Today you are going to get a sneak peak of how someone ranked a site with nothing but Blackhat SEO spam and is earning over $1,000 a month with it.
Not only that, but the site has defeated the latest Google Algorithm updates including Penguin & Panda 4.1 which was released a couple of days ago.
Lots of people are going crazy in forums right now claiming that duplicate content & link spam doesn’t work anymore – this case study proves them wrong.
Table Of Contents
- Introducing Nick Joleson
- Kicking Off With The Results Of Blackhat SEO
- How I Did It – Step By Step
- Choosing A Niche
- Building The Website
- Link Building
- Setting Up GSA Search Engine Ranker
- Generating Spam Content
- June 5th Rankings & Earnings Update
- July 16th Rankings & Earnings Update
- October 8th Rankings & Earnings Update
- November 20th Rankings & Earnings Update (After Penguin 3.0)
What You Will Learn
- How to beat Panda 4.0 & the latest Penguin update
- How to build a website with spam
- How to rank a website with Blackhat SEO spam
- How to earn over $1,000 per month
- The exact method & Blackhat SEO strategies used
Introducing Nick Joleson
My name is Nick Joleson & I run NoobWarrior.com I’ve spent a bit of time ranking blackhat SEO spam websites & wanted to share my experience with you.
Matthew asked me to do this post a couple of weeks back. While I agreed to do it, I was a little hesitant due to the predicted May Penguin update.
I wasn’t sure when/if it arrived my pure spam site would survive. So it felt strange to write a case study on a site that may no longer rank by the time the post was published.
Well today is the 22nd May and amidst the chaos of the current Google updates, including Panda 4, I am happy to say my test site is still ranking well.
I did take a small hit on the rank progress for the main term, but that is so minor it hasn’t actually affected the sites income.
In fact the site is earning more now because lots of competitors got slapped with the recent update.
Kicking Off With The Results Of Blackhat SEO
Before I go into more detail about what I did & more specifically how I did it, I wanted to show you the results after 4 months blackhat SEO spam link building using nothing but GSA Search Engine Ranker.
The site has been making $1000+ a month in commissions since mid-February, which is 3 weeks after I began building links to it. The site was dormant 2 months prior to that so it had time to be indexed.
Here is a screen grab from GWT showing some the search queries my site now appears on.
Current Site Rankings – After Panda 4.0
These are the current rankings of the site AFTER the release of Panda 4.0 on Google.com (USA).
- 100 1st page terms
- 32 are in 1st place
Below you can see some additional graphs from RankTracker for a selection of the long tail terms I was targetting with the site.
You can see everything from the moment I started to build links to the site-
Here is the tracking of the root term of the site. You can see it had made it up to page two than began its dive back down after the last updates.
Fortunately the site drove very little traffic from this term so the revenue impact in minimal.
Website Traffic
So let’s take a quick look at traffic behind the scenes. You can see a slight dip around the time of the Penguin update but then it picks back up.
How I Did It – Step By Step
In this case study I will show you how I ranked a 10 page niche site using GSA Search Engine Ranker and just one page of unique content.
It will assume you have basic knowledge of SEO, building a WordPress site, using GSA Search Engine Ranker & Kontent Machine 3.
None of these are tools are hard to get started with and Matthew has produced a neat guide to GSA SER and a kontent machine review if you need help.
Just to be clear, the case study below was the first time I used these tools so no previous link building experience is necessary.
For this case study I used:
- A product niche with high value commissions – $20/$30+
- A fresh copy of GSA SER and Captcha Breaker
- Kontent Machine 3
- A VPS
- Private Proxies
- PLR content
Choosing A Niche
First you need to find your niche and some products to target. I made sure my niche had at least 3 products offering good commissions.
Don’t waste your time with anything under $20 a pop. For this case study I used a sub-niche of skincare.
Finding The Target Keywords
First I headed over to Google keyword planner to find some key high traffic buying terms for my niche.
I was looking for things like:
{Best|Buy|Top} niche {treatment|Product|Solution}
That had high monthly exact match searches. In this case of around 8000 – 12000.
Now these are obviously going to be competitive, so ranking a pure spam site using GSA SER and blackhat SEO for these terms while not impossible may not be a realistic goal.
What we want are long tails based on these core terms. Things like:
{Best|Buy|Top} niche product {treatment|Product|Solution} + {For Men|For Teens|Sensitive Skin}
Use the Google LPI to assist you with this part, perform a load of manual searches pulling up all the LSI and making a note of them on a spreadsheet.
Perform further searches using each relevant LSI to build up your list. We will need these later to use as GSA SER anchor texts.
By now I had a key search term (with variants) along with lots of long tail versions to target.
I did not worry if the traffic to these LSI or long tail terms were low or showed a “-“ in the keyword planner.
Choosing a Domain Name
I always use an exact or partial match domain name. It’s highly likely that the exact match domain you want will be gone so use “search term” + “Extra”.
Make sure it’s relevant and not too spammy looking. I always use a fresh domain name to avoid problems.
Get a .com unless you are targeting a specific country and avoid hyphens.
Building The Website
The first task was to build a simple website that compared 3/4 products and promotes one as the clear a winner.
The main thing is to use a clean template that adds authority. I always look for what is ranking in my niche and emulate the best looking template to build my own site.
This is the site structure I used-
- Homepage
- 3/4x Product review pages
- 10x PLR Articles for posts grouped into related niche categories
Homepage
The homepage is what most of the work goes into. I used a HTML table to create a product comparison matrix or you could create a graphic one.
Remember a HTML table will provide better SEO opportunities as Google can’t read images the same as a HTML table.
Over 75% of the click through traffic will go to the “winning” product, so I made sure it is based on the best commissions, best conversion and the one that was the easiest sell.
Looking at competitor sites will help determine this.
I then created a further 1500 words of unique content to add flesh and authority to the homepage. The bulk of this was added after the comparison table.
You should end up with something like this:
The main thing to remember is that we are only attempting to rank the homepage.
That means the homepage content needs to be unique.
It doesn’t mean you have to write it from scratch.
I look at the other sites in my niche that were ranking, steal the bits I like and rewrite the content.
The reality is the comparison table is going to do most of the leg work, you just need some unique, keyword rich content to assist with the ranking and add some authority.
I made sure the key search term + long tail was in the Page Title <H1> and <H2> title tags.
Don’t keyword stuff. Just write naturally and use some key terms we identified in step one. GSA SER will do the rest…
Building The Remaining Pages
The rest of the site comprises of either PLR or content copied from the web. I create a product review page for each product, then bulk out the site with the PLR content.
We are only interested in ranking the homepage. In this case study, no other pages are original content. Just add images and link out to authority sites where appropriate in the PLR posts.
We are building a pure spam site so we want to cut as many corners as possible but still have the ability to rank.
Link Building
With the link building side of things we are going to use the tiered link building approach.
This is where GSA SER, a VPS and some proxies come into play, alongside a content generator like Kontent Machine.
Using Kontent Machine 3 to generate all of the tiered content I aimed to build out a tiered link structure as quickly as possible using spam content.
Setting Up GSA Search Engine Ranker
GSA SER was set up on a VPS using about 20 shared proxies. Check out Matthew’s tutorial if you need help.
There was no fixed rule to its setup and as I learned more about the program I started to change things around.
Here you see the tier structure I used with the number of links built after a few weeks-
The target sites for the tiers were as follows:
Tier One CDF + Two CDF and Three CDF
I wanted the links that make up the actual tiers to be able to pass link juice down to the money site so I set for Contextual Do Follow links only.
The easy way to do this is right click on the target sites:
“Check All” then select “Uncheck No follow” and “Uncheck No Contextual”. That removes most unwanted link types.
I then manually deselect video types, social network and bookmarks.
I set GSA to begin building links to the newly forming Tier 1 as soon as they were verified. This was the same for the Tiers 2 and 3.
Keyword Anchor Text
GSA SER has an excellent anchor text generator. I targeted my main keywords then used a percentage of LSI, partial, generic and naked url anchors pointing to the money site.
There was no hard rule I followed, I just made sure there was a good range of terms pointing to the money site. I would play around with this every time I uploaded fresh content to the tier.
Every so often I would check in Ahrefs what the anchor cloud looked like and tweak accordingly.
For the lower tiers I just used “search terms” and naked urls.
To build links to your links, use this option:
Also, it is important to re-verfiy the links each day. Because we are building the tiered structure on the fly, using a lot of spam content, a lot of links get removed.
Therefore in the options for each tier, set the following:
This keeps the links in the tier structure up to date and prevents building links to dead ones.
Tier One, Tier 2 & Tier 3 Secondary
These are the lower quality links used to help power up the tiered structure. You can throw any link types at this that’s not used in the main tiers.
I hold back on volume to the money site, with just one or two links a day, but on the tiers themselves I just let GSA SER rip and build what it can.
Start building these links as soon as your tier structure becomes verified. It helps index them as well.
Just copy my choices above if you want!
Generating Spam Content
Here I used pure spam generated by Kontent Machine 3 working with the GSA SER template output.
I used relevant keywords to scrape content against and changed the tier quality for each output.
To be honest I did not pay too much attention to the output and changed it up every time I generated a fresh batch to refresh each tier.
GSA can add authority links and images, so it’s up to you which way around you do it.
The only thing it seems to effect is how sticky the tier one content is and whether it survives a manual review, which is unlikely either way. We are going for quantity over quality.
Wrapping It Up
All of this took roughly a day’s work, although there was an ongoing learning curve with GSA SER and its plugins over the past few months.
The site has survived the latest round of Google updates including Panda 4.0 & continues to drive a modest yet regular source of income. Around $3000 to date.
I have used this exact model from this site to create more in other niches which are also now starting to rank.
Does basic spam filled tiered link building work in a post Penguin & Panda world?
I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Please feel free to check out my blog & ask any questions in the comments below!
June 5th Rankings & Earnings Update
Thanks everyone for the great feedback on the post. It was very interesting to write given all the Google activity that took place last month.
While I understand that this style of Internet Marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea, it is effective and deserves its place.
Almost 2 weeks have passed, plus what was rumoured to be another update or tweak was made by Google last week.
From the traffic stats, you can see very little has changed in real terms. There was a dip over last weekend where I thought the site was finally crashing, but then it picked up straight after.
Here are the highlights of the sites performance:
The Bad News:
- GWT is still reporting a lower set of impressions, but that doesn’t seem to affect traffic
- 5 terms have moved into #2 where larger authority sites have appeared at the top
- After reaching 12th, the root term dropped out of top 100 (US) or on page 9 (UK)
The Good News:
- Despite all the updates, May was best month with over $1100 in commissions
- Site still takes 24 #1 slots
- Traffic remains stable
- Commissions still coming in
- One product review page (that is all duplicate content) is in #4 for main review term
I think that the penalty that affected the site the most came from the Payday loans 2.0 update, not Panda 4.0.
This is due to the change in ranking/Impressions of the key terms happening a few days before Panda was released.
I am continuing to build links to the site to see if the main terms can recover ground or not. The next point of interest will be the release of Penguin!
July 16th Rankings & Earnings Update
Well another month has passed and I continue to get a lot of feedback on the original post which is great. Many people still ask whether the site ranks, which I am happy to say it does.
It is approaching the $5k mark in total affiliate sales since I started building links. The main product is almost at $4k and the other products make up the rest.
It’s a shame the exchange rate to UK sterling sucks right now! Still it’s a good haul, plus I have gained so much invaluable knowledge.
I stopped building links for around a month at the end of June/beginning July as wanted to take some time to tweak GSA SER and clean up the bloated site lists. Plus I went on holiday with my family and detox my brain from computers.
This timeout from link building saw a decline in some of the number 1 spot rankings plus affiliate sales dropped by 30%.
