed: if RankPay can produce profitable results for some of the most competitive terms out there, why in the world don’t they just build their own affiliate sites, secure top spots for lucrative keywords, and roll around in big piles of money? Why would they ever dick around with nickle and dime operations like Tyler’s if they have what’s essentially a printing press for money?
“At no point is the obvious question addressed: if RankPay can produce profitable results for some of the most competitive terms out there, why in the world don’t they just build their own affiliate sites, secure top spots for lucrative keywords, and roll around in big piles of money?”
Exactly. Anybody who isn’t charging tens of thousands a month as a minimum isn’t worth hiring, if you’ve got any ability why go through the shit and expense of dealing with clients? Quality unique content and enough relevant backlinks is hardly f’ing rocket science.
You can say the same thing about all the advice you guys are giving Tyler.
If it was such good advice and it actually worked, why wouldn’t all you guys implement it and essentially have a printing press for money on your hands?
Why is Jacob a full time SEO? If he can produce results, why doesn’t he just build affiliate sites and make millions himself?
Millions a month no, enough to never ever have to worry about money again, yes. In an average month I spend nil on paid traffic. There are no secret systems to good rankings. Yes you can pay for shortcuts to speed things up but only once you understand what the effective shortcuts are. You need to put in the work before you can see where you can outsource your time and effort. And you couldn’t hire me for $10,000 $20,000 or even $50,000 a month. There’s only so much money I can spend and I kind of enjoy having the freedom to bugger off on my boat fishing for a week if the mood hits witout having to answer to anybody except the wife!
Like anything worth while, it didn’t happen over night and it involved a hell of a lot of work.
Right, I believe you. My point was that there is a flaw in the logic of thinking that Rankpay can’t be a legit service because if they were, then they would just be doing SEO for themselves.
The truth is that there are many SEO companies and consultants out there who DO produce SEO results because that is their specialty and that is the only thing they focus on. Yes, they *could* get into the business of building websites, running affiliate offers and all kinds of other things on top of doing SEO, but there then they might spread themselves too thin and produce no results at all.
The argument that Rankpay can’t possibly produce results for people because if they knew how to rank for highly competitive keywords then they would do it for themselves is flawed.
It makes no logical sense, as you can pretty much make the same argument against almost every other business model out there.
For example, I could say that Facebook traffic can’t possibly convert on affiliate offers, because if it did why wouldn’t Facebook just put their own affiliate offer ads up there and rake in all the money. Same flawed argument.
The answer is that they (Rankpay, Facebook, SEO Consultants etc.) are not in the business of building websites or being affiliates etc. They are in the business of doing SEO for businesses.
It’s a fair point but you have to look at the background of the people setting up the service. Facebook etc don’t give a monkeys about affiliate marketing, never have, never will, they like Google understand the real value is in peoples data. However a A LOT of SEO companies are formed from people claiming they came from a “I did myself and now I’m selling it to you” standpoint. If you really did it and experienced true financial and time freedom it’s hard to give up. Very hard. I can’t imagine anybody willingly choosing to give up a lifestyle that provides all they could ever need with the freedom to do what they want when they want in order to pander to pain in the ass clients. I do have some experience in that I went the other way.
There are services out there that can help you along the way, but they tend to be explicit in what they are doing and how they do it. You choose to fit them into your strategy and cut out some of the manual work, but you have to have the strategy in the first place. I think I’ve even mentioned one service in a previous comment that would have saved Tyler a fortune and produced far better results without the headaches.
Cupcake, do you even read the replies before you defend Tyler? I know it’s easy to see it as Fatties vs. the World, but you’re not doing Tyler any favors when you enable his epic laziness.
The advice he’s been given basically boils down to the following:
1) Stop wasting time on projects he has no interest in (such as affiliate marketing).
2) Invest his time and/or money in better content, instead of paying SEO “gurus” that produce no profits for him.
That’s it. No one claimed that he’d make millions. No one claimed they were making millions by doing, or promise Tyler the same. That’s the sum total of the advice he’s been given.
The only people making outlandish claims are you and RankSchmay, but I guess that fits as you two are cut of the same cloth; dangle any carrot around in front of greedy, lazy people in the hopes that you will make enough money to continue to not have to have a real job.
