How hard would it be to rank...

dashu1 · Jul 1, 2012

How hard do you think it would be to rank a site for:

Make money online / how to make money / that kind of thing

OR

search engine optimisation

I'd guess these are 2 of the hardest niches. What do you think?

How long would it take, and how many links, etc??

Is it even worth the effort to bother trying.

Would you need to cheat and use black hat techniques to even have a chance?

retired_member33 · Jul 1, 2012

Why?

Why the fuck would you start a thread like this

JMOT · Jul 1, 2012

Marcoose · Jul 1, 2012

dashu1 said:
How hard do you think it would be to rank a site for:

Make money online / how to make money / that kind of thing

OR

search engine optimisation

I'd guess these are 2 of the hardest niches. What do you think?

How long would it take, and how many links, etc??

Is it even worth the effort to bother trying.

Would you need to cheat and use black hat techniques to even have a chance?

If you're having to ask these questions then I would say virtually impossible to get there and sustain it without paying someone.

Why would you want to rank for " S E O" if you don't know SEO?

cc976a · Jul 1, 2012

Not hard just costly, and will need to think outside the box and not follow the status quo. If done right and lots of cash to spend, then about 6-8 months.

If you want to build a site, organically rank and build links - probably around 5 years of persistence.

Insurance will be the most trickiest and perhaps the least possible - but not the niches you mention.

max99x · Jul 1, 2012

how make money is definately not one of the hardest to rank for.

Insurance, loans, stuff like that are tons more competitive.

Bit of a pointless question really. Of course its worth it if you can get top and make more money than costs you. but thats same for anywhere.

dashu1 · Jul 1, 2012

The reason I ask is because I guessed that there'll be people here that have tried, so will have an idea of how hard it was in those niches.

And I want to know that because in both of these niches I've found people doing similar things to the "payday loans" shennanigins - loads of 301d sites with thousands of links flying around between them, etc.

In the "make money" niche there's one particular guy who gets a site to no.1, it disappears, then is replaced with the next, then the next, etc, etc, etc.

I spent a couple of hours looking at what he was doing and found about 10 sites, many on different servers, registered in different names, all interlinking between each other, 301'd between each other, etc.

Now, I'd have thought S E O would be hard because all of the S E O companies will be trying to rank for it.

And the Make Money one would maybe be tough because there are so many people selling scammy get rich quick products, ala the warrior forum/clickbank/etc.

But I wouldn't have thought they'd be anywhere near as difficult as payday loans and similar.

And I wouldn't have thought there'd be anywhere near as much money in them as in the loans and insurance markets.

So what I'm wondering is whether either they're a lot tougher/more lucrative than I imagined, or is this kind of manipulation of the results using this specific tactic far more widespread than you might think.

Even in the less lucrative niches.

Maybe I've just found 3 niches where people are doing the same thing and that's it, or maybe it's going on all over the place, but the problem is you don't find it unless you dig really deep.

If it's a lot more widespread then until/if Google find a way to tackle it, how can anyone possibly compete legitimately?

I've only been having a really good look because of Googles last update that seemed to be very hit and miss, and the more you dig, the more dodgy some of the results look.

Marcoose · Jul 1, 2012

Fair questions to ask. I presumed you were asking because you wanted to rank for them - my bad.

dashu1 said:
And I wouldn't have thought there'd be anywhere near as much money in them as in the loans and insurance markets.

SEO is very, very lucrative. I used to work for a company that wouldn't take a client on unless they had £700+ a month to spend - 80% of this would be profit (before wages/general overheads). Get 40 regular clients on your books and you're making some nice money. The fact that someone was willing to pay 20k for SE

rg.uk on here a few weeks a go says it all. I could also see the make money online niche paying well. If you get people who know nothing about the topic and refer them to different software and services, there would be some good aff comms to make.

To answer your OP - the way things are going I would completely avoid any black hat tecniques including multiple 301 redirects. There's a chance a penalised site will carry a penalty over to the new site and if it doesn't now, Google will surely address this in the future. SEO got expensive with Penguin unfortunately!

rocklesnar · Jul 3, 2012

Haha! because he's paranoid!lol Well, it's hard to rank for that keyword if you don't really know what you are doing..

3rigena · Jul 3, 2012

lol @ this thread

alexchiu.com ring any bells anyone?

arold10 · Jul 10, 2012

I think it's best to choose a niche that you can make profits out of it in a matter of months, instead of choosing a niche where there is a chance that you may never be able to make any profits. The reason is that ranking and profits walk together. The more competitive a niche is, the harder it is to get top ranking for a keyword since that keyword is being targeted by tons of webmasters.