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Ideally, within a month of launching, I would like us to have 5 SEO and 5 Conversion/Monetization experiments continuously running.
In the first test below, I am going to give as much detail as possible, with screen grab pics and links while still (hopefully) preserving testing integrity as much as possible (though tests such as this are not 100% scientific, as will be discussed below).
I firmly believe that when it comes to Internet Marketers and SEOers, most us of us fail to do any testing. Shocking. In fact, some of the more senior people in this business that I had assumed woould be testing addicts do ZERO testing.
Why not?
"I'm too busy" is the usual reply.
So hopefully our experiments here (not all by me) will address that lack of testing.
Judging by the poll in this Traffic Planet survey:
one of the early contenders is for an assessment of the current effectiveness of our (formerly) beloved Forum Profile backlinks - one avenue of backlinking that has been spammed beyond death in the past few years. Can't really blame Google for slapping that one.
Or have they?
That's what we are here to (attempt to) find out!
So in my own testing, I don't use a single site but instead set up 4 sites to see what happens. I personally think that there is enough inconsistency with rankings results that one site isn't enough.
That's exactly what I will also do here.
Now in order to engage your interest but not influence the test (by additional backlinks from non-forum profiles), the keyword that I am going after is this one:
'over the range microwave'
This Exact Match term supposedly gets 4400 searches a month in the US and I could conceivably promote these products on our test sites as Amazon Associates (products range from $150 to $200ish with 6% commissions around $12 each, not earth-shattering but fine for testing purposes and could be a profitable siteflip with some income and/or rankings):
In terms of SEO Competition (the most crucial aspect of keyword research IMO), Market Samurai returns this snapshot of competition for this term:
In fact, not one Internet Marketer has targeted this term (probably the low commissions understandably turned them off) - they are ALL shopping site inner pages with very few backlinks. For me, shopping site inner pages clustered at the top of Page 1 is a huge green light; these pages are usually extremely easy to beat - unlike seeing a Wikipedia page at #1.
I did also check the Anchor Text in the backlinks to the #1 site/page here (according to Google Global plugin searching from the UK):
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Microwaves/Over-the-Range-Microwaves/abcat0903001.c?id=abcat0903001
and a fast, free and useful tool like ahrefs.com revealed this result on the Anchor Text of its reported backlinks:
So, what exactly is the testing methodology that I will use? And let me address any issues or concerns as we go:
1. Tonight I have bought 4 dot com domains for the purpose of this test.
2. None of the domains is even close to an EMD i.e. absolutely nothing relevant in the domain name as you will see when I eventually reveal the domain names.
3. Each will be hosted on the same new Hostgator (USA) reseller account that I have set up solely for the purpose of Traffic Planet experiments (this is the main potential flaw in the experiment that I see but let's run with it this time).
4. Each site will be created with a single post (homepage) of about 1000ish words through 4 versions of the same spun article using The Best Spinner (synonyms on every second word or phrase, original text removed) e.g.
Before the concerns about using spun content emerge: I do get sites to rank high on Page 1 all the time with spun content (my 'make money online' UK site, http://makemoneyonline.gb.net/, for example, got to about #5 on Page 1 in 4 weeks with spun, barely readable text though now it has some proper-ish articles as it is driving traffic to this forum).
5. Each site will have 5 images and 2 YouTube videos embedded into the spun content PLUS one outbound authority link to a deep inner page on a trusted university site in the bottom sentence. The exact Anchor Text for that outbound dofollow authority link on each of the 4 blogs will be 'over the range microwave' (this does seem to work for me).
6. Each blog setup will use the default 2011 theme, have a Category of 'over the range microwave' for the only post but not tags.
7. Forum profile backlinks will be built to these domains at the rate of about 100 per week over the next 8 weeks. I will use the same Fiverr vendor for each week's forum profile backlinks to the 4 test sites but change Fiverr vendors each week (I may also try http://zeerk.com/ later).
8. All forum profile backlinks created will be run through my Nuclear Link Indexer account for additional boosting.
9. In terms of Anchor Text variation, I am only going to use 'over the range microwave' but for my own sites I do mix that up these days with URL anchor texts at a rate of about 80% Keyword 20% URL
10. Even though SEO competition is very weak for , I don't necessarily expect any of these sites to penetrate the top 50 results quickly. If one or more of these sites can get in the sub-#50 range with just forum profile backlinks within 4-6 weeks, that would suggest that this type of backlinks still have some value in a diverse, overall backlink profile.
In this test, I am locking away all my SEO nuclear weapons and it is just going to be good old-fashioned (too old-fashioned?) forum profile backlinks to new, non-EMD domains over the next 8 weeks.
Late in the test, I will report the actual domain names but of course I will document progress, methods and Fiverr vendors here as we go.
Let the good times roll!
Oh, 2 more things:
The reason I said that this kind of test is not necessarily scientific is that Google tweaks the algorithm (large and small adjustments) almost every day of the year so ANY experiment is being conducted on a moving target.
Secondly, science was far from my best subject in high school...
Questions, thoughts, issues and contributions highly welcome below.
... Someone once said "F*ck Google until it loves you" ... waiting to see your results.