I started hitting it hard again last week with my newly cleaned GSA SER setup with shiny lists and have already seen a boost in rankings and sales.
Progress So Far
- Traffic although not as high as pre-Panda update is still between 50-80 visits a day
- With 5-15 clickthrough’s a day to product sites
- Traffic shows day on day increase since restarting link building
- The site has 14 #1 ranks (with 9 jumping back after new link building campaign)
- A total of 9 #2 ranks
- Then 22 other 1st page results
- That’s a total of 44 page one terms (google.com)
- Still no top 100 ranking for the main term
All Time Traffic
There has been a small decline in traffic but it is still stable-
A Closer Look At Traffic
If we take a closer look at traffic the past week you can see an uplift since link building was restarted last week-
Rank Tracking
One of my primary terms has remained stable in the #1 position, here are the rankings from day 1 to now-
One of the other primary terms I was tracking has remained strong, dropping the #1 spot but reclaiming it shortly after-
Below you can see the current rankings for all of the terms I’m tracking. There is a large drop for some of the secondary terms but they will recover once the new wave of link building kicks in-
Thanks again for all the positive feedback. Let me know if you have more questions.
October 8th Rankings & Earnings Update
It’s been few months since I last checked in on Mathew’s blog and summer is well and truly over. During which we’ve seen yet another Panda update (4.1) as well as a full frontal manual attack by Google on PBN’s. There are also rumours of Penguin just around the corner.
With regards to the case study site I am pleased to say it’s still sticking. July saw its best month ever making over $1300 although it quietened down in August and September to closer to the $600 mark. This month is looking good so far so we’ll see how it pans out.
Looking at the stats, traffic has started to drop a little but overall has remained fairly stable.
Here we can see the last 30 days and the Panda 4.1 roll out. It had little effect. As you can see there was an all time low a few days ago and I thought the site was about to die, but then it bounced back.
With regards to ranking, little has changed.
- 15 #1 spots
- 10 #2 and #3 spots
- 18 rest of first page spots
That makes 43 different tracked terms on page 1.
Obviously these are long-tail, low volume terms. The big money term I got to position 12 with got hit back in May and now ranks in a lowly 88th place.
However the point is the site still ranks, generates traffic and sales. The site has made over $7000 to date, with over $5300 coming from one product alone.
Not bad for the work I put in. In fact I have spent more time blogging about it than it took to build it!
I still continue to build links to the site and have started a new push in anticipation of the next Penguin release. It will be interesting to see what happens.
If it is hit, I will duplicate the site onto a brand new domain, 301’ing the old one to it to see what happens.
Either way, I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, good luck and stay focussed.
November 20th Rankings & Earnings Update (After Penguin 3.0)
First off, sorry for the late update, there is a good reason for this I promise.
I became a father again just days after Google released their last update, so I have been up to my eyeballs in new born duties and sleepless nights. In fact as I write, I have a baby asleep on my chest!
To answer everyone’s question, yes the site got hit with the last Penguin update. It got hit hard. This came as no surprise and I had been anticipating it for a while.
You can see when it hit traffic just disappeared, all but a bit of Bing and Yahoo. RIP.
Recovering The Site Was Easy
Once I realised the site was over, I set about with the next phase. This was to take a fresh domain that I had prepared a few months back and clone the old site on to it. For this I used a WordPress plugin called Duplicator.
It’s the best plugin I have found so far and makes site cloning a breeze.
Prior to the cloning, I did a fresh WordPress install and used some highly unique spun copy in a related niche. This allowed the site to become indexed. This is not necessary but will speed up the process that follows.
Once this was done, I set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. There are a number of ways to do this, the simplest being to set it up using the Cpanel redirect function or to edit the .htaccess script for the old site.
Make sure it’s a 301 and nothing else. Don’t forget to redirect both www and non-www versions. You will find plenty of guides online showing how to do this so don’t panic if you don’t get it.
Once the site was cloned and the redirect was in place, it was just a waiting game.
Luckily it was not too long…
You can see that Google picked up the power of the redirect very quickly and began to send traffic to the site within days.
It caught me off guard when I received a sale alert just 48 hours after the switch over.
As you can see the traffic started off quickly at about a 3rd of what it was. Since then I began to build links using GSA to the new domain, but at a slower rate of a handful a day.
I had been talking to a friend about the sites progress and I sent him some links to see.
At this point I had not built many links, but he was like hey man, there are 1000’s of links pointing to the site. Confused, I fired up Ahrefs again to discover this on the non-www version:
At the time it was about 1200 domains but they have started to decay now. At first I thought it was a negative SEO attack but upon closer inspection it was lots of links with Chinese anchors built to non-existent pages.
It did not have the signs of an attack and just seems like a random event. The site wasn’t even ranking at the time.
I am not sure what effect these links are having, but the reality is I am building links like this anyway so it doesn’t really matter.
Results So Far
The site is starting to do a lot better, you can see from the traffic chart that there has been uplift in visits and in the last 2 days about 4 sales have dropped in. This is due to a recent uplift in ranking.
So far the site has:
- 41 page one terms
- 29 Position 5 or above
I will step up the blackhat SEO link building over the next few days to try and take some number one slots and get the traffic back to its former levels and hopefully the sales as well… I have an extra mouth to feed after all!
I’ll keep you updated as always.
686 Responses
Very Nice Article Must Read…
Thanks Umar – hope you put it to good use
Thank you for sharing this informative and helpful article
Glad I could help
Fantastic blog!Thank you so much for sharing this kind of wonderful things.
No problem, hope you picked up lots of helpful information.
Good job. I have couple question about how to rank. Call me at +1 561-247-4179.
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/contact-me/
Great Tutorial. Thanks for sharing this awesome.
No problem.
nice article
Thanks
Can You Guide me through GSA? and how far its better to earn?
Take a look at https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/link-building/gsa-search-engine-ranker-advanced-optimization/
Thanks for the tutorial. I use GSA only for tier 2 and tier 3.
No problem Joaquin!
Where do you get the lists? GSA is very expensive !! needs to much money for be working every day!! proxies, capchas, lists, VPS, etc…
Quote of the day: “There is no such thing as white hat – if you build a link, you break webmaster guidelines.”
True story
Great Tutorial. Just discovered i can monetize a spam site.
I will prefer a niche blog with quality content that i can monetize and sell.
Thanks for the post
There is always more than one way to skin a cat :)
Hi Nick & Matt,
I am intrigued by this approach and I am going to test it out with a bit of additional quality content and see how it goes. I will let you know how I get on or how long the site lasts :-)
However, I have one question – Nick talks about building out pages, does it make a difference if I use posts or should it always be pages?
Thanks
What do you think about MRR and PLR?
I don’t use it myself
This is the site structure I used-
Homepage
3/4x Product review pages
10x PLR Articles for posts grouped into related niche categories
??
I wouldn’t use PLR articles on my website, they are duplicate content and damaging your website.
Either create your own unique content, or delete everything.
Great Post
Thanks Ashis!
Thanks for sharing this awesome case study, Matthew :-) Would it be okay to kill two birds with one stone and build one of these as a short lifespan PBN? I’m doing other longer-term work but it’ll take time for that to catch on SEO-wise. I figure since the really crappy GSA links are buffered because of this site, my money site should be safe.
Why build a short life span PBN? Just build it properly and benefit for life!
Have you done this for rank and rent sites – in the local business niche?
Your Posts are very exciting. I learned many secrets that shared nowhere else.
Thanks Vineeth :)
Hey there,
are there any case studies that confirm that this approach still works?
If not, do you know of variations of this (with e.g. redirects, web 2.0, etc) that still work?
What about using the double 301 redirect right from the start?
Thanks a lot and looking forward to your answers!
Julian
What plugin did you use for the html table?
Just HTML and CSS, no plugin
Actually I used something called Tablepress. Its not responsive though so I would look for an alternative.
Nick
Dear Mathew,
After new Update some of my sites got banned by google. They are not showing in search. I have received a message in GWT that : “Mejor Spam Problem!!!!”
Yah, I did a lot spamming by GSA. But I think problem was my contents….. they are not good enough. By the by, I like your blog in fact I love it too much! thanks a lot for this awesome post. I don’t understand GSA too much, still learning. Would you mind to share some new tutorial of GSA?
Greetings! :-))
I’ve never seen a GWT message that says “Mejor Spam Problem!!!”
Can you screenshot the actual message and I can give you some advice
Hi!
Thanks a lot for your kind reply Matthew. :)
Here is the link of screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByCYuoy-eNrSSlREV1JoQTl5RDg/view?usp=sharing
Hey Rashed,
Yes I can see why they have applied that to your site. Unfortunately you have little to zero actual text based content and pretty much every page on your site is identical except for 1 image a few words but even then, the images are not original.
It is going to take a lot of work to bring that upto scratch and remove the penalty and its generally very hard to produce meaningful content for a wallpapers site =/
How the site is monetized here?Amazon?Adsense or other network?
A Clickbank product I believe
Hello,
Well, I have been trying out to understand Google Panda and Penguin, by reading more and more and this is helping me a lot. I know Google Panda is all about Quality Content.
Although, It would take some time for me to understand, How to avoid any penalty from Google Penguin. It is bit complicated for me, they say, Only natural links are safe, but After reading articles, including this one, i get bit confused.
Anyways, Will try experimenting a bit.
GSA can not search for new resources
I’m not sure what you mean sorry
Run 5 days only to confirm the 306 links,and set each day to verify 186
This site is a university for me, Matt’s Buzzbundle and LTP tutorials meant I could sell gigs on Fiverr, now I have the cash to purchase the software needed to set up the spam sites.
From the comments I would say:
Spam sites are ultimate SEO practice and getting to the kit
They burn out and fade away but with enough effort you can earn a good wage, to location independent people $1000 is plenty
Shut all my gigs on Fiverr and done Marketer Seal Training.
I buy all my kit from this site because of the discounts and the fact that [he] tells me how to use them, so I guess all who say spam is evil need to create an maintain a site like this then no spammer is ever getting in your way.
Wow this is very unethical. There are people out there trying to provide real value and make an honest living, and then we have this site ….
My advice is to embrace both sides of the coin rather than becoming ignorant of the other. If you can make a good amount of money just by throwing a site together with amazon affiliate links and spamming it to the top – then so be it.
Equally that carries the risk that you are not building an actual business or brand – but you should be doing that as well seperately.
Is this method still valid? Any updates? Or has it been superseded by something else? Looks to be a sound strategy, but could equally have been an elaborate presentation to sell the featured software. Please don’t mind the apparent cynicism, no offence intended.
Enjoy your monthly income reports – it’s good to see someone this side of the water doing well online.
I’m awaiting an update from Nick and actually I’m not in the UK anymore :)
Sorry about the delay! Life has been busy with new work projects and new additions to the family.
The original site still is in play although it has had 4 different domain name replacements with 301 redirects from the old domains.
When I switch to a new domain I then start to build links to the new site/domain in pretty much the same way as mentioned in my post above. The results are not as dramatic as when I first released the site but when I last refreshed the domain in December ’15 it jumped to #1 for a few terms and started making $200 a month. That has now faded back down and ranks #9 and now struggles to pull in $50 a month. It still gets about 20 hits a day though.
So its time to do a refresh with the domain and hopefully that will bump it back up for a month or two. I’ll try to document it and record some of the rankings and get Mathew to update the blog.
When changing up domains, its important to buy a fresh one that has NEVER been used before otherwise you don’t get the bump. If using a pre-used domain It just goes back in where the last domain left off. I found this out on the 3rd change.
Nick
So its it like musical chairs? You have to keep swapping domains?
If you kept adding content to the site in addition to the link building would it help maintain its ranking potential?
Maybe its the sites lack of content growth Vs link spam alone that is causing its drop in ranks?