Go play with the RankSchmay “Keyword Opportunity Tool” and tell me you think that’s legit. For just $311 bucks a month they’ll put PaulySloth in the top three results for “online degree” ($26.63 CPC and 1.2 million monthly searches); it’s just a low, low $1,102/month for you to get in the top three for “mortgage”.
Can hiring a SEO consultant help you rank better for many terms? Of course it can. Should you trust any SEO consultant that leads you to believe you can get a top three ranking for terms like “mortgage” or “online degree”? Of course you shouldn’t.
That’s the whole issue with RankSchmay and why anyone with half a brain will take a pass. Some terms are simply impossible to rank in the top three for, unless you’ve got a budget in the millions; pretending otherwise just makes you look dodgy as hell.
Only an idiot would try to use a service like Rankpay to try to rank a non-mortgage related site for the term “mortgage”.
Their Keyword Opportunity Tool tells you that the SEO Opportunity for that keyword is “Poor” and they don’t recommend going after “poor” opportunity keywords.
If you actually ever tried their service, before judging it as junk, you’d also know that every keyword you go after is manually reviewed by their team prior to even approving you for it. If you choose a term like “mortgage” they will tell you that this keyword is not a good choice, and will offer you better options.
I’m not defending Rankpay, nor am I defending Tyler. I was simply pointing out that some of the logic in the arguments didn’t make sense.
Mistakes or not, at least Tyler’s trying something and reporting his results.
What else exactly would you consider he write about as “good content”? When he writes about weight loss, you guys bitch. When he writes about SEO, you guys bitch. When he writes about affiliate marketing, you guys bitch.
What do you want him to write about?
Again, Cupcake, try actually reading.
RankSchmay says you have an “EXCELLENT” SEO opportunity for PaulySloth to be in the top three Google results for “online degree” ($26.63 CPC and 1.2 million monthly searches) for the low, low price of $311/month. EXCELLENT.
What an amazing deal! You’d be crazy not to pay RankSchmay $300/month for a ranking like that! Man, they’re generous people, if they can rank a crappy site like yours for a very lucrative and competitive term like “online degree”; you’d think they’d just throw up a crap, unrelated site themselves and snag all that cash, but man, they’re happy to give it to you instead! What great guys!
It’s speaks volumes that you’d be completely baffled about what good content is.
Go look at a site like mikejackness.com, then look at your and Tyler’s sites. He’s got good content; you guys don’t. He provides helpful, useful content, and almost never shills affiliate links; you guys can’t type two sentences without cramming in a plug for RankSchmay or some similar crappy reseller/affiliate program.
The reason people complain about Tyler’s posts is that his content has absolutely gone downhill over the years. He used to post actual interesting content about the day to day work he did; now he just looks for any excuse to cram in links for programs like RankSchmay or monetize even the Fatty Challenge.
The cart isn’t just pulling the horse now; it ran the damn thing over and left it stinking and dead in the road. That’s why people complain and/or suggest he get back to doing things he enjoyed, as his content was a million times more useful, helpful, and/or interesting to read.
(And don’t even start with the your “But what are YOU doing that’s better?” tired argument. Tyler is the one putting himself out there, trying to make money off RankSchmay and the like. If he’s going to whore himself out to anything under the sun then yeah, he’s going to get some rocks chucked his way.)
If you pick such a highly competitive keyword like “online degree” with them, one of three things can happen:
(1) They fail miserably and can’t rank you anywhere near the Top 30 on Google & Yahoo/Bing. In which case all the work they do to try to rank you is THEIR time/effort wasted, not mine. As their slogan says “If you don’t rank, you don’t pay.”
(2) They get you in a spot between #10 and #30, in which case you pay the reduced fee – below the quoted price for Top 10 – and you may/may-not get any traffic for that fee.
(3) They do actually somehow get you in the Top 10, in which case you get the traffic and you pay the fee.
Those are the only 3 options.
There is no risk in possibility #1, since if they can’t do their job as advertised, then you don’t pay. They tell you up front on the consulting call that they can’t rank everyone for everything. But if you don’t rank, then you don’t pay.
