10 SEO Facts That Will Simultaneously Make You Pissed Off – & Thrilled…

http://gan.doubleclick.net/gan_click?lid=41000613802639813&pubid=21000000000634342&lsrc=17 

 

Hey guys…
Yes, I know I went AWOL for a few months, and left a few things hanging…
There’s a few reasons for that – the main one being that the world of organic traffic has been turned on its head recently, and I’m neck-deep in running a huge number of SEO tests (and still spending often in the low 5 figures a month on linkbuilding/SEO promos), just so we can stay on top of what’s actually still working.
As you probably know full well, the past couple months have been rife with tumultuous changes in the SEO world. A lot of people have gone under, and many have simply just walked away from the business altogether.
Between the latest Penguin refresh, Google’s “EMD filter” and other noticeable changes in how rankings are currently obtained – one thing is certain: things are drastically different, now.
And I wouldn’t be much use to anyone unless I actually had some current, real-life data to back up what I’m saying, teaching and occasionally selling – right?
Therefore, our goal these past few months has been as much to simply gather data – and figure out what works – as much as it has to actually rank sites and bring in the bucks.
It’s been revealing, to say the least. In fact, what we’ve discovered has entirely changed my own approach towards SEO.
So let’s dig right in and talk about the results we’ve been getting, exactly what’s changed – and what you need to do to adapt and come through this without going under.
I’ve organized my findings into a “Top Ten List” of facts we’ve established from our testing over the last 3 months in particular, right up until today. As the title of the blog post says…
…prepare to be pissed off – and thrilled.

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Fact #1: You Can Rank Much, Much Faster Than Ever Before
Like, as in – you can rank for stuff in 2-3 weeks. Sometimes even 1 week. I’m talking competitive keywords, sometimes in insane niches.
This is not the old days of SEO, where you didn’t even login to your stats until at least 3 months after starting your linkbuilding. No, right now it’s pretty well instantaneous (in contrast).
This means faster cash-flow, faster ROI’s, faster “niche proving” and in general just faster everything.
Let me show you some recent examples of some of our test sites:

This site (above) doesn’t take much traffic to pull in serious coin. The offer it’s pushing pays out $90 a LEAD, and it converts very well. However, in this market, “heavy lies the crown”. Nobody stays on page 1 for long. Negative SEO (you know, that thing that “doesn’t exist”) pretty well takes care of that. But if you can shoot up to page 1 for a few weeks, you’ll make back 20 times what you spent getting there.

With this site, our rankings shot up to the top of page 2 less than a week after we blasted the site out on some semi-private blog networks.

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This site is in a very high-traffic niche (this isn’t the main keyword target), and it generally converts very well. This has actually been my best-performing affiliate niche from the “old days” until now. Not necessarily the biggest uptake, but definitely the most consistent. The sales just roll in steadily, day after day.

Anyway, as you can see, all it took was a couple link pyramids (3-tiers) and boosted blog posts (on a high quality network – basically like “insider” guestposting) to hit that spot. Oh, and to top it all off, the site is an EMD, exact-match-domain.

So much for the whole “EMD penalty”… Definitely not seeing it on our end. The site ranked up about 2 weeks after promotions began.

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Now here’s something totally nuts. The above site is currently fluctuating at the top of Page 3 / bottom of Pg 2 for a profitable, competitive keyword that gets 1.2 MILLION search queries (and that’s conservative), and all we’d done is set up a couple linking pyramids and place about 50 or so quality comments (on established blog pages with PR, mostly dofollow).
I’m thinking a couple blasts on a private network or two will secure a Page 1 spot inside of a couple weeks from now, and based on my previous experience in this niche (and ranking on page 1 awhile ago with a site that got tanked when the big public blog networks got mass-deindexed), we’re looking at 1,000 – 3,000 uniques a day, converting at something like 2.5%, just from that keyword.
As you can see, it took a matter of days for those rankings to start climbing up.
The real takeaway here folks is that ranking up in the organics is currently faster than I’ve ever seen it. Ever.
And it truly does not take much to get there, right now. Partly it’s this new algorithm behavior, and I think it’s also because a lot of affiliates/SEO’s in general have tucktailed and thrown in the towel, so there’s less competition (temporarily) right now.
BUT…
There’s some strings attached to this anamoly…