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for this valuable tutorial
I have a question, how to rank magazine site, that update random articles daily..
what keyword that I should rank first because many topics that share there..
I try to backlink domain name, but no one search by magazine name, today I just share from social media platform..
I hope you can help..
sorry for my bad english, it’s not my primary language.
I suggest you do some keyword research https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL2yjHxp-57Q4Dcmk0bv7oMwfFW3RaHFZ
Any chance of uploading a template?
A template for what?
how to increase Domain Authority (DA) for a one or two page site in quick time. please reply
For what purpose?
Matt,
I checked his Nick’s site and he mentioned a while ago on his blog that his spam site was dead. Is this the same site that you mentioned on this case study?
Also, when many people have asked for an update you always reply that you are waiting on Nick’s update, but why would he not reply for such a long time?
By the way, I think this strategy is way to risk now in 2015 but would love for you to do a brand new case study using the exact same strategy and show us that it stills works :)
Thank you Matt.
I’m not sure, this is what I know- http://i.imgur.com/o7bZWm9.jpg
this was enlightening and informative
Glad you enjoyed it!
What were you using to gain commission from your product sales? The totals amount you displayed didn’t look like anything I had seen before. Sorry I’m a bit new to this whole thing :D
What will be your prediction on pages of sites..will churn and burn work on those ? If i tried to rank a page e.g.example.com/page.html using tiered link building , will it rank ..if there is how much change of getting the page ranked with churn and burn or tiered link building ?
Doesn’t matter if it’s the home page or an inner page
Hey what were the tools being used for the commission and website tracking? Sorry kinda new.
Would be nice to get an update on this for July 2015 :)! Thanks
I have dropped Nick an email
Any update Matthew? can you say this will still work or what would you change? Or can anyone confirm who tried this strategy that still works?
Just waiting for Nick to get back in touch :)
This still working on 2015? The last update on post was in june now, but the last update in results is on 2014.
:D
I will chase for an update
Any update yet on how the site is going now?
Awaiting a response from Nick :)
You’ve never heard of Alix Bocker?
Not a clue sorry
Hello
Thanks Nick for your great post and thanks Matt for inspiring people with your site.
I’ve read this post many times and started my journey two weeks ago.
I’ve followed the details and check my site’s progress everyday using free ahrefs, majestic and moz ose. So far the result is good. It’s one year already since this article posted but still relevant until now.
I’m targeting low comp keywords in health niche with 1,9k US monthly searches. Today, the keyword ranks on Yahoo and Bing top 10 but nowhere in Google. Still waiting for that.
Questions for Nick:
1. I read the comment above that you posted on same URLs for T2+, did you tick “per URL” box too?
2. I found that SEREngine only give me low number of verified links in each project (4-6 links). I ticked all engine and unticked nofollow and no contextual link. How can you get 108 verified web 2.0 links on T1? For T2+ links in web 2.0 group, are these tiers only contain web 2.0 links?
Best regards,
Shine
Hi Mathew,
I am blogging from last 3 years but i find it really hard to get traffic. Right now, I am blogging in tech niche and create evergreen and high quality content. Can u please guide me on this?
I have another question? How can a site with copy-paste content can get high rankings in serp. I am getting frustrated when seeing some sites stealing the content of other and ranking.
What value does your tech site add to the audience over and above established sites like engadget?
Mathew, I know there are many tech sites, but engadget is mainly a news tech site. But my tech site is based on how to guides and top list. URL of my tech blog is http://www.ecloudbuzz.com. Please guide on this by analyzing my blog.
Ok so how about MakeUseOf – what do you do, that they don’t?
Mathew,
I have seen many ordinary blogs are making making with ordinary content. Why you are comparing my tech blog with MakeUseOf. It’s well established site.
I don’t do ordinary, I either do amazing or I don’t bother. Regardless of how well established a site is, they are your competition (whether its makeuseof or whatever, just whoever is your competition) and they are the people you have to compete with.
For example the first question I ask anyone that comes to me for advice about their amazon site is this – “What value does your site offer over and above the real verified buyer reviews that are available directly on Amazon”
Most people can’t answer that question and they are the same people that never make any money online.
Hey, I think you should check your site. Someone hacked it. I clicked the link above and your site redirected me to another page that said I had a virus installed on my computer and I must pay the ransom to get it removed. My computer is fine, but your site is not.
Seems ok here I just checked it with Sucuri
Hey Matt, I was talking about the link in Rahul comment above. Rahul, site is hacked. I don’t want to check it again, but hopefully he cleaned his site files.
Ok thanks, I’m not having a problem this end when I click :)
Hi Matt, Hi Nick,
Thanks for sharing!
How do you create your comments spintax while you use GSA? Special niche?
Thanks for some great stuff. I bought all the stuff needed, now Im going to get startet.
How do you build the internal links?
Are the reviews pointing to the homepage and the article to the reviews?
Can this work with foreign languages and also can this process be outsourced to services like fiverr?
Thanks
As with anything in life, you get what you pay for.
The method is outlined for you step by step, but still looking for the shortcut ;) Thats the difference between making a lot of money online or zero.
I loved the article regarding your niche site and sure you are very smart to again pick up the dead website and give it a new life great
Hell Boy, nice case study!
Seems like spam and hacks working better then ever before :D
Always has :)
Is there any update on this site? Is it still ranking? Earning?
I have dropped Nick an email this morning to find out
Looking forward to hearing the results. If this site tanked after 6 months I think the experiment would have been a success given the time invested vs the return. It would be really sweet if the site was still earning after all this time.
I’m pestering for an update :)
Do you have to use a WordPress site to do this or can you use any quality site? Do you have an alternative?
Use anything you want
any updates as of yet? has the site tanked or still going strong?
As of last week Nick told me it was still going strong
New updates please ? I am really interested to see how it works now and how much you’ve earned.
Keep going mate!
Nothing new to report really, site continues at current trend – will update when something notable happens
Sorry if this was asked. Do you build links to your inner pages? If yes, what’s the percentage? Thanks!
Do you nofollow the authority links in your PLR articles? Does it matter since they are pure copied content?
Hi Nick,
I can’t find the post about building lists with SB on your blog.
Not sure that is this blog buddy
I used this method for recovering 2 sites from Google Penguin 3.0. Both sites had built up a spammy link signature. I used this recovery strategy in smaller local niches (still competitive) for a service company, and both sites have already begun the rebound to page 1 and page 2 rankings for some of the target keywords! I used brand new domains (not previously revved up with spun content) and followed the instructions exactly as they were written. This definitely works, and quickly. I assume that I will earn back my top notch rankings over the next month or two. Great info and thank you, Matt!
Great to hear you are having results with it Carl!
At the same time I would start building quality links to the new domain to help keep things sticky
I follow your method, but the result is quite poor. Maybe it caused by the list i imported. Do you use your own list or let GSR find target site buy the keywords you provide?
Thanks
I would suggest kick starting your project by buying some link lists.
Check out Loopline.
Nick
Hi Nick,
When you do your 301, Do you remove all the content on your old site?
I have one site that were hit by a manual penalty during the mass PBN update. I was thinking of doing a 301 but wasn’t sure how to do it correctly.
Do you think 301 still works for manual penalty?
Thanks
Joe
Yes, once the 301 is in place you can remove the old content.
I don’t know about manual penalties, you will have to research further.
Nick
Thanks Nick. Appreciate your effort. :) hope that I will have the same success as you.
I got my niche but having hard time finding an affiliate of a product. Any suggestion??
What is the niche?
It’s about healthy foods.
Have you considered making your own product? That’s exactly what the blogs that dominate my income report roundups do
I can write ebook or make premium video about it but then if I do that I would rrather make it as a white hat.
I am currently looking over sites like “offer vault” hopefully I can get something. I also your tutorial on finding offer through “flippa”, amazing tutorial.
Anyway most of us are struggling on finding an offer like yours. Mind spending few words on how you find it? If it’s already done, I beg your pardon.
Thanks
Making a product shouldn’t have anything to do with what hat you wear. Just use your blackhat spammed sites to feed traffic into your product funnel.
Hi Nick and Matt,
I have been following this post since the beginning. It got me started on using GSA and has been the basis of my efforts to rank a new money site using GSA.
Unfortunately one of the biggest mistakes that I did was creating a money site for a single product and trying to rank for that product name and product review keyword. There are almost no long tail variations of this keyword. I learnt the hard way that this is almost certainly impossible without some powerful PBN links, which I don’t have the affordability for right now.
I think the real power of GSA lies in building links with extreme anchor text diversification, which allows you to rank for all those long tail keywords. This is what I am going to do for my next money site.
It’s been a hard journey, but I sure am hopeful for the success of my next money site. :)
That said, can you elaborate on anchor text ratios and HOW MANY anchor texts that you used for each category (partial match, LSI, secondary, etc)?
TIA. :)
So a single 301 worked? cool
I’ve read some people saying a single 301 will now pass the penalty to the new domain, that we need a double 301
like old site –> aged domain –> new site
Any thoughts on that?
Thanks
I haven’t tested this method and props to Matt for doing this.
I’ve heard this too – but the penalty will only manifest itself again when they rerun penguin.
But, the penguin is so resource intensive there was over a year gap between peng2 and peng3.
So come on Mattybabes let’s hear how he did.
I’m waiting with baited breath. I want to give this a go.
I have a very long established authority site (making big £££) working purely white hat and I’m getting f’in frustrated by the Big G.
If this has survived Peng3 I’m going to try the above technique with a burnable domain in the same niche as my authority site.
(Or are you not telling yet because it would damage your affiliate commissions on GSA et al ;-) )
Hi,
You’ll understand the delay when the update is released – very very interesting stuff!
What are your frustrations with your bigger site and Google?
How do you managed to make money with a website that only has 100 visits a day?
How much traffic you have isn’t all that relevant to how much money you have. How targeted that traffic is though plays a huge part.
Hi Matt thanks for sharing this with us , But I have a couple of questions.
1. Did he used any indexer?
2. Where did he get his list for GSA?
Thanks
My name is Nick!
The update on this is killing me! Im really thinking about getting into churn and burn.
Hahahaha I know what it is already :P Just got to put it together! But it’s a positive one ;)
Very interesting informations Matt. thanks for this
No worrys :)
News for this site after the monster update called penguin update? he he
I am trying this trick since monday.
Awaiting an update :)
+1 for update
Coming this week, there is a good reason for the delay you’ll see :)
spammy sites devastating for the whitehat players, but yes that is seo, sometimes we have to mix occasionally with blackhat techniques in order to compete in the SERP
thanks for your article,
and i’m waiting for your newest post about the latest updates penguin
If you choose to wear a specific ‘hat’ you’ve already lost the war.
Great Post Matt!
Just for clarity…Are your commissions for each product sold over $20 a pop or do your products cost over 20$?
The commissions were for $20 and over.
Nick
I bought an Insurance site for $1500 three months ago,
that site was making $500+/month, until that tweet from Matt Cutts. The revenue is now almost zero.
Irony: One Matt Destroys, the other Matt Liberates.
Will try this one out for that existing site.
Sorry to hear that, thats the game we play unfortunately :(
On your diagram, secondary money site is this another domain . ?
Tier 1 Secondary is this a product page from your main site?
Tier 2 CDF what is CDF
How do you feel about Google slapping any sites that use keyword anchors? I see most top sites just have url anchors
Tier 1 Secondary are lower quality links pointing to the money site.
CDF just means contextual do follow.
Nick
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for discussing in details the process of building and ranking spam site . It is really an easy way to start making money online.
I wouldn’t say easy, but definetly a good place to start learning
My advice is to build a site and write about the things you love.
Is this site still surviving after the Penguin update this weekend?
Just waiting for the dust to settle before updating!