There is no risk in #3, since as you said it’s a highly competitive keyword that would be easily monetized.
Therefore, the only risk is in #2. The possibility that they WILL actually get you into the Top 30, but not into the Top 10.
That is the worst case scenario.
If you actually read Tyler’s posts where he talks about trying out Rankpay, he specifically says that he is aware of this possibility/risk. Him and I have talked about it extensively as well. We have also talked to Rankpay about it as well.
THAT is the only real risk for Tyler, and he’s willing to take it because he wants to see if he can get any traffic from the highly competitive keyword he picked even IF it is only in the TOP 30, not TOP 10.
It’s a valid experiment. What if they can’t get him into TOP 10, but they get him in the #25th spot for example, and in that spot the amount of traffic he gets (however little it is compared to the amount he would get in TOP 10) converts and pays him more than he’s paying for that #25 spot, then he’s ahead of the game.
If not, he can discontinue service at any point if it’s not profitable.
I for one am very interested to know if this experiment works out for him. Do you know for sure that he won’t be able to make a profit from being in a TOP 30 (but not TOP 10) spot? What if it is profitable? If it is, then I’ll do the exact same thing to see if I can make it work for me.
That is why he is writing an SEO CASE STUDY.
To me, it is VERY valuable content.
If you already know everything about SEO, and weight loss and every other topic Tyler has written about in the last few years, and if these types of case studies provide no value to you, then why don’t you just STOP READING?
I’m sure you can find plenty of other Blogs which have more of this “high quality” content you speak of.
Or is there so little content out there that meets your LeSigh “high quality content” standards, that you’re forced to read Tyler’s Blog in hopes that he’ll write something you’d consider useful?
Cupcake, I’m really starting to think all those doughnuts went to your head. Oh, no wait, they’re right there at your waist…
How many times do I have to say this? If you and Tyler are going to spew terrible advice in your almighty quest to grub up some affiliate commissions, you have to expect people to call you out on it.
If you put yourself out there as an “expert” authority on being an “Internet entrepreneur”, you’re going to get called out when you act like an idiot. You don’t get to cry and whine like you’re doing and tell the big bad meanies to go somewhere else if the don’t like what you post.
You guys put yourself in this position; you guys are the ones looking like idiots shilling for RankSchmay; you guys are the ones willing to whore yourselves to any affiliate or reseller program that you think might make you money.
Tyler’s SEO “case study” is only valuable as a guide of what NOT to do when it comes to affiliate marketing. Which would be funny, in and of itself, but also a shame for anyone sucked into your guys’ “Internet entrepreneur” Ponzi scheme, who’ll sign up for RankSchmay or buy some crap eBook or some Clickbank product thinking that’s all they need to be on “the journey to wealth” just like you two.
Ahh, that’s priceless; Tyler even has a craptacular Ninja link set up for ClickSchmank, the absolute lowest of the low when it comes to worthless eBooks and scammy get rich quick products
I agree. But perhaps the compilation is just for the purpose of composing this case study. Anyway, posts like these are good… I always learn some new stuff every time I read these!
All the sites are getting good ranking in Google..They are going to top search results in Google…
That is too bad some of your sites got sandboxed. But hopefully they will come up int he next report.
Hi Tyler! Long time no talk! Just an FYI google did 2 updates this month. So that might be aa big reason why your rankings are jumping around so much.
Becky : )
Hi Becky, are you still doing SEO affiliate marketing? I haven’t seen a lot of updates on your Blog recently.
Just curious.
nice stuff as always tyler, good seo is required for am income.
I agree with you. SEO is crucial as a long term plan. But I think PPC marketing gets you were you want to be right away!
LeSigh, LeSigh, LeSigh. When are you going to learn.
Every time you leave a comment on Tyler’s Blog, all it does is help him get better SEO rankings.
You think you’re cutting him down, but actually you’re helping his rankings with every nasty comment you leave.
Go search for “SEO Case Study” on Google. You’ll see what you helped Tyler rank for.
