[ARVolund]

So the general accepted wisdom is that mass low quality blog commenting on your money site will kill it so that it never sees the light of day again.


Maybe not........

So I found a name with 5k exact searches and looked for a site I could test on without adversely affecting anybody. Google rated the competition low.

I found a Podunk high school site that was a PR2 that had a staff page where one of the teachers  had a matching name and the page was a PR1

I figured this somewhat matched the profile of a money site with low to medium competition that had been around for awhile and had a fair number of links.

I also figured that if for some reason the staff page dropped from its original ranking of 102 to not ranking at all it really would not matter to anyone. or cost anyone any money.

So I used this url for a week that ended last Sat the 21st. to test my harvested urls to see which ones actually came up with live posts.

Over the seven day period the url received just over 250k links that tested positive in scrapebox as found. ( not posted but found)

These links have not been cleaned other than to check to see if the link was actually found. No cleaning out of high obls, no follow, porn, or any of the other "negative" factors.

Before the test started the url was ranked #102

This morning when I checked (5 days since the last link was posted) the url was now ranked #7

I will be checking it daily for a couple of weeks to see what happens and will report back if and when it drops back off the charts.

[sylvesta]

Will be interested to see what happens...

[ARVolund]

sylvesta, on 26 January 2012 - 01:30, said:

Will be interested to see what happens...

Me as well. I really had no idea what to expect. I generally do not buy into the "quality is king" argument as much as some people do and especially so  after my last blog experiment  but I did hit it much heavier than anyone would normally do. The funny thing was I started looking for it at page 10 and scrolled up looking for it and by the time I got to page 3 I was thinking I did kill it and then there it was on the first page.

I guess my next one will be to use a fresh domain put a couple of articles on it and hammer it the same way and see what happens. I will probably set that up for next week.

[sylvesta]

I would argue that quality is king for the long hall through updates as I've seen many sites rise quickly and then fall off, so this experiment really should have an update over the weeks to see what kind of fallout you get from it. That's my opinion, right or wrong.

[sylvesta]

As a side note I used to manually search for the sites but then tested several ranking tools and found rank tracker to be the most accurate and there's a free version which works just fine for this.

[DoubleUp]

I have no doubts it'll rise in the serps, as i do the same myself, and have noticied the same results. Are you using scrapebox to blast these comments?

[ARVolund]

sylvesta, on 26 January 2012 - 04:17, said:

I would argue that quality is king for the long hall through updates as I've seen many sites rise quickly and then fall off, so this experiment really should have an update over the weeks to see what kind of fallout you get from it. That's my opinion, right or wrong.

Well since I have stopped linking to the site I do expect it to fall at some point in the future but then link velocity comes into the picture as a big issue. If I was really trying to rank the page and keep it ranked I would build other types of links and keep going instead of hammering it and then stopping.

The point of the test was either to back up or refute the idea that blasting your site with low quality links will send it to the lowest depths of Google hell.

Unless the page completely drops out of the rankings in the next week or so than I would say it does tend to refute the idea that this kind of link building automatically kills a site.

sylvesta, on 26 January 2012 - 04:21, said:

As a side note I used to manually search for the sites but then tested several ranking tools and found rank tracker to be the most accurate and there's a free version which works just fine for this.

I do use Rank tracker for my sites. I just did not bother firing it up this morning.

[ARVolund]

DoubleUp, on 26 January 2012 - 04:51, said:

I have no doubts it'll rise in the serps, as i do the same myself, and have noticied the same results. Are you using scrapebox to blast these comments?

ScrapeBox and I are good buddies.

[adamcm]

Very cool experiment, am interested to see the results.  If it sticks, I wonder if it because of the age of the domain?

[DoubleUp]

I thought the issue with this method wasn't so much that blasting pages with blog comments would hurt rankings (why should it?), but that if the site's backlinks were viewed, it would show the domain has clearly been spamming it's way to the top?

[ARVolund]

adamcm, on 26 January 2012 - 05:50, said:

Very cool experiment, am interested to see the results.  If it sticks, I wonder if it because of the age of the domain?

Good thought, I just checked the whois and it really is not that old  "Created on..............: 2009-05-22"  it really does match up fairly well with a number of sites that are out there trying to get ranked. A few years old, main page a PR2, url a PR1 and only showing 3 links in Google. I obviously has more than that but it is not like we are talking about a large university site that is a PR8 or 9 with a huge number of links.

I am going to try this on a one of the domains I have sitting around not really doing anything with zero incoming links and just a couple of articles and see what happens.

DoubleUp, on 26 January 2012 - 09:20, said:

I thought the issue with this method wasn't so much that blasting pages with blog comments would hurt rankings (why should it?), but that if the site's backlinks were viewed, it would show the domain has clearly been spamming it's way to the top?