I rank and track lots of sites. I belong to a few paid forums and have read lots of posts regarding the new Penguin 3 update.
If you have been hit by the update, you will know because of a dramatic drop in your rankings.
Waiting for the dust to settle, AKA hoping rankings will come back, is hopeless.
Either you got hit or you didn’t? Time to fess up!
Ahh but not everyone knows they have had a drop of rankings or even track them, many just know they lost traffic =\
Did it make it past Penguin 3.0? It looks like it is rolling out this weekend.
Just waiting on the dust to settle
Seems like Penguin 3.0 just release. How’s the website doing? Matt and Nick, Can you both give your thoughts on how can we can move forward from here?
Waiting on some dust settle :)
I wonder with the new penguin 3.0 rolling out, how is this site doing.
Waiting for news :)
HI Matthew,
I wonder if the site is still ranking after panda 3.0 rolled out?
Penguin or Panda?
Hi Matthew,
First, i thank you for discussing in details how everyone can rank a spam site, but to be honest with you, i follow white hat SEO ,but sometime i see some spammy site on the top of search engines (i become sad) but when i think deeper i find that white hat will bring results for a long time, thanks a gain for your article.
No worrys, there is no one size fits all glove and I dont believe in white hat vs black hat, at the end of the day there is 1 algorithm to beat. How you beat it is irrelevant.
Can anyone please tell me how to overcome the Panda 4.1 ? i am hit with it and my traffic is down almost 50%. i made changes to most of the pages with less content and/or 10+ aff. links on them, here is what i did so far but hasn’t seen any increase in the traffic
1. updated content to all shallow pages , now all my pages are 400+ content
2. removed aff. links on few of the pages which are having 10+ links
3. updated content and reduced the keyword(s) count
but even after making all these changes i am having no luck :(
how much days will it take to recover my site? does it happen instantly or i have to wait for next update?
what steps should i do apart from the above mentioned ?
thanks
Im curious if it will work on a .nl niche website, because the article spinner doesn’t work because of the gramma etc of words.
Dang, my eyes are bleeding, I tried reading all the comments but couldn’t do it.
My take on the approach: in any business, it’s either all in or none at all. People can say “white hat” 100%, I think even doing the clean implementation, you’re still a grey hat.
In a couple of years, the white will blacken eventually. “White” hat doesn’t really mean abiding to Google guidelines, it means doing in a way that won’t annoy the sh*t out of people involved (especially webmasters and blog owners), “spamming” them with loads of low quality irrelevant stuff. And even here, “spam” depends on perception only.
The fact that I like to comment 10 times in a row on the same page might mean spam for X, for Y might seem like I am just seeking attention, for Z might seem I am mentally dysfunctional and I can’t convey thoughts in just one comment. For the blog owner, if we’re familiar, it might seem like a funny joke or even proof of respect; if we’re not familiar with each other, I’d be “just another commenter/spammer”.
We judge too quickly, the Internet is a free society. If you think living in one where you respect all the rules will make things better, newsflash: there is no perfect society. The Ancient Greeks wanted an “oikeio pragia” (look up Plato), a state built solely on the justice of humankind. In theory, it sounds nice, in reality, you have to adapt.
“The end justifies the means” (Malraux). The idea isn’t how he got, but that he GOT there – with or without black hat, spam etc.
And hey, I’d say someone deserves a freaking medal each time they “cheat” the system. That’s why we all love hackers. So Nick, the author talks about how to “hack” the algorithm. Where is the enthusiasm???
Instead, we just point a finger and blame it on others that it didn’t work for us. That’s not the way. You are responsible for your shares of successes and failures. You fail, you learn, you get up, you build another business. Life moves on. You can’t say “hey, my website got hit, but yours is still up”. The correct mindset is “hey, my website got hit, so I’m gonna fix it or do it again until I succeed”.
Just sayin’…
Sorry for the long comment, Matt, and Nick, but I get really mad when I see people victimizing themselves. I don’t like that, I expect online entrepreneurs to learn from each other and get that “peaceful warrior” mindset activated. But all they do is spam with their victimisation (pun intended).
si nesito como aser unpoco dedinero en la internet como puedo aselo y don de quiero saber las pajinas .
lo siento hablo un poco espanol, no entiendo =\
Congrats Guys,
Been following this case study for so long.. Matthew, I’m not an experienced SEO, so can you please correct me .. This is called ‘Churn and Burn Link Building’ right?
Moreover, can’t believe the numbers. 7K with a site with PLR content and these links.. I’m tempted to give it a try :D
Hi,
Yes it is indeed :)
Hi! Nice post.
But I always wonder the same:
How many links should I build daily to each tier 1, each tier 2 and each tier 3?
I like a lot creating niches with 10000-15000 searches/month. I just have two at this day, and havent earned a dollar yet xD
Thanks so much!
Hi Matt,
Interesting read, and I am….LOL….at this comment thread. Can’t remember the last time I saw the word “dufus” used hahaha!
Laughing all the way from Fiji, can you hear me? ;)
Ryan
what tool was used for “Current Site Rankings”
That will be RankTracker
This is an awesome article. I was building niche sites with SEO Nuke back in 2007 and got out of it to go back into professional agency work where we build buffer networks which are very high quality.
This article has reinvigorated me to get back into building some niche sites and enjoying some good old semi-passive income
Very well written! Excellent case study.. Thanks!
very cool update on the case study :)
Any of your sites that are being ranked by PBN? Because i’m aware of the last hit on pbn weeks ago. Is there any effect on them including this site ranking?
Thank
Earth from SMMTIPS!
Great case study Nick and awesome guest post Matthew!
i have a question about homepage products comparison table. i’m quite new in such style of AM, so i’m wondering what is the best way to choose metrics for products and if you use some WP plugins to make such HTML comparison table?
If you can drop me some guide links or something like this i would be also happy ;)
Great thanks!
Hey Matthew,
I’m a bit confused. I thought this site was being ranked only with GSA. However, when I checked the site’s backlink profile it seems to be using quite a few relatively powerful PBN sites. That would lead me to believe that the PBN sites are responsible for the rankings, not GSA. Am I misinterpreting the article?
Love your site btw.
– Pat
That’s awesome work Nick! I am not sure who is going to answer but I have 2 questions…
As for your Tier 1 links pointing to your money site… are you using unique content that is manually spun or kontent machine?
When setting up your site with Google analytics and webmaster tools… are you creating a separate account for your spam sites or do you put all the sites own by you under one account no matter if they are spam sites or not?
Hello Guys,
Congratulations on the success! I’m a fan of WH SEO as the opposite tends to knock me down.. plus it helps when you can do better seo than most people :D
Just thought I’d drop my 2 cents of thoughts..
If you do get hit, 301’ing won’t help you recover.. SADLY!
Apart from the traffic, Google spiders will crawl your domain and end up on your new domain and also link your spam links with the new one and hit it aswell.
It’s the same thing as when you 301 a high PR domain and the new domain gets link juice and authority. Same principle applies here, just the HIGH PR domain is replaced with a ‘hitted’ domain.
Good Luck.
Looking forward to the next update
Actually I have had great success with 301’s
Have you actually tried it? It takes time for the google penalty to get transferred to the new domain so there will be a new window of ranking and banking.
Thanks for the actionable tips Nick!
Quick question for either one of you,I plan on running GSA Search Engine Ranker,GSA Captcha Breaker and Scrapebox on a VPS. Which VPS package do you recommend I get? Thanks.
Personally I use PowerUpHosting
What’s a good package to buy for running GSA Search Engine Ranker,GSA Captcha Breaker and Scrapebox?
The SSD2 or 3 would do the trick!
Thanks. I’ll look into it!
Hi Nick,
Thanks a lot for a great case study.
How often do you change your spun tiered content for GSA?
Do you use different spun content for different kinds of donor sites (web 2.0, article directories etc)?
weekly if I can.
This site is included in the ones Google did not detected due to many out there :))
I’m happy you still rank and earn good money month after month.
Ha! Your a competitor of mine! I thought your screen shot of your design was familiar…
Well, your not a competitor any more because I just sold my site last month.
Great niche to be in eh!
Awesome brother!
If you had just started out with GSA how did you get so many links? I bought GSA a month ago, ive scraped and scraped, daily! And I cant get anywhere near that amount.
Am i doing something wrong?
Not sure why. Just read up and tweak GSA. Look for platforms that build links easily and turn off the ones that don’t. Streamline the process. Remember lots of emails and lots of keywords.
Hi Mathew !
Where did you bought the best GSA list ? Can you suggest for me.
Thanks.
This is class nice work :)
Would like to give you my much lazier version:
1. Aged domain no need for keyword EMD
2. 301 redirects or a nice aged domain (to protect money site)
3. VPS 2GB GSA SER with captcha breaker (tweak GSA like a beast)
4. ContentFoundry (learn this software then knock out sexy content without breaking a sweat)
5. For major speed a SERList at approx $30
6. Very good supply of yahoo emails
7. Semi Proxies $10 p/m
8. Pay for an Indexing Service don’t be cheap if you want quality results
8. Wait 1-3 months (depending on niche and keywords always)
Do it now and have a good life!
Byeeeeeee Google >>>
Peace out :D
TheDarkLord
Not sure how that is lazier, but thanks for sharing!
N
Thanks for this tuts, really help a novice like me…
by the way, did you collect and use your own GSA list or buy it from list broker ?
maybe you could reccomend some GSA list seller for me, with affordable price of course >.<
Come subscribe to my blog and I’ll email you some good sources. I wont post on here as it defeats the object.
N
Hey Matthew,
I’m a bit confused. I thought this site was ranked using nothing but GSA SER..? However, when I looked at the site’s backlink profile it looks like Nick used a bunch of fairly powerful PBN sites to get the site ranking. I don’t remember him mentioning that he used PBNs in this spam case study. That would lead me to believe that it’s actually the PBNs and not GSA that are responsible for the rankings. Thanks!
Love your blog, btw.
– Pat
I think you are confused. This is Matt’s blog and I am pretty sure there are no PBN links pointing at it. I did not provide a URL so you are not looking at the case study site either.
Nick
Great Casestudy update Matt, really don’t understand all of the haters that are commenting. Surely they realise this is a blackhat blog?
I just love this kind of article especially right after a major Google algorithm update.
Keep up the good work Matt.
Well I must say I’m impressed. I’ve been following this article since it was first posted and I’m admittedly pretty surprised that it’s still ranking so well. One of my newest clients came to me with a site he purchased which I immediately recognized to be a spam site (although he didn’t know that).
Even so, the traffic it’s getting is actually even a little better than this site, with good conversion rates. Meanwhile I’ve had GSA just sitting around on my PC for the last 4-5 months and I never used it :) One of these days, I’m gonna find the time and give it a go
We’ll see if it survives Penguin!
Hi Nick,
Many thanks for the detailed case study above.
Q. No email marketing or retargeting running on this site? You could be missing out on a load of money without those.
Keep up the good work.
Good shout – Facebook retarget > email capture > remarketing oosh
Nope. Not on this one. Its too spammy to do real marketing on!
Hey Matt,
This is serious.
Good to see increase in income and traffic for the case study.
Congrats
It’s all fun and games =D
Hey, I would like to know about indexing. How you indexed those tons of backlinks out there??
Serially creating links and sending them to indexer or first build tons of links or send them to indexer all together at once or drip feed ?
Would you make me clear about it ?
Looks like this guy survive Panda 4.1 **removed to protect site identity*
Check his robots.txt he blocks off all the major bots, I’m sure he’s spamming like nick to rank. I’ve been watching his site for the last month.
it did indeed, will be posting an update soon!
Hi Matt,
Did you get any updates from Nick Joleson? Google recently pushed out Panda 4.1. Is the niche site is still doing well?
Thanks!