Are you being serious? Do you know roughly how much effort it would take to hit the top 3 for that search? I’ll give you a clue (after 5 mins comeptition research), somewhere between not much and not a lot. The top 3 aren’t even targeting it, if there was any real commercial value in it they would be competing…but they’re not.
I give up. I’ll just take your advice from before and stop reading, it’s like the stupid teaching the stupid around here.
Just because a term doesn’t charge a high CPC and just because there it’s a tonne of traffic to it, doesn’t mean it’s not worth going after.
And also, just because there is no competition for the term, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth going after either.
320 exact searches for that term alone will get him 30-50 highly targeted visitors per month easy looking for an seo case study and they’ll find a 13 month long case study when they arrive.
Blog incomes are built on targeting long-tail traffic like that. 50 visitors/month * 500 posts = 25,000 visitors/month.
We don’t go after super competitive, high CPC, high traffic keywords like one would with affiliate sites, or landing pages or commercial sites.
But there really isn’t any information in these case studies. We don’t know anything about what his “seo” guys are doing.. Only that they are failing to do it in a decent time.. More than a year and still no results to show.
Oh Cupcake, now you’re truly showing how little you know about this stuff…
Aside from what Paul B said, take a couple of seconds to think about what you just typed. I know, I know, thinking is hard work, but bear with me.
You’re suggesting that comments can impact a blog post’s ranking in search engines; you’re also extending that thesis to say that the more comments there are, the better the post will rank.
Do you see the problem there? Sure, I’l wait. Go eat some doughnuts, teleport to other dimensions, then get back to me.
If that were the case what would stop someone from just creating a ton of fake comments on any shilly post they wanted to rank well?
I mean, honestly; comments, Cupcake?
The bar is pretty high, but this one is going into Cupcake’s Finest Moments Hall of Fame.
Comments most absolutely affect SEO.
I’m not even going to begin to try to explain why. It’s ok if you think otherwise. Just keep commenting and thinking you’re “calling out” Tyler on everything, while you’re really just helping him make more money from his Blog.
Oh Cupcake. I almost feel sorry for you.
You’re confusing inbound links from linkbait-type posts with comments. I know that’s way over your head, but stay with me. Eat some doughnuts and focus really, really hard.
If I’d linked to Tyler’s post from a site of mine and said “If you want to see an example of how NOT to succeed at affiliate marketing, click here” then yeah, he’d get a boost from that.
If I comment here, Tyler’s post gets absolutely no boost. None.
Technically speaking, sure, the comment text is considered by some search engines to be text on the page. So more comments mean more text on the page.
If Tyler’s post was like less than 100-200 words, then yeah, he might get a tiny, tiny boost from comments, as it’g get him up to a decent word count. Tyler’s post was an epic tome to affiliate marketing fail, though, so he wasn’t hurting for word count or for on-topic discussion of his little SEO case study.
Sorry, Cupcake, no doughnuts for you. This is really, really basic stuff; I’m actually shocked you don’t know this.
I know you like to time travel and take over the bodies of little old ladies but I thought you were more savvy then this. What are you going to start yammering about next, how awesome meta tags are for good SEO?
Believe what you want.
Really Dude you are lame, and there are 1 million ways out there to do good seo not everyone has the same style, and that is what makes the internet great. There is no ONE was to do things right, there are many different ways. Some are better than others, and it seems my friend you don’t know jack! Pauly is on point with this and you are just yammering.
You still think “nofollow” tags pass no juice? Wow.
Poor Cupcake. You really are still living in the 2000s, aren’t you?
Those were glorious days, when you could still see your toes and all a budding Internet entrepreneur had to do was cram in meta tags and spam comment their way to riches!
You’re like the George Costanza of SEO; everything you swear by is the first thing Google and other search engines got savvy about and started ignoring. Keep ’em coming, Cupcake, as these SEO gems of yours are priceless.
You’re the one who’s stuck in 2009. What we know about the “nofollow” tag and how Google sees it today in 2011 is not the same thing most SEO experts thought back in 2009/2010.
If you think that the only links that count are “follow” links, you’re behind the times.
Man, those were AWESOME days! Hi there, toes, I can see you!
Maybe you could teleport into the body of someone that knows the rudiments of SEO, read your comments here, and get a good ol’ chuckle?
