Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Ok, so first off. To anyone whose been trying to get ahold of me, I apologize. Been offline for a few days since school was over, and I had to move. I was only on for an hour or so a day. But I’m back in action now.

Secondly, for those of you unfamiliar with this topic, I recommend you read the blackhat case study entry that started this (Note: Conditions beyond my control made me change how I was going to promote for this case study).
This experiment wasn’t designed to rank necessarily, but rather to see how possible it was to provide some decent longevity using blackhat tactics. I tried to rank my site high enough that it would get traffic in it’s niche, but not so high it would be noticed and banned for the search engines. In addition, the tactics I decided to use were ones that would cause as little friction as possible.

I can’t give out too much information, as the site is still indexed. It was first indexed in early November.

About the Niche Chosen

• The niche chosen is very much saturated by affiliates.
• Both the initial short tail keywords, and a really common misspelling were targetted.
• The top 10 keywords in this niche are somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 searches per month. So it’s definitely not a top tier keyword, but it’s not bad.
• The top ranker for all of the keywords chosen is the affiliate program I’m running through, so trying to rank too high was risky.

About the Tactics Used

• Directories (all autosubmitted; nothing by hand) were used to clutter up the linkdomain: results to prevent snoopers from seeing too much.
• The majority of the blackhat link drops were on a single CMS that is not commonly used by blackhats to drop links.
• The blackhat backlinks themselves were reinforced by more blackhat backlinks behind them(15-50 each), giving them some relatively substantial power to pass.
• Articles were hand written, but it is quite obviously an affiliate site to anyone within marketing. The articles are relatively short.
• Overall time invested was probably 3-6 hours. (I hate writing content, and procrastinated a lot)
• All inbound links used rotated anchor text. Frequency was determined by how difficult the keyword was to rank for.
• The url structure of the CMS all the link drops were on looks similar to the auto-submitted directory architecture(yes, this is the true point of the directories)
• Depending on the inbound link checker used, 600-a couple thousand inbound links were found.
• Some of the blackhat link drops themselves were no longer indexed or at least are hard to find after they got reinforced. This is largely a result of me being more than a little bit overzealous in my initial reinforcement. Oddly, it appears they’re still passing link juice? I shouldn’t be ranking this high if they’re not.
• Links were dropped over the course of 3-4 days via a cron script that dropped them a random number at a time.
• The links dropped to reinforce my real links were really crappy links. Many of them are from an ancient BBS system that hasn’t been used in years. And I mean litterally years. So these domains have produced nothing but spammy links for a long time, and have expanded to be hundreds of thousands of pages. This was selected due to my belief that it’s mostly pissy webmasters that track down sites. Not as much algorithms anymore. So by dodging easily angered forum webmasters, life stays drama free.
• Despite my best efforts the site has gained a few organic backlinks. Thankfully, they don’t give too much power so they shouldn’t effect the overall outcome of the experiment.

The Progression of Ranking: From Birth Until Present
Note:

• Site was first indexed in November, and quickly broke the top 50. Afterwards, it was smacked WAY down for the proper spelling into the 200-300 range. It was still ranking for the misspelling.
• After a few weeks of this, it continued to climb for misspellings, and drop for proper spellings.
• At this point, something peculiar occurs. The pages ranking for each search term are not the proper pages. Apparently I was too enthusiastic in my anchor text shuffling, because the anchor text definitely overwhelmed the on page content. This is another sign that the pages I was too zealous in reinforcing are still passing juice; they were the ones that used the most shuffling. Afterwards, it was more contained.
• Now, I forget about the domain for a bit(sorry guys!)
• Fast forward a few months. The domain is currently ranking top 5 for every targetted term involving the misspelling(there is actually some competition for the misspelling; it gets about 1/2 of the traffic of the proper spelling). On a positive note though, it’s top 10 for most most medium tail keywords(2 keyword combos) with the proper spelling(some top 5), and top 15 for the primary keyword (where it still gets traffic).

Rankings on MSN/Yahoo

• Yahoo: Ranking top 10 for every single keyword targeted with the exception of the main one. It got muscled out of there, though for a bit it had the #3 slot. The medium tail keywords seem to hover mostly around 3-5.
• MSN: #12 for the primary keyword. #2 for most other keywords, including every one of the popular misspellings. The furthest down it is for any keyword other than the primary one is #7.

So XMCP, Did Anyone See what you were up to?
Yes, it got 5 referrers from site: commands, and one subpage got a referrer from a yahoo linkdomain: command on the main site. That was months ago though, so it obviously passed whatever inspection it got from whichever webmaster it got.

So where are the rest of the stats?
All in good time. I’m still debating about pumping it up a bit more in the rankings. But it has to get banned before I can give out any more information than I have here…

So What is Hampering Progress?
Well first of all, I barely spent any time on this site, and should’ve spent more. I may fire off a few more rounds soon. Beyond that, I have to be really careful not to outrank my affiliate program for these keywords. They definitely have a professional SEO on board, and have claimed the top spot for almost all the keywords I’m targeting. Ranking higher than them is a risk I’m not willing to take.

-XMCP

PS: If you feel like it, I did a podcast over at Cant Get Rich. And no, I have no idea why my voice sounds so nasally.

PPS: I’m super tired as I write this, so forgive any bonehead errors.

Posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 7:56 am in the category:Grow Some Balls, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.