Seriously dude nobody is going around manually checking backlinks to our sites. It is all done by algorithm. While there are a few manual reviews done regularly  on the sites themselves you have to be going for some high dollar keywords and trip some serious algorithm triggers to get a live person to look at your links.

Do the math and divide the number of websites in existence by the number of Google employees and see how likely it would be for them to be manually checking sites.

The people at Google are programmers and they are looking for software solutions not manual checks.

[MarkAse]

Good points about Google.

Frankly, if you were them what you rather have:

Some random guy checking 10 websites an hour and penalizing them?
A programmer looking at sites which are trying to manipulate results and then tweaking your algorithm to stop tens of thousands of sites?

[JSP]

About 3 weeks ago I sent approx 3,000 DoFollow links from Scrapebox to 12 different videos over the course of a week and a half.  (Each video was getting about 250 dofollow links a day.)  7 of them are on page 1.  The others aren't far behind.  One has been sitting at the top of page 2 for a week and I'm getting ready to see if I can push it to page 1.  (The term gets over 20k exact searches a month according to the Google Keyword Tool.)

Not sure where they'll be in the future.  But it was fun watching them rapidly climb to the top.  Piqued my interest enough to set aside some time and try to get at least 5 new videos up each day.

These aren't really the highest quality links, either.  Even though they're DoFollow.

[bmsh]

ARVolund, on 26 January 2012 - 00:01, said:

Over the seven day period the url received just over 250k links that tested positive in scrapebox as found. ( not posted but found)

Were they all with one anchor?

[Dan]

tested this a couple of times before, got to top 10 for several tough financial keywords in the UK lol based on about 1 million scrapebox links...
it only lasted about 1 month then it dropped into oblivion

[ARVolund]

bmsh, on 27 January 2012 - 00:26, said:

Were they all with one anchor?

Just the one.

[ARVolund]

Dan, on 27 January 2012 - 02:15, said:

tested this a couple of times before, got to top 10 for several tough financial keywords in the UK lol based on about 1 million scrapebox links...
it only lasted about 1 month then it dropped into oblivion

What kind of sales/income did you get for that month?

I have been thinking about trying this type of thing actually. If you could get first page for a high dollar keyword even for a month you should be able to clean up and dropping a million links is not really an issue.

You could rinse and repeat as many times as  you wanted.

[Dan]

ARVolund, on 27 January 2012 - 03:12, said:

What kind of sales/income did you get for that month?

I have been thinking about trying this type of thing actually. If you could get first page for a high dollar keyword even for a month you should be able to clean up and dropping a million links is not really an issue.

You could rinse and repeat as many times as  you wanted.

made a few hundred bucks.. a positive ROI... had someone offer to buy it too, but i didnt go through with it as i knew what was likely to happen and didnt feel like screwing someone over

[aramyus]

If I understand well, you tried to rank a page that belongs to the site of a high school.

My impression is that such a domain has a very high trust rank even if it's an obscure high school with no reputation.

I think that High trust sites are largely insensitive to spammy links.

Adding links to such a page will necessarily have some favorable effect, especially for a non competitive kw.


I doubt it would be the same if you started from a site with no trust rank.

There is probably a threshold: for example, blasted youtube videos do not last very long. So It would also be interesting to see if you can 'kill' the page with more spammy comments at a constant/reasonnable velocity.

[ARVolund]

aramyus, on 27 January 2012 - 03:58, said:

If I understand well, you tried to rank a page that belongs to the site of a high school.

My impression is that such a domain has a very high trust rank even if it's an obscure high school with no reputation.

I think that High trust sites are largely insensitive to spammy links.

Adding links to such a page will necessarily have some favorable effect, especially for a non competitive kw.


I doubt it would be the same if you started from a site with no trust rank.

There is probably a threshold: for example, blasted youtube videos do not last very long. So It would also be interesting to see if you can 'kill' the page with more spammy comments at a constant/reasonnable velocity.

You could be correct. I was looking for a page that somewhat fit the profile of a site that had been around for awhile with a modest PR and link profile. I also did not what to mess with a site that somebody was using to make money either because well if nothing else it would be pretty rude to do so.

What I am really looking to test is this whole "Quality Thing"  In my last experiment with the blog there was no trust or quality and I was surprised at the results. For my next experiment I am going to use another domain without much trust and go for a particular keyword or two and bang the hell out of it and see what happens. I am looking for a term that is moderately competitive and probably something with a CB offer that I can use for the site. That part is still open though.

When you blast those youtube vids is it a continuous thing or do you just blast them one or two  times?