The only value in nofollow links is to give your site a more natural distribution of external follow and nofollow links. In simpler words that you have a 10% chance of understanding; having all dofollow links pointing to your site isn’t optimal.
That’s the sole value in nofollow links. In and of themselves, they’re worthless.
Work with me here, Cupcake. Why in the world would Google validate comment spam by attaching any importance to either comments or URLs attached to comments? That technique is about as subtle as you at an all you can eat seafood buffet, easily manipulated, and simple to identify.
You really and truly believe Google would encourage the legions of spammers and shillmonkeys like yourself to pollute the Internet tubes with even more spam?
Jesus Christ, get your head out of your ass for a few seconds and look beyond the Kindergarten SEO you think you know.
It’s not as simple as:
Follow Links = Good Epic Awesomeness
NoFollow Links = Bad Poo Poo
Have you even ever build a website before, much less SEO optimized it or built any links to it?
Have you even TRIED building a site, and tried to see how nofollow links affect it’s rankings? Or are you just talking from theory you read online?
There are MANY benefits to NoFollow links beyond what you just said.
http://www.socialseo.com/blog/an-experiment-nofollow-links-do-pass-value-and-rankings-in-google.html
Quoted from that article:
“Final Results and Conclusions on Nofollow Links
Approximately 5 1/2 to 6 weeks after the nofollow links experiment started we found that, even though our domain names were not keyword relevant and our website content was <10% relevant to the keyword phrases used for our nofollow link building, we still ranked for those keywords after only acquiring nofollow links. The assumption by many is that nofollow links will not pass much, if any, link juice or anchor text value. But the nofollow link can still pass relevance… and slightly more in my opinion. Google may not "count" the link as a weighted backlink but this doesn’t mean they ignore the anchor text being used or the authoratative status of the website being linked from."
There are many other such experiments been run out there and the Follow/NoFollow issue is not as simple as you think.
Here are some other things to look at:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-importance-of-nofollow-links
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predictions-3
http://www.receptional.com/blogs/link-building/value-nofollow-links
You're probably still taking your SEO advice from Matt Cutts right?
Anyway, like I said, believe what you want.
Again, Cupcake, reading is fundamental. 75% of the content in the links you provided actually back up what I’m trying to get through your doughnut-congested noggin’.
But hey, rock on big guy. Nofollow your way to massive riches. It’s obviously working wonders for you at the moment:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/paulymath.com+tylercruz.com/
http://davefleet.com/2011/05/competecom-compete/
So many Cupcake Hall of Fame moments in this thread.
Of course someone else with nosediving traffic is to question Compete.com metrics.
You keep rocking on, big guy. At this rate you’ll be down to 10 unique visitors per day soon, with 90% of those comment spamming your site for some of those INSANELY VALUABLE nofollow links.
I am with pauly on this one, by having comments on a post it creates new content on an already established post it makes the crawlers see that is is newer content and/or updated, so it does have seo value. And I haven’t used Rankpay but at least someone is checking it out and reporting their finding so others may choose to or not to spend time on the program. And with you guys linking in your comments to other post’;s of Tyler does give both pages internal linking and therefor gains the quality of those pages. Now we all can’t be winners but why don’t you naysayers step back and look at what you are saying before you say it. He isn’t wasting his time or ours but making people aware of findings and how something does or doesn’t work. He is providing valid useful information, as he should.
pie eating Tyler reading the arguments here and laughing.
If http://www.scratchrepair.org/ is your affiliate site, you have been hacked again. If you cannot see that from Canada then access it via proxy. Might explain the fail in sales.
You have to try several other methods to climb in the rankings; Ask around to be a guest blogger, make your RSS feed prominent, post in forums, make a video and brand it with your blog’s address, use at least one picture in every post with URL, write with long-tail keywords in mind,,,,,,,
Too many arguments in this post, in my opinion rankpay works but you could get the same results much cheaper by paying a freelance link builder!
I understand what you mean since I believe that he could get cheaper and faster results but we don’t know what keywords he target and how competitive they are…
It seems that Rankpay is pretty good, Do you recommend them for small niche sites with very low competition.