Yeah it survived no problem, update coming soon!
With the latest going-ons about PBN…I’m itching to try spamming again just to see how fast goog’s shiny brand new algo can go. :)
Hahaha its a test I would recommend you do :)
PBN is just a manual penalty. Ignore all hype.
Hi Matthew! congratulations for your blog, i´m starting to learn from it, i have a little bit of experience on Seo but always manually, and recently i purchased GSA, my question: is possible to rank a niche with Gsa without using Kontent machine3?
thanks
Yes you can use other content sources
Scrapebox will get articles and TBS will mix them up. The premium article plugin will translate them and the you can translate them back to mix it up even more.
Nice post, I have been seeing that many bloggers have started doing such spam blogs/websites. Many of my friends recently started doing event-based niche blogs (like, happy new year 2013) and they earned quick bucks (around 1K to 2K $$) … but they has not used any of the tools above (i.e. GSA, KM3, etc etc…) they just used Google footprints to find blogs which give dofollow links in the comment section, and then they spammed them manually. THey made around 4K to 6K dofollow backlinks for just 2 keywords.
I am wondering whether I should start one this Halloween or not. Because frankly speaking – it is just spamming with a little bit of On-page SEO and monetization.
Thank You,
Apurva.
I say go for it!
Great stuff Matt and Nick! Good to see all the data and details in the post
Cheers
Thanks man.
N
I’m trying to rank a youtube video, but am having lot of problems with the Article/Web 2.0/Wiki links being made with GSA. The links get made, but a TON of them disappear after you re-verify. I should mention that I’m using generated content from KontentMachine with Tier 1 quality. Whats the reason for all the links disappearing in GSA after re-verifying. Is it because the content is auto generated by KM3???
Try it with hand spun content and see if it makes a difference
thnks for the nice guide, i want to know following basic seo principals, with good backlinking, Ho long it will take for top 10 ?
I think you need to spend a bit more time learning about SEO first
Hi Nick and Matt,
Great case study….as always great value!
What are your opinions on buying a VPS with the software pre-loaded? It’s tons cheaper!
Thanks.
I’ve never done it sorry =\
Carl,
I’ve done it before and it’s not worth it. It’s much slower and unreliable. Could have just been the providers I was with, but I wouldn’t do it again. Good thing with GSA is that it’s only a 1 time fee
Hey, Did you have “allow posting on the same site” ticked?
if so what where the options set to?
how many email address did you have imported?
Yes, on tier 2 and below. Set to up to x accounts. You’ll need x amount of fresh emails to be able to utilise that function.
Thank you Matt and Nick!! I hope this strategy will work with amazon affiliation like rest other mentioned above .
It will, its just the commissions suck on Amazon!
Hi nick,
May you inform me how did you find the products which offer more than $20 commission?
Thanks
You could start with Clickbank
Most terms just ranked by themselves. I choose a high volume root term and made sure there were some long tails around it.
A site like this will struggle to (maintain) rank for high volume terms. Target long tail for quick wins.
Original content is better. This case study was just a quick test to see if it would work. I cut corners at every turn.
A couple questions if you’re still monitoring comments:
1. I see about 30 or so keywords you’re ranking for – what were the initial search volume before you decided to target those? With long tails I have some that are “low competition” but range from 10-40 exact match monthly searches. Granted these phrases are 4+ words per phrase and contain words like “buy” and “best”. But is the search volume too low?
Affiliate commissions are in the $20+ range for this. I chose what I perceive to be filled with buyers who are in a “must” situation. Not for vanity, but the kind of issue that would keep you up at night and worrying throughout your day at work/school.
2. Is it worth to try this with spam links but use original content for the 10 inner pages? (I have Licorne AIO right now, but I can get GSA SER with captcha breaker if needed/advised if Licorne sucks).
I also have No Hands SEO for mass links at lower tiers.
Sorry if these questions are stupid, but I know setting out on this is for learning as the biggest goal, and hopefully earning as a side result. I admit, I used to believe in white and black shades of SEO…but this case study was so interesting to me I want to give it a shot to learn more but had a couple questions before I buy a domain and invest the time and money for proxies and KM.
The head term has 12000 exact match searches a month. The terms I rank for are long tail derivatives and LSI.
If you rank for lots of long tail low volume it ads up. Just one or two will restrict you.
I am sure original content will work as well.
Good luck
Nick
great post Matt
I can’t take the credit for this one sorry :)
hello, thanks for the awesome tutorial im going to be trying this out very soon,
Im very new to doing seo on my own so would like to ask a couple questions,
i read this tutorial and also saw matts tutorial on tiered link building and there doesnt seem to be alot of difference between what your doing “spam” and the “safe” way to rank sites, could you point out the differences? it seems to me the only real difference is the content being used on money site / tier 1 would need to be unqiue (manually written/spun) and a slightly more variation of links being created. what other differences are there?
also you said that the SEengines Tier 1 is being run as a seperate campaign, why is that?
do you then load both tier 1s into the tier 2 list or do you have a seperate tier 2 and tier 3 for the seengines links?
matt, in the tiered link building tutorial you use UD for tier 1 and GSA for tier 2+3, could this not all be done by GSA now? what was your reason for using UD over GSA previously?
Hi Sean,
I can’t tell you more differences than that. You’ll have to research it yourself.
SERengines was added later on. You need it to run as standalone project in T1. If you use it you’ll understand why.
I copied out the tiers but you don’t need to do that. Just select multiple projects to build links to in T2.
Nick
Hi I have been buying up expired domains and building up my own pbn from which I backlink to my money site. Currently on page 2-3 for quite a few of my targeted keywords.
I was hoping that this would be a long term site, however I have only really made about $20 from the site and I have had it for months now. I really want to get it to the 1st pages, my question is this strategy still working and is it safe as I really don’t want to lose the rankings I already have. I’m really looking for a long term strategy, if executed in the way you have described in this post, do you think it is safe?
I have never used GSA properly and I don’t currently own it. I But I would install and follow this guide if someone could confirm that it would help lift my site to the 1st position of google since I’m already on the 2nd page.
Mainly is it safe and is it still working, and can it be used alongside PBN campaign. I have a partial emd domain and I ‘ve already used anchors that target my keyword on my PBN so if iwas to start a gsa campaign would it be wise not too use any of my keywords as anchor text and just use bare naked urls and generic anchors?
I hope someone can answer my question,
Thank you very much,
Phillip Dumont
No, its not safe. Stay away. Its just for short term gains.
Hi Nick great Tut! i like that Table you used in the example, do you know if there is a WordPress Plugin that could do this? Thanks
Ok so I’ve read through all the comments and couldn’t find the answer to my question.
what articles did you use that points directly to your money site? (Not talking about the web2.0) but the first actual part you made.
And then what content did you use for your tier 1 links.
Kontent machine spun or did you get them manually spun so they are readable?
Thanks guys!
Hi Michelle,
All content and articles were generated using Kontent Machine or Content Foundry.
No manual spinning.
it is getting harder after 22th, man 2014. payday loans updates. Our city full of SEOer, we are now facing the spam problem. the big G give the “waiting period”. almost kill us. And we now have to re-design our strategy. The long term war has began. Google star the war and we will fight against. We are rats. Seeking the leaking. So we are now targeting the long term words first and them spamming the main keywords. Or we will be killed by google.
Or don’t build your entire business model around a company that changes the rules when it wants
It is great that the case study sill has the value and your website is still ranking. I am not sure about the website as it is not mentioned here and could not really say you are true. If you could have given the website name then this case study could have been looked much genuine.
However, I do have one question. Have you used GSA SER for the Tier 1 as well? Some of these information is missing or confusing so I just thought to clarify it.
Are you happy to replace the lost affiliate income if the site is revealed and consequently slapped?
I agree with your views. But listing some of the keywords would have made it easier I believe.
I really tried hard to get what Nick has told here. I could hardly generate any Backlinks, I do not have VPS but I own GSA, CapthaBreaker, KM and 10 Private proxies.
I also want to try this on my affiliate site which is way behind in 11th page of google. I do not have much funds to invest in VPS.
Can I sill get the same results without VPS?
The keywords are really irrelevant and wouldn’t help you solve your problem.
You don’t need a VPS no, but if you only have a 1-5MB connection and/or slow computer it will take a lot longer. You also have to leave the computer on all day.
Hi,
Do you recommend using the SERengines plugin?
yes, great plugin once you figure out how to use it. It adds a few extra web20’s. Run it as a separate project in tier 1 though.
so do you have 2 seperate campaigns in GSA?
also with proxies, are you using both private and public proxies? surely it would be better to use the public proxies for all the heavy lifting?
Is tiered Link building working after paydayloan algo update?
Have you seen the updates?
Could you aproximate your total cost of this campaign? (VPS+proxies+target list and so on.. )
Thanks!
Well thats just lazy :P
do u spam for tier 4 o tier 3 or tier 2 or tier 1???
Yes, all (3), but you don’t have to. You could go white hat and manually spin tier 1 :)
Hi Nick,
Your affiliate link for the Content Foundry ($5 monthly trial) does not work – when you try the link, it takes you to the site’s home page with no link to the offer.
Has anyone tried this software BTW? Sounds like a good software to have. Please let us know if you’ve used it. Thanks.
Its there. Just scroll down and when you get to the pricing, you will see the $5 offer just above the two product boxes.
HI Matthew/Nick ,
absolutely amazing post, have been following it from the start. I do have a GSA related question however.
When setting a campaign up, what was the reason for you to break the tiers up into web and not web.
Should I have for example, one type of link building say article directories in one tier, then a totally different set for other things, or can i run GSA tier 1 for example on web 2.0s, wikis, articles, all in one) Thanks good luck and keep it all up!
Hi Aaron,
The web2.0 tier you see was where I added the SERengines plugin at a later date in the campaign. This has few extra web2.0 to post to.
It really is just bolstering the tier 1 CDF tier. You have to have it set up separately for it to work.
No mix up each tier with platforms, I use 2 parts per tier – Good (CDF) and Junk (secondary). You want to focus on do follow contextual relevance for the most part of the core of the tiers.
Nick
Could you use this exact same strategy using a blogger site, and are they any benefits in using wordpress instead
Well I suppose you could but I would never use a blogger site as my main money site
Thanks for the reply. I was thinking because it’s a churn and burn It wouldn’t matter as much. I would never use it for a long term website.
You should never use a web 2.0 site as your main money site – it may ok for using Adsense but you will find very few people would buy your products from a web 2.0 site.
Also, you won’t be able to sell your site if you used a web 2.0 site and a lot of webmasters would sell their sites at Flippa when the site earns certain amount of money.
I liked the article Matthew and I agree with you that it all depends on what my goal is with a site – if it’s long term or short-term. Building links manually itself breaks the guidelines of Google, so it doesn’t matter.
But what I did not like is copying content from other sources. It’s completely fine to use PLR articles, but content copied from other sites is not good because the writer who has done the hard work of writing the content suffers.
Otherwise, the spam tiered link building strategy used for ranking this site and making some quick bucks is great.
Copied content was spliced to create new content. No different to any content scraper out there, just done manually to achieve more control.
Question. If I want to rank my site for 100 different keywords. do those keywords have to be on my site? Could I just use GSA to spam those keywords for my site and not actually have them on my site?
Thanks
You would have to have tighly related keywords on your site, eg ‘computer offers’ on page, would allow you to rank for ‘computer deals’
ah okay great thank you :)
It is shameless and DISGUSTING, Mr. Woodward, that you would promote this kind of spammy garbage!
Just kiddin’! Good article.
Haha ^^ It’ not my article though :)
I guess ClickBank products would work well with this link building too?
An affiliate program is an affiliate program, whether thats with Clickbank, JVZoo, Affiliate Window or ShareASale is irrelevant.
