:: Case Study :: Link Building comparison chart!

Hey guys, I like doing case studies and testing out products before I use them; I had some interesting results with one of my latest ones and thought I would share it with you guys.

There is a lot of debate over crawling vs indexing-whether or not crawling is beneficial, and which tools work best. I took two of the more popular ones and put them in identical situations, and ran them against a control test to see what would come out the other end...

...the results are very interesting:

There is a lot of discussion online about whether crawling backlinks is useful and necessary to improve site rankings. Some people say that a link must be indexed to count, while others feel that Google will naturally find every link so there is no benefit of pinging/crawling. I decided to make a test to determine how effective crawling is as a method of ranking sites. (Full disclosure: I know crawling works and want to quantify exactly how much of an effect it can have.)

Since making an accurate case study requires a lot of work, I also wanted to use this time to determine if there was any difference between the services Linklicious.me and Nuclear Link Crawler. Both claim to do approximately the same thing - get your links crawled on a steady daily drip. Both services cost around the same amount of money but Linklicious does give some good bonuses if you are an active link builder.



TEST PREP
To accurately perform tests for the Google ranking algorithms, it?s important to have only one independent variable: the crawling service used. When we eliminate all of the other variables, the dependent variable (SERP ranking) is truly measured. Further, to verify our hypothesis that crawling is effective, we also needed a control. This control is used to compare and contrast against our two test cases to see the results.


Websites:

Since domain name is one of the highest ranking signals, we purchased three domains with the exact same name. We used the three common top level domain extensions so that would not bias the results either. As far as content goes, we wrote a single unique article and generated three different spins of the article so that one spin would be used on each site. We added no additional content. Hosting was done all on one VPS with a single dedicated IP for all three sites. This was done to remove server speed and IP neighborhood as possible ranking factors.

http://www.linkcrawlingtest.com - Crawling/pinging service used: Nuclear Link Crawler Free
http://www.linkcrawlingtest.net - Crawling/pinging service used: Linklicious Free
http://www.linkcrawlingtest.org - Crawling/pinging service used: None Used


Linkbuilding Service:

To effectively rank a site backlinks need to be built. We decided to use DripFeedLinks.com for building the backlinks since the service is the most cost effective and lets us do a small daily drip of links. We felt the slow daily drip of links was important to avoid sandboxing these brand new sites. Since these are long tail keywords, it isn?t very hard to rank them and we can use just these cheap links pointed directly at the test sites.

For all three sites we built 200 links per day, with 70% of the links being comments and the other 30% being forum profiles.

Keywords Used:
importance of link crawling
link crawling important to rank
link crawling versus indexing
link crawling

RESULTS
The results for the test are very conclusive: link crawling with Linklicious works extremely well for ranking keywords. The screenshots below show that as links were built, rankings improved. When NLC was used as the crawling service, improvements were seen for the first few days but then dropped quickly over time. By the time we closed this test, NLC was actually worse that not using NLC. When Linklicious was used as the crawling service, two of the terms terms jumped to the top of page 1.



CONCLUSION

After running the test for two weeks, it is clear that crawling is a very effective tool for improving your SERPs. Any serious SEO needs to incorporate a good link pinging/crawling tool to guarantee their links are found - otherwise link money is wasted. For all of the cases we were able to show how cheap links alone can be used to rank certain keywords. Finally, we were able to show that Linklicious is head and shoulders above Nuclear Link Crawler and no crawling of links.


FUTURE STUDY AREAS
There are a few logical places we can look at after this study. We may take a look at them at a future date.
- Crawling versus indexing and rankings: What is the best overall way to spend money.
- Guaranteed crawling (Linklicious) versus simple pinging (pingomatic)
- Effectiveness of building links to the backlinks

SCREENSHOTS



linkcrawlingtest.net

Rank: 2 - importance of link crawling
Rank: 22 - link crawling
Rank: 4 - link crawling important to rank









linkcrawlingtest.com

Rank: 6 - importance of link crawling
Rank: 29 - link crawling
Rank: 8 - link crawling important to rank









No Pinging/Crawling Tool Ranking Results

linkcrawlingtest.org
Rank: 9 - importance of link crawling
Rank: 23 - link crawling
Rank: 12 - link crawling important to rank







Below is a screenshot showing links built by day at DripFeedLinks.com. We ordered 200/day and were over delivered on the projects.



Here was the daily build schedule for the backlinks.



Nuclear link Crawler taking the links and pinging them.


Linklicious taking the links and pinging them.

Thanks man, a great and detailed review.
Rep given.

So where'd you test this against indexing?

DamageX said:

So where'd you test this against indexing?

Click to expand...

This case study is what I hope to be, the first step, in a group of studies I have been wanting to do. First, I wanted to see if there was any benefit to using crawled links, so I used two crawling services and compared them to the control. The results were obvious; crawling indeed has a positive effect on SERPs.

Now, I can run a similar test using a crawling service against an indexing service and see which one out performs which.

I think the indexing service will out perform the crawling service, but my question is, at what cost?

You seemed to do a pretty thorough job. Have you tested other scenarios and not posted them? I'd like to learn what else you've seen. We've tried