No, because with a little bit of work, you can rank in the top 3-5 pretty easily for low-competition keywords.
I gotta admit, I am surprised that 13 months into it that there are not a few more top 10 rankings, I guess that just goes to show how competitive and hard it can be to rank for more competitive keywords.
-Jean
It has indeed gotten very competitive, and continues to do so with each passing day. Sometimes I wonder how to stay in it consistently.
Komodo, just alot of dedication! Results help to motivate but its hard to stay motivated when the results arent there.
-Jean
Yep I agree with you Jean, it’s a lot dedication and stay motivated.
Thanks Dean!
-Jean
I would have to agree with Jean as well on this one.
Hi Tyler this is really great SEO case study! I really love reading your blog. thanks for keep updating. Looking forward your next case study.
I really wish I had the money to outsource and get a SEO guy. Maybe one day I will. One step at a time though. First amazing content then an SEO guy.
Michael, I hear ya! It’s sort of a risk/reward thing, isn’t it. I mean if it was 100% FACT (like a psychic who is never wrong and predicts the future for you) that a particular “SEO guy” can get you to #1 in the search engines, I’m sure you wouldn’t think twice about hiring that SEO person if you had the funds. But the truth is, there’s no guarantees that whatever SEO person you pick can help you rank. So the next best thing is to use common sense, weigh the risk vs reward, and then go from there. What I’ve done is to search for an SEO person with a track record, who’s very reputable, whom I can trust. Obviously I can’t say (here) whether I have found one or not because that digresses from this comment thread, but the point is to make sure you’ve done your homework *before* you consider spending your hard-earned money (as with all things, right?).
Yes, I agree that seo is expensive and time laboring. I also wish i had the money to outsource but i guess i have to do it all myself.
My kindle site is just chugging along but google is not loving it all Any suggestions on getting it up in google?
Msn and Yahoo like on first page but stuck somewhere in the big G result page.
Hi Tyler,
After having followed and read this article with all these comments, can I see that most people have totally different opinions about ranking, key words and the SERP, which shows how difficult it is with SEO, good article with many good comments.
It seems many people are not doing testing for themselves, but instead relying on whatever information they find. Much of which is outdated.
Really great SEO case study. Thnx 4 sharing this.
Thank you so much for sharing these SEO case studies!
Wow! I love these case studies. I’ve only read about half of what you’ve written, and I’ve bookmarked it to read the other half. Although you are smart and didn’t post your specific keywords, it would be nice to know those. But again, it’s smart not to post them so I understand. You are a good writer!
Did any of your sites drop after the most recent PANDA update?
One of mine did but most stayed the same…
great seo case study…and thanks for sharing it with us keep on adding more valuable content for us…cheers
All the hard work and dedication will pay off, thanks for the case, i really enjoyed reading about the results
Now, SEO does look quite tricky to me , but i am still confused as to whether i should rank tracker or not.
I am trying to learn about SEO (and I have just found this site!), it is all a bit too much considering I don’t have a relevant background… I thought the article was useful though and funnily enough the responses of some posters were very useful too, thanks guys.
George
Really detailed and impressing post about your SEO experience! What has been your link building/ SEO techniques? 😉
Hi,
The visitor number increased from 30 to 79. That is really a great thing. You are using Rankpay , but I don’t know about that software, but I am using longtailpro to choose my keywords which are very useful for my site. The difference comparison in 6 months charts visually explain your efforts. Thanks for sharing
Do you have any case study for year 2013 or 2014?
No, sorry. I’ve long-past given up on SEO though. Not my thing. Too slow, and too much out of your hands.
Hello Tyler
Rankpay is really an awesome tool to find keyword. Can you suggest any other free keyword searching tool. Also should i choose a keyword with low competition or with decent traffic ??
Your SEO Case study articles are good.. bt why you r not updating seo case study articles on ur site??
Yes, I agree that seo is expensive and time laboring. I also wish i had the money to outsource but i guess i have to do it all myself.
My kindle site is just chugging along but google is not loving it all Any suggestions on getting it up in google?
Msn and Yahoo like on first page but stuck somewhere in the big G result page.
thanks fro sharing your experience.. Its inspiring !!
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