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Fact #2: 90% of Those Rankings Will Not Last Longer Than 2-3 Months
Yep. It’s true.
And no, before you get all self-righteous on me and start preaching from the SEOMoz Bible, I’m not JUST talking about sites with horrible backlink profiles, obvious link-buys, obvious blog network blasts, obvious sitewides, obvious comment spam, obvious spun wikis, etc.
I’m talking about ANY affiliate-driven site in a COMPETITIVE market, regardless of your backlink profile. Your backlink profile could solely consist of natural, in-context editorial mentions from Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and all their whiter-than-whitehat webmaster friends.
You’re still gonna tank, most likely, after a short run. The writing is, in fact, on the wall, from the day you get yourself on the radar. If it’s not some “quality rater” who is unofficially employed to downgrade all affiliate sites – particularly minisites – it will be your competitors, who will just send masses of horrible links at your site from spyware-infected, Romanian-hosted porn sites, and then file a DMCA takedown request and a spam report directly, just for good measure.
And yes, I know that Google now has a “disavow tool”. However, I really have my doubts about its efficacy, and recovery times. Also, your links may not be the root cause (and I suspect, they often are not).
I honestly believe at this point – just from seeing this happen over and over again – that Google just simply has it in for small, tightly-focused affiliate sites (minisites) in “known” markets. The really profitable stuff, that is.
In fact, from our own tests, there appears to be NO APPRECIABLE BENEFIT to building “quality content” or “quality links” for any affiliate-driven website for keywords (or specific niches) that can net you $1K+ per day from organic traffic. And I think obviously this just comes down to the kinds of perpetual spam that Google sees, day in and day out (mass auto-comments, etc.)
It’s not just limited to “buy viagra” or “payday loans”, but you can see where I’m going with this.
Basically, if you even look the part in a competitive market where Google knows everyone is most likely guilty (due to the uptake of landing on page 1) – you’re guilty by association, and the game is “up” before it’s even started.
Ask me how I know. All I can say is that we’ve spent literally as much as high 5-figure amounts on promoting certain sites the “right way” (real press, real publicity, real exposure), and for other sites (“throwaways”) we’ve spent literally like $300 on homepage links and crap blasts. On more than one occasion now, we’ve seen both types of sites TANK, not long after peaking out at their ranking target.
Let’s just say the whole experience has significantly enlarged the already-substantial ice chips I’d had on my shoulders, regarding my views on how Google treats legitimate webmasters.
So the business model, in this case, is literally just to get yourself to the top as fast as you can, soak in the profits at the top, and then wait for the inevitable slap. And it is inevitable. Whether you got there with a link from CNN’s homepage, or with 100,000 footer links on some horribly obvious spintax blog network – your days at the top are numbered, unless you’re a direct-supplying, established brand.
(And before anyone tries to prove me wrong, ask yourself: “Does my  wonderful site that follows Google’s rules currently net $1,000 per day or more from my primary keyword target via affiliate marketing?” If the answer is “no”, then please shut the hell up in advance. Any moron can have “consistent rankings for years” for non-competitive keywords. Good luck in the big-dollar markets with whitehat SEO…)
So what does this mean for affiliates like us?
The answer will either offend you to your whitehat core, or powerfully liberate you with a rush of grayhat goodness. The answer, my friends, is just to continually (link) spam your way to the top, with as little $$ as possible, over and over again.
Not only does this produce a 10X greater ROI, it also lets you create a realistic business plan – one that is repeatable, scalable and consistent. And one that does not end up in you “betting everything on White”, only to lose it all to the assholes who only need to bet a few chips on “Black” with each turn of the Roulette wheel.
Speaking of link-spamming your way to the top…

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