Do you have a discount coupon for buying ask the required tools mentioned in this case study? Plus where should I start to look for information to learn these tools before using them
Hi,
No coupons sorry but you can take a look at-
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/reviews/gsa-search-engine-ranker/
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/reviews/kontent-machine/
Thanks
Nick,
Where did you find your products to sell?
Thx,
Kristof
Affiliate networks and programs. Choose a niche, find a product, then google product name + affiliate program.
Good luck.
Nick
Matt, how do you think this strategy will stand up to the latest Google ‘sandbox’ update? It seems to be making it harder to rank spammy sites.
No one knows yet, but as with everything with SEO the best way to find out – is to do it.
I’m sorry, but in my opinion this thread is very, very misleading for several reasons.
Here’s why:
1. Your link building strategy is vary vaguely described. Yes, you did tell us that you’ve used several tiers and how you’ve set them up, but no mentions of filters and especially WHY you’ve chosen to do certain things (i.e. manually untick particular engines, etc.)
2. It’s hard to tell how much of your ranking success is due to SER alone and not the SER engines plugin. This right here devalued your whole thread by a lot IMHO. What we can see from your SER panel is that you’ve built quite a lot of CDFs, but you’ve also built more than 700 (!!) web2s and backed them up with link juice. This is more of a 2 step ranking process where one of it is building web2s.
3. Your website was already ranking BEFORE Panda 4.0. These google updates were clearly targeting churn and burners, but one of the biggest changes that came with it was the extended sandbox period. It has gotten much harder (or at least it’s taking much longer) to rank spam projects.
Don’t get me wrong mate, I still appreciate the information you’ve shared with us, but after taking a good hard look at this thread, I find the main statement of this article (which is that it’s still possible to easily spam rank after Panda 4.0) not to be proven at all, which is why I’ve called it misleading.
I’d love to see a reloaded version of this project where you only use GSA SER and try to rank a brand new domain, or at least clearly state in the beginning, that you’ll be using SER + X, because SER alone won’t be enough.
Cheers.
I’ll get on that right away for you.
Great, appreciate it.
Will we be seeing the results on Matt’s blog, or on yours?
Yeah, would love to look at the results too! When is that coming out?
Hi Nick
Interesting case study and great success story man.
I am interested in your sales copy ( home page of your site) design. Did you make that template yourself or you modify some theme.
Would you suggest the theme name that you are using on your site?
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this.
I took the wordpress genesis framework and styled it myself.
N
I’ve been skeptical about trying this method with all of the updates Google has been tossing around (just because it could turn out to be a waste of time), but seeing those results is really encouraging.
+ I already have a suitable domain, affiliate and the software I need so why not? :)
Even if it doesn’t do well, running experiments like this will teach you more than anything else!
Yep, I agree :) That’s what this would mostly be about… Getting my hands dirty with a bit of black hat for a change XD
Hopefully I picked a good time now that Matt Cutts is going on his long vacation, lol
Why not indeed!
Great post! I am following all updates with attention.
Nick, Matt, I have 2 questions:
1- Have you been publishing fresh content to the site lately?
2- Where are your Tier-1 links pointing to? I suppose a mix of home-page, category page’s and/or direct article links. Can you specify your strategy there?
thanks!
Dan.
1. No, no fresh content. Not sure that’s a real big ranking factor these days. I may be wrong but I have very dormant sites still getting the same traffic as 2 years ago.
2. No strategy really. Mainly homepage now but did fling a few at other pages for a while.
Nick
Thank you for the awesome guide.
Would you be able to create a GSA template for this, so it’s easy for GSA noobs like me to get started ?
Would be so much appreciated.
Thanks!
I am putting one together for my blog as loads of people are asking. Subscribe and I’ll let you know when its finished.
Hi, thank you for such a comprehensive guide.
By any chance would you be able to create a GSA template for this? I am a GSA noob, and wouldn’t know if i was doing the create settings / Anchor ratio etc.
Would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Nick
Would this also work for ranking local sites for lead gen?? example: Plumber + city name.
To be honest, you have a basic template if you try to follow the above. The best thing to do is spend half a day building a site then spend the other half messing with GSA. Don’t worry about getting it right, there is no right. The only real right thing you can do is to press “start” on GSA SER and build some links.
If I gave you one of mine, what would you learn?
Yes, rank for plumber + city. Perfect.
N
Hi Matt & Nick,
Out of interest have you two started any new sites since the purported new sandbox was introduced in the latest payday loans update?
If so, what impact have you noticed – if any?
Cheers,
Will
I have started 2 but I haven’t ranked them yet!
It’s definitely a lot tougher than before. Some terms are taking a lot longer to start to lift. Experiment with lower link velocity and better quality ones.
OK, I need to learn this shit from someone who knows what they are doing! I am sick of getting fucked over by Google! Playing Google’s game has got me absolutely nowhere apart from a grim time from my Mrs! Boom & bust sounds great to me, far better than bust & broke anyways.
Can someone tell me the best way forward? Is there a no-bullshit course I can follow where the author isn’t going to be pestering my in-box with his latest JV dog-pile offer and where someone will answer my questions before I have forgotten what I asked?
I must admit I like the tone of this blog and the members comments.
Briano
The best way to learn is by building a basic understanding of SEO, then just doing it. There is no magic bullet solution. Throw 2-3 sites together, then try 2-3 different link building strategys and measure the results. The experience you will get from that is 1,000x more valuable than any guide. And probably cheaper!
I think what google was targeting with this latest panda update was the churn n burners who are spamming little 5 page sites to the top, using a 30 day waiting period they’re hoping the site will be penalized before reaching page 1 and also for SEOs doing client work they’re hoping clients won’t see any results in 30 days and leave, pretty clever if you ask me.
I would say its closer to lazy than clever, not exactly difficult to build a 30 day period into any campaign =/
Hi Nick and Matthew,
Very interesting article. I have been reading Matthew’s posts the past 3 weeks and I am becoming a huge fan (I already am actually). Keep up the great work!
I am an SEO newbie and I would not consider myself anywhere close to tech savvy. My questions might also sound kinda silly but I got couple of them.
I have 4 wordpress sites so far and I simply use webhostinghub for hosting (3 are addon domains to the main website).
1. Do you have any suggestion on where to host a spammy website?
2. If you have a handful of spammy websites, would you host them under the same account?
2.1 Would you have a spammy website hosted together with a “healthy” website within the same account?
3. Any additional service I should consider?
Thanks in advance,
John
Hi,
1) http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4
2) Never, avoid SEO hosts that offer you multiple IPs
2.1) Never
3) Nope
Yes, great advice, hit the web hosting talk forum. There’s loads of cheap offers for independent hosting, plus some are awesome, better than the mainstream rubbish most people use. Some start at $7 bucks a year, but try and avoid those for money sites as they tend to be oversubscribed.
hi ,
I am almost done with my site only miss a logo and a way to cloak the CB links.
So as it pretty clear from sentence above :
1. You cloak your CB link? if yes then how?
2. How r earnings now? Has google slapped u?
3. I didn’t understand where u push all the kws u have collected.. in which tier?
4. You created spam content also for tier 1?
thanks in advance,
Chen
1) Yes, I use Redirection and Mathew uses Thirsty Affiliate.
2) They are still fine
3) You mean keywords for anchor text? Tier one of course. You want them pointing to the money site.
4) Spam all the way down. You don’t have to though.
Nick
Help me understand onde thing. What are the settings for the “Money site”? Iz the same thing for Tier 1 CDF?
And about the Tier 2 CDF and 3? I know the platforms are the same. But you keep the keywords and everything the same?
Thank you.
Ignore moneysite, its just the way I grouped it to display the structure.
No, I mixed it up. Plus I used naked urls and keywords used for scraping.
Thanks for writing such a great post!
As I heard recently, that ranking a Youtube video on Google these days is not as easy as it was before! What I wonder now is shall I apply the same exact tactic to Youtube videos to let them show up on Google page 1 ? If yes, is there a tweak or sth that I should know about before running my GSA campaign regarding ranking videos ?
Not really, I would just throw in some PBN links depending on the keyword
I tried this with a youtube video. I did a test, one with GSA and one natural. The natural one outranks the GSA one. :(
You need to focus on “natural” YT views I think else it wont work well.
Can This Method Work Without Proxies
I would recommend at least 5 semi dedicates from BuyProxies
Hello Nick and Matt,
I want to know if GSA will work on a french site, or we have to use a technique to rank french website in google.fr? Thanks.
Same poster above? Same answer anyway. :)
N
If I want to rank for another google language, for example, google.fr
Do I have to do anything “special”, or just follow the guide?
Thank you in advanced.
Other than write a French website and generate spam content for GSA in French, I don’t think so. I have never done it though. Let us know how you get on.
Nick
I may be missing something but I can’t seem to replicate your tier link structure with my copy of GSA. I’ve even went thru Matt’s video tutorial on GSA but still no help. Appreciate it if you are able to indulge this noob!
Questions:
1. I’ve noticed that your “Money Site” does not have the active or inactive option displayed in the tier structure. Why is that? Each time I create a project, the options are there
2. Correct me if I’m wrong but based on Matt’s video tutorial; the Tier 1 is set up as the money site and Tier 2 links to the verified links of the money site (Tier 1). Why is it then that you have a Tier 1 which is not a money site?
Thanks in advance!
Hi Steve,
No worries.
1) Ignore “Money site”, it’s nothing. I just created a sub-group which nested everything for organisation.
2) No, I don’t think he would have done that. Tier 1 are web properties with links to the money site. Go find yourself a tiered link diagram so you can understand it properly.
Hope this helps.
Nick
Thanks Nick! Much appreciated.
Great case study, I have 2 questions –
1. If I apply these techniques to a Web 2.0 site (Blog) will it be safe from penalty, it is almost what is happening with Youtube. All Web 2.0 are capable of handling such large links without suspicion being there, so is it advisable to build these spam sites on Web 2.0 rather than dedicated sites?
2. Also please tell me how to go about Indexing these backlinks. Can we do something to speed up the process? If not after how long we start the campaign, can we start seeing results in Ahrefs/Majestic SEO?
Hi,
1) Yes you can use those although personally I would do it with a dedicated domain
2) https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/tools/backlink-indexers-test/
1) You must get a dedicated domain. It’s not worth the effort otherwise. Your account could get suspended then its bye bye work…
2) If you use the tiers/platforms correctly, there is no need to index. I never bother but still see my links in ahrefs almost overnight sometimes.
As you guys might realize the title says “Beat Panda 4.0” – So if you are all over it, then this is your perfect chance to get rollin’!
No such thing as black,grey or white! Only short-term and long term SEO tactics (not strategies)!
Finally finally finally
Someone who talks sense and understands business I am fed up of all the bloody white hat claiming people preaching about white hat when they are trying to game the system. The you matt for bringing the truth and honesty to a industry full of people talking sh!t.
Keep it coming with this quality first seo site i actual will continue to read o and the rank tool is brilliant, learning gsa and demon will this new training your offering help me in that sector and how many links to a 1 month old site is ok ?? Tier 1
Well this works, but playing the role of the devils advocate as well, so does this https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/link-building/zero-links/
nice
Geesuz how many comments?!
In the words of a wise one
“to Organically rank for decent commercial terms requires artificial linkbuilding in almost all cases but artificial linkbuilding does carry some risk. The question then is how we strategically manage that risk and quickly respond to rankings setbacks.”
That sums it up! SEO is just risk vs reward management
how many times you run GSA backlinking every month ?
once a week ??
Thanks for an interesting study, Matt! Truth to be said – the moment you build a link by yourself, you are breaking the Google Webmaster Guidlines. Well, often it is the way to have better ROI than to produce content that will naturally attract audience.
