Gaming Google: SEO Case Study

[GaryT]

Hi guys

Thought I would share this, a case study I put together about getting to the first page of Google for the term "domains" by doing everything against Google's guidelines.

Hope you find it interesting.

http://www.3ac.co.uk/gaming-google-3ac-domains-seo-case-study

Shares, likes, re-tweets and comments are all appreciated!

Best

Gary

 

[FWSJay]

Very interesting mate, thanks.
Good on you for trying what many just complain about - and actually know very little about.
Jay

 

[Murray]

Thanks for sharing.

Proved what I think is pretty widely known though; you can game google still with bad links of course, just the time scale you can stay ranking is cut much much shorter.

I would advise if you ever do a test like this again you should point the links at a test page like domain.co.uk/test, that way when you want to get rid of the links pointing to you, you just need to delete that page

 

[GaryT]

Widely known... but not widely documented for a real site.

I wanted to get away from any sort of test page/domain scenario and allow people who were intrigued by doing SEO like this to see the ins and outs.

I'm doing the link clean up over the next week or two, so will be interesting to see what happens and how easy it is to get rid of links like this.

Best

 

[namdas]

Agree, a subpage would have been more cautious - as would actually mixing up your anchors. Not sure what the test was trying to prove - whether crap links still work, or whether exact anchor text does.

If you are taking down the links its a bit late to change, but I would be surprised if you had the same result if you'd really varied the anchors - I think that's a pretty classic anchor text filter there, and you would probably still be ranking if you'd mixed it up more.

 

[GaryT]

Thanks Namdas

Wasn't trying to be cautious, simply try to shed light on the subject for others by doing it for real

The idea now will be to remove the crap links, mix the anchor text back up and see if my pre-experiment rankings come back or whether it has done longer term damage

Doing it on a test URL which can just be deleted wouldn't give the desired results as many websites have already built links like this to their entire site, so undoing them, in reality, would not be that easy.

It's a live work in progress

Best

 

[Admin]

Interesting study, thanks for posting.

I have a site ranking on Page 1 on Bing and Yahoo but no-where to be seen on Google!

What can I do to help it's G rankings?

Thanks

Admin

 

[GaryT]

Hi

Have you had any penalty notices from Google?

What about your anchor text for those particular terms, are you using a large amount of exact match anchor text when you build links?

I suppose there are numerous other questions such as the domain authority of the site, the on page content, how much adsense or affiliate code do you have on any one page.

What type of links have you built? All of these and lots more contribute to your rankings...

Feel free to drop me an email if you want me to take a closer (and confidential) look. Always happy to give my comments

Best

Gary

 

[Murray]

What can I do to help it's G rankings?

Impossible to know without knowing the site I'm afraid.

You could PM me if you want and I will take a look at it.