I am in the business of researching profitable niches, cranking out niche sites, marketing them until they reach cruise control and then leaving them alone to float in cyberspace and print passive and residual income for me over time.
For any niche site to reach cruise control, it needs a steady flow of significant traffic.
The single best way to ensure that happens is by engaging in effective backlink building.
Recently, I took two brand new niche sites that targeted similar keywords in terms of search demand and competition and applied two different backlink building strategies to measure one’s success over the other.
As a result, I further reinforced my theory on how to build mass back links effectively without appearing as a spammer to the search engine police.
Here is a high level synopsis of the experiment and related results:
Site A
I created 10 unique articles and submitted them to hundreds of article directories using an article spinner software program, with backlinks pointing directly to my site’s home page, as well as 10 different webpages within the website (deep linking approach).
Each article submitted contained two links: one to the home page, and one to a specific webpage within the website.
Both links had two different underlying anchor texts, each of which was relevant and corresponded to the webpage linked to.
After 6 weeks of testing, site A currently ranks on page 14 of Google.
Site B
I created 5 unique articles and submitted them to 5 different article directories online manually with backlinks pointing directly to my site’s home page, as well as 5 other webpages within the website.
Similar to Site A, each article submitted contained two links: one to the home page, and one to a specific webpage within the website.
Similarly, both links had two different underlying anchor texts, each of which was relevant and corresponded to the webpage linked to.
I then created 5 more unique articles and submitted them to hundreds of article directories using the same article spinner software program that I used to market Site A with, with backlinks pointing directly only to the 5 original submissions I had made to the article directories manually.
After 6 weeks of testing, site currently ranks on page 3 of Google.
What are the Niches?
Before I go further, let me address a question you might be thinking about.
Why am I not disclosing the niche?
While there are plenty of niche sites I own I disclose on my blog, there are a few that I keep confidential because:
1) the profitability is significant (ex: high Google Adsense payout on terms) or
2) the niche is narrow enough that one additional competitor can significantly impact its profitability for me.
I am sure you can understand and appreciate that.
The Velocity of Link Building
So why are the results so drastically different after 6 weeks of testing?
My theory is the velocity of backlink building with Site A was far too aggressive relative to the method utilized to promote Site B.
Since both my websites are relatively new, search engines may have found it not so natural for a “baby” site (Site A) to suddenly amass massive quantities of back links brought to it from automated mass submissions (hundreds of sites submitted to and therefore tons of immediate incoming links).
Site B, on the other hand, was a more subtle, natural looking approach.
The initial 5 articles that linked back to Site B were submitted to highly credible and well ranked article directories, thus bringing in 5 unique links from 5 different sources.
However, the mass link building effort using the submission software brought in hundreds of links back to each of those 5 sources rather than directly to my website.
Though I have no further concrete evidence to present at this time, it is my belief that this method appears more natural because it is more so “believable” to search engines that already popular and highly credible article directories and web 2.0 sites (i.e HubPages, Ezine Articles) can generate tons of links immediately when compared to a brand new website that was establish just 6 weeks ago.
This is classic Page Rank Juice Flow at its best.
What are the Long Term Effects?
So will Site A eventually catch up to Site B over time?
Only time will tell, and I will certainly provide updates if I notice anything drastic or worthwhile sharing.
I know that a couple of years back both strategies may have provided equal results.
In fact, Site A may have outranked Site B.
I don’t know why – I am not sure how sophisticated the search engines were back then? But I clearly now know what works today.
Link Building Marketing Takeaway
What’s the lesson to be learned from the experiment?
DO NOT link directly to your website and its webpages aggressively when your website is in its infancy.
Rather, link to it once from a popular source, and then link back aggressively to that source.
This is a very common mistake new internet marketers make, thinking gobs of traffic to their site is just around the corner.
Again, the mechanics of how and why things work the way they do are merely my theory, but the results are clearly evident and such a theory would support those results.
Hope you found this information helpful and practical enough to implement in your internet marketing initiatives.es