Exactly so if you are going to break the rules, break the rules :P
I’d say compromise, not break it. lol
Thanks for the awesome tutorial. I also Sig up for tutorial which is count downing to released on July but I can’t find any info about it anymore. Is it still coming out Matthew?
Still working on it, its much bigger than I first anticipated but trust me when its ready, its going to rock the industry :)
Ok i was mad too, yes really cause i believe in an honest white hat SEO but right after doing research and working for almost 4 years and rank my clients sites and after reading this article? it made me realize life in SEO is just the same as running business in real life you can’t always be honest im not saying to cheat people but to plan how you would earn more after all thats what we really up to, to earn, right? too many commas hahaha for 84 words of a quality comment with no backlink.. i just want to add yeah it really sucks when you do white hat and your competitor does not and you rank behind them it sure do .. believe me, i even “hulk smashed” my keyboard.
Thanks for this article matt and hope to learn more from you.
Best Regards,
Di Dot
The truth is there is no such thing as white hat or black hat. There is a single algorithm looking for certain parameters – we just have to fit within them.
hi sorry for my english :) for rank site Necessary to create all post unique or only home page ?
In this exmaple, only the homepage should be unique.
Thanks for this study case, it’s really inspiring. I think i’m gonna give SEO a try, simply because I’m tired with mass youtube comment, it’s getting harder and harder these day. Even if the comment stick, the conversions are bad.
Few months ago (january i think), i bought GSA SER + CB through your affiliate link using “MatthewWoodward” coupon (if i’m not mistaken). it’s the biggest discount that i’ve found on the net.
But, i didn’t use it. In fact, i’ve never installed it since i bought GSA SER + CB. I just bought it because i knew someday i’ll use those software.
Now i’m ready to embark my SEO Journey. I’ll start with low competition keyword first and hopefully i can get wonderful results like yours.
Once i finished with the site creation, i’m gonna buy 20 semi dedicated proxy from buyproxy and vps from powerup hosting through your affiliate link (proxy and hosting that you recommend).
I consider it as a gift back for what you’ve shared in this blog. Thank you again for this wonderful post, It’s super awesome Matt!
Wow thats very kind of you – I hope you find great success :)
This is so cool, event without those tools, you can still do this strategy, just need to understand the theory.. Thanks Matt..
Well you can yes, but the amount of time involved vs reward your selling your time for next to nothing!
Great tut man! Im doing same with succes but are some niches that are hard moderated. I hope your site will on top long time!
Thanks Lukas!
great tips and very helpful tutorial. Thanks for sharing Matthew.
Not my kudos :)
What is the difference between LSI keywords and secondary keywords, how many such keywords you have used in this case? Does these keywords all need to appear in the post or related to the posts? For example, can I use anchor text “face wash for woman” to my post “face wash” although it didn’t mention woman once.
Not much really mate. They are just options in GSA to give you more flexibility and variation with your anchor text ratios. It’s up to you how you implement them.
You could argue LSI is for more long tail alternatives and secondary could be alternative main search terms, Eg. “Best product” vs “Top Solution”.
I don’t see why not. Perhaps research it.
N
Hey Nick,
I have used SENuke a lot before. But recently I am trying more and more pure whitehat teqniques. The results are varying and SEO costs, much more expensive.
But this really opened my eyes. Correct me if I am wrong but:
The links from the following goes directly to the root domain (or also inner pages?)
“Tier 1 CDF”, “Tier 1 Web 2.0”
The links from the Tier 2 CDF goes to the Tier 1 CDF campaign:
The links from Tier 2.0 Web 2.0 CDF goes to Tier 1 WEB 2.0
Why the split? Why not send links from Tier 2.0 Web 2.0 CDF to Tier 1 CDF? Your pyramid consist of the money site and two sub-pyramids under the money site? Or am I missing something?
All the best
Hi Alireza,
Its only one pyramid really. The web 2.0’s and CDF tier 1 is the same tier as it points to the money site.
Web20 is where I added the SERengines plugin so wanted to test it out separately.
Tier 2 and 3 were just duplicated over.
Now I just use the use “verified links of another project” and select both web20s and CDF so you no loner get that the double pyramid effect you mention.
Nick
hi!
first of all I would like to thank u for this method.
I am gonna try it now with a niche I have had in mind.
got ~50 long tail kws with a total of 12k searches a month.
starting to build the site now – I am gonna use wp since I think it is really easy to use and have some good features.
So I have few questions:
1. Which plugins do u recommend while using WP?
2. how many plr articles have u put in ur site? other than a review per product and the unique article in the main page.
3. have u put social signals?
4. have u tried promoting it also by FB or TY?
thanks in advance for answering.
1. Matt has better knowledge with plugins – I just use redirection and bulletproof mainly, plus whatever I need to get the job done.
2. 10
3. no
4. no
Curious about how many keywords you targeted, in particular how many LSI keywords you wrote down in the research step.
I targeted one main keyword to begin with plus a few long tail versions and used that as a foundation.
As part of my keyword research I noted all related LSI’s to help get some more ideas.
As the site began to rank, I could identify more pseudonym terms that Google was automatically ranking me for and incorporated then into the mix as well.
Nick
Great article, but what I don’t really understand is how many different anchors you used. In the research step you wrote down an unspecified number of long tails.
My current approach is to do a similar experiment but with paid links from SEO service providers so some more info about anchor distribution would be nice.
http://bit.ly/1lDloGR
i wish he did a video study instead because it was easier to follow matt’s study case then your’s.
Sorry! I did the best I could.
Hey Matt i dont have KontentMachine but WickedArticleCreator and TheBestSpinner alongside GSA SER.Those tools will be enough ?
Yes the tools are irrelevant, just apply the theory!
I asked a question regarding the table yesterday which seems to have been removed. Are we not allowed to ask design related questions?
Well now it reappeared as soon as I posted this. Strange.
You should probably look up how the WordPress comment system works, but you need manual approval first :)
Which table?
Im glad to find your site, your post is motivating enough to give another shot to seo especially the tier level link building method. Can we do this technique manually without the help of GSA Search Engine software.
Yeah you can if you have enough time and patience – you would be better off working at a bar for a day or two to buy the software though.
Spammy links still works these days, the question is for how long?
You mean the same question that has got asked every year for the past 10 years? :P
You mention that you use genesis as your theme. Also that you use a html table for the product comparison. Is the table responsive? I’m having one hell of a time finding a solution that looks decent on both desktop and mobile. Any suggestions?
If you want responsive, then maybe an image file is better for you.
N
Wp-Tables or TablePress… many other free plugins also available, most are responsive.
Best, Chris.
Hi,
just curious. which is better, makine money site that sell product from clickbank(which is digital product) or physical product like your example?
great Post btw :=)
Depends on your target market
Hello Matthew! Hello Nick! I’m Ashley. Awesome article btw! :)
I’m just starting out so I’m really a newbie when it comes to SEO. I’m a huge fan of blackhat stuffs by the way :D
I really need some guide because I can’t absorb all of these new information as of now. I think my brain is about to explode o.o
I just have some questions. I hope either Nick or Matthew will answer all of these:
1. Do you hide/cloak your links (using any redirection tool) in spamming your money site using the GSA SER? Do you also cloak all your tier links? If yes, what are you using?
2. I can’t understand how to make your tier structure. I really want to duplicate it :(
Is there any video that can show me how you made those?
3. What is that “list cleanup” in your tier structure? Do I really need it? What is the purpose?
4. What is the purpose of all those “secondary” in your tier structure?
Sorry for the noob questions. I hope I can get a backup of this GSA SER project for me to understand all of these, if possible. Sending it to my e-mail written on this form would be highly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Hi,
1) Nope
2) Watch https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/the-ultimate-guide-to-tiered-link-building-part-1/ & then https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/reviews/gsa-search-engine-ranker/
3) Leave that one for Nick
4) Watch videos in point 2
Hope that helps!
Hi Ashley,
Thanks!
Just to fill in the gaps:
3) Well spotted, but ignore that tier – it’s just where I was feeding in scraped site lists to try and grew my global verified lists faster.
I am surprised no one else asked before you.
Nick
Hey Matthew, would you say that this could be done for a website that is not in English, or will the English output from content machine not work?
Only one way to find out!
Even I came across this website when I was about to buy GSA. :)
No doubt Nick has done awesome job to add quality content on this website and helping people with this spam link building site. :D
These days I am also trying one education keyword and using GSA + Kontant machine to do spamming.. ha ha..
Thanks for this great guide and clearing many of my doubts..
Let us know how you get on :)
I spent 3 days for doing what the tutorial guide me and feel very happy now :)
Let us know your results!
Thanks for good content Matt only complaint (Small one) i have is your email list, lately you have been sending mostly spam (old links to your old content) as we have read those already, don’t you think that might get on some people’s nerves and leave your list? i don’t mind just think about it :)
I think you misunderstand the word spam :)
But that’s how I keep my old content fresh, if it’s a problem for people they are free to unsubscribe as they wish :)
While it’s certainly an interesting read i dont think the evidence speaks for it’s self. I think this post is a little misleading.
Maybe i missed it but it seems you didn’t actually document or have at least not told us how your sites performed before you started the use of SER. What i mean by this is where was the site placed prior to link building once the initial index rank had settled?.
Showing the before and after results of your link building process would of shown a clear indication to how effective it actually was but as it stands it might just be your onpage SEO/content that helping it rank rather than your method.
I will also go out on a limb and say the keywords you have chosen are not really that competitive which is why it was so easy to obtain multiple #1 (32 keywords) and first page (over 100 keywords) spots from a small 10 page site.
It’s a good read but i think there are flaws in whats been shown here that leads to me believe some elements have been hyped up for the purpose of this post.
I believe that is explained with “The site was dormant 2 months prior to that so it had time to be indexed.”
And then this graph https://cdn.matthewwoodward.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/RT1-618×146.jpg
Does competition matter if the site is making over $1,000 per month?
Hi Rich,
I am sorry you feel the post is misleading. My intention was never to deceive or hype anything.
This post documented how I ranked a test site and included a step-by-step guide for anyone interested.
As Matt highlighted, I also provided before and after ranking results, alongside commentary around the last set of Google updates.
Despite what you say, the site operates within a very competitive skincare niche.
I document how I used long tail terms and how they act as quick wins. Long tail will usually mean low-competition high-relevancy which is why GSA will help you rank very quickly.
Nick
What is the plug-in that is used on the homepage in the post that shows the product ratings side by side (or is it html)?
Hi,
That is https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/reviews/author-hreview/
It’s just an HTML table dropped into the page.
And you can use free plugins like wp-tables (now TablePress) to speed up that process…
Best, Chris
How do you create that awesome looking comparison table? Only html?
Which table?
It’s just an HTML table and some graphics dropped in!
Nick
whats the difference between money site and secondary money site??
It’s just my wording for the structure.
Secondary Money site just means the secondary (lower quality) links pointing to the money site.
When you build the structure into GSA you will understand.
Nick
Any change you guys can show a sample Site? Im not quite understanding how it should be setup. Thanks :)
Thanks guys
What search engines did you use? and how did you get target urls?
Did you already had a verified list of target urls?
Select all English ones. You need to learn GSA some more and watch some tutorials.
No, I built one up from scratch.
Nick
1 stupid question: what marketplace you recommend to find $20 payout products (physical)?
Just browse around ecommerce sites
1) Find a potential niche you are interested in
2) See what the best products are and their affiliates offerings
3) Make a shortlist
4) Build a site around them
I find direct relationships better than the networks, but the networks may provide a 2nd and place place product for a filler.
Nick
Nick
This is solid money making technique. Just a quick question: which provider you guys are using for VPS?
Personally I use PowerUpHosting
Cool. Thx ;)
Worth checking out SolidVPSSeo as well.
Hi Nick,
How long it take you to build the 200K backlinks? (days wise, hours ?)
Thanks!
Tony
Probably while he was sleeping ^^
It took 2 weeks to build the 1st 70K. Just fire up GSA and unleash it. I don’t worry about stuff like that.
If you had a decent site list you could probably knock that out in a day!
Nick
Can you point me to a tutorial on setting up and using proxies? I love this freakin blog man! Awesome stuff!
Just get proxies from someone like BuyProxies then copy and paste into whatever software you are using.
Nick,
“…I set GSA to begin building links to the newly forming Tier 1 as soon as they were verified. This was the same for the Tiers 2 and 3…”
Where can I find the setting for that in GSA?
Under Data, “Use verified links of another project”
I must admit I was disappointed to see tiered link building after I had read the title. I was expecting millions of backlinks straight to the domain. It’s still a nice share though.
Nick, I’d like to ask why you’re not using social networks in your contextual projects? Also I was wondering if you don’t mind building all the profile links as SER does as default or did you untick these?
Whats wrong with tiered linking?
Of course there’s nothing wrong with tiers. This approach to link building just isn’t what I would call spam at all. I’m into spamming hundreds of thousands of backlinks directly at my money sites, and that’s why I was excited to see how your guest poster was doing it. It’s still a great article though and I enjoyed reading it.
That’s what they are doing, it’s just structured spam :P
Hi Groen,
Sorry to disappoint you!
My experience with the social networks is that they offered poor contextual opportunities. Mainly profiles that looked weak. They are used, just not in the main tiers.
Same answer with SER profiles. There’s nothing stopping you but in this case, you are just building a spam profile that I can’t imagine carries any juice. Building contextual tiers to that profile would be just odd.
However I am open to errors in my thinking…
Nick
Interesting case study Nick! Truly a source of inspiration for newbies like me.
One question: how many links do you recommend building for each tier per day using just GSA? I am thinking along the lines of 10 x 10 x 10 links per day (for each tier), totaling 1000 tiered links per day. Is that good, or can I go even more aggressive?
I don’t know what the rules are, but what you suggest sounds good to me. You may want to investigate further.
I just build at a rate GSA can handle. A lot will depend on your site lists.
Nick
Ask a question, how to set up here?
Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.
Options=>Pause the project after () verifications for ()
Thanks
See below comment.
I would set it up to build X verified links a day +/- x
I play around with it all the time but 10x10x10 is a good start.
Nick
You said the only unique content is on the homepage but from what I understand you also have a separate product review page for each of the products.
Yes. I copied it from other sites and mixed it up a little. Weirdly one review page ranks 4/6th place for the review terms. ^^
Awesome guide.
Do you think that it’s possible get first page of google to any keyword you want?
thanks
Yes
If I have much competitors, I just have to keep using GSA, building backlinks and etc?
Or do you recommend another thing?
Depends on the competitors, what they are doing and why they are ranked where they are
Hm. I was looking to a great niche with 6kk (HUGE) searchs per month.
But I can’t beat this yet, I’m just starting.
I’ll search for long tail keywords and try this tutorial.
Thanks
Set up a test site and give it a shot, see what happens!
Hi, thanks for answer all the questions…
The site being a blogspot or wordpress matters too much?
I can rank specific keywords for a website? Or I have to make the seo on homepage?
Thanks again!
Just buy a domain and hosting rather than going the free route
Normally each page on the site will target a related keyword.
Matthew thanks
When setting up the campaign it gonna have like 3 tiers am i right?
Yes
Hey,
Can I get #1 page of google with Ultimate Demon?
And I need all this tools? I’m want to start with GSA or Ultimate Demon or Senuke, but I’ll spend like $500 or more…
Thanks
Hi,
You can apply the methodology with any tool
I applied the principles behind Matts tutorials which were done using Ultimate Demon originally.
Hi Dave,
No, you are not missing anything, although today the homepage ranks #1 for around 20 unique terms.
I have seen a handful drop into #2/3 this week as their was another update and some large authority sites have popped up like webMD.
They are about 3/4 main terms with the long tail variants plus some product brand names too.
Nick
I am wondering what you spent to get this up and running? Between GSA SER, proxies, kontent machine etc
I’m sure you could do the math :)
Epic content Nick! Quick question about running a Virtual Private Server,what are the main advantages of using a VPS,compared to say a junk PC you buy just to run linkbuilding software? Thanks.
A VPS is usually hosted on a much faster connection than you have at home, and doesn’t drain all of your bandwidth and is always on.
I used to have my own box hosted at home but I was on a 80mb fibre connection and even then I eventually outgrew it and went the VPS route.
I prefer a VPS because it is on all the time, has bucket loads of bandwidth, is cheap and you can upgrade it as your needs grow.
Plus you can access it on a iphone or ipad and it gives me a windows platform on my macbook.
Nick
I feel like I’m missing something here……
how did you rank for all them easy keywords when you are only ranking one page?
even if you have a handful of keywords for that one main page…you surely cant have 32 which have gone to the number one spot for one page?
Sorry, my reply is a couple of boxes down. Must have pressed the wrong button…
Question for Nick:
Did you use any of Google’s Webmaster tools for your website such sitemap submission, ownership verification..etc?
Thanks for this great post!
I wouldn’t personally
If you do, create a new account…
Awesome guide. I have all the tools listed ^_^ so I think I am be trying it out as soon as I get free.
Let us know how you get on!
Who are some of these clowns?
As a follower of your site for some time now, I can say that I make money using both spam tactics and not using them (notice no reference to hats).
If you’re still stuck in the white hat/black hat argument, you have a ton to learn young grasshoppers.
It’s almost as bad as self-proclaimed musicians arguing genres of music.
You take the high road, and I’ll take the rankings.
That’s a good way to put it, I agree there is no such thing as white or black hat!
I have a question about this. I know he was scraping the sites when building the tiers, can you tell me which search engines he was using? Were they all english? or what? Did he use all the search engines in GSA? Thanks Matthew
Will approve it for Nicks response but personally I would use all english search engines
Like Mathew says, select all English engines, I think there are about 131 in total.
Load up with at least 100 related keywords and keep an eye out for warnings. Update as needed.
Once you build up a decent amount of verified links you can pull up the stats and start to fine tune your target sites. This will increase your LPM greatly.
Nick
Can you share technique to find keyword that help find more quality link & also in related niche?
Not sure this technique is about quality links!
Use scrapebox keyword scraper or any of the many other tools, like uber suggest to generate keyword lists.
Just a quick question: is it safe to use this “strategy” for Adsense? Thanks
No they would end up terminating your account & seizing all earnings
Why would they ban it? Is it due to the backlinking strategy or because you’re using spam content?
I have done shady backlinking on sites and never had my adsense banned.
Search around, look around blackhat world you’ll find plenty of stories!
Hi Nick…some questins here :
1. So all of your sales are come from “the winner product”??
2. Do you use any backlinks indexer service??
Btw Great case study..thanks for sharing.
Hi,
1) About 90% come from the one product
2) Not really, the high volume, lower quality link types should help index the tiers. There is nothing stopping you from using an indexer though.
Nick
i use social bookmarking,social shares and few forum submit….
How is that working out for you?
i am new to SEO. .. Still try to figuring out best SEO strategy…. Let Me know how i put a Youtube Video at the top of Google search engine for a specific search… tell me in details….thanks
Pretty much just follow this guide to build links to it!
HI Matthew/Nick, great post and great site have learnt so much from it.
Would the above method work with a .org or a .net domain or is it preferable to get the .com where available?
Domain name extension is irrelevant unless its country specific like .co.uk (but even this domain ranks in USA serps)
Great article, Matt
Would you create/set up all of this on a consultancy basis?
I’m in a niche already with an authority site and can’t risk it on something like this but would love to try it on a ‘churn & burn’ domain in the same niche. Interesting to see I could compete ‘black hat’ against my own ‘white hat’ site.
Yeah you can just churn n burn through no problem!
Funnily enough, I actually have a “white hat site” in the same niche as the case study site.
The black hat site makes more money!
Nick
so could you do this for me on a consultancy basis?
I could, but then you cheat yourself out of the pricesless knowledge, experience & understanding of how Google works.
Plus I charge $497 per hour when I am taking clients on, which I’m not at the moment. Perhaps in October I will open those doors again
Thanks for a great post. I’m going to try it out for myself. BTW, can you perhaps recommend a product review/comparison theme like the one in the image above.
Thanks again.
The one in the demo is using the Genesis framework with a modified basic theme.
Any simple theme will work that you can easily edit the CSS to get the right fonts and colour schemes and a logo.
When choosing colours, I first look at at the big brands in the niche and see what they use.
Nick
Yeah, I know this is a bit old… but would also recommend Dynamik Website Builder, a WP plugin, if you’re fairly new. It’s a visual drag-and-drop page builder that works well with Genesis (they recently partnered with them on an official level).
This assumes that you’re not familiar with directly editing code… Genesis is a fantastic framework in general, very fast (bootstrap), and has some great built-in SEO functionality out of the box.
Best, Chris
As someone who has a ‘proper’ site that we work very hard to not get caught by Google this article is both frustrating yet also very interesting to me.
Frustrating because we do all the stuff were supposed to do, yet still get beaten by short lived black hat sites.
Very interesting cos I’d love to try it and see how well we could perform on a churn & burn site.
How much would you charge to deliver all of the above? or is there anyone else out there that would do it for us?
Cheers
Mark
If you really want to understand how Google works, do it yourself. Hiring someone else to do it only cheats you out of knowledge and understanding.
Thanks Matthew
Yeah, great article. I never build any manual backlinks. using GSA and after Google updates it is still blinking on top.
Sounds good keep it moving!
Nice post guys, keep spamming and banking!
Oooosh!
One of the best tutorials yet! Props!
I have a couple of questions though, what sort of search volume are you going for with the main keyword? And are you scraping target sites or just letting GSA find them?
Cheers
The main keyword in this example was 8800 exact matches a month.
I let GSA find target sites but also scraped like crazy in the background using scrapebox to build my site lists up quicker.
Nick
Thanks for this post Mattew, your blog is the better in this topic. You are the best my friend :). Regards from Venezuela
Glad it helped!
Hello Matthew, I think there’s something wrong with your content locker or whatever that is called. I +1’d and Liked your post, but I can’t seem to get the download button to show. I’ve downloaded many of the tutorials but this one seems to be troubled.
Have a good day, and thank you for bringing us all the beautiful tutorials. Cheers!
It seems to be working here but if you have problems just email me :)
I should have asked this question in my previous comment. For your first tier links, what did you use as links? The homepage for your money site or your money site inner pages?
If you used your inner pages did you use all of them? or did you set up a web 2.0 aside from your money site?
Thanks great article!
The homepage had most of the links with a few pointing at the review pages to make it a look a little more natural.
No, I didn’t link to all the pages, although there is nothing stopping you. I just wanted all the juice to rank the homepage only.
Not sure what you mean “or did you set up a web 2.0 aside from your money site?”
Hope this helps,
Nick
Thanks for the reply @nick i had to check back to see if there was a response to my question.
I plan on doing something similar to this, except tweaking my primary tiers a little.
Just a few more questions, when you say you hit one or two links a day to your money site, that is verified links correct?
Would you recommend 20 verified links a day to your money site?
Did you set up any filters to your money site?
Thanks again
SEO doesn’t exist…
If a link doesn’t get indexed then it’s not worth getting it.
If you call yourself white-hat then you should know that you nevel build links but you acquire links.
You build links that bring you traffic and potential customers. But if you build links just for the links then your methods are as spammy as in this post and you shouldn’t complain when you get slapped.
And the next time you try to optimise your artlcle for SE’s and ask questions about how many words you should have there… Then just go and write something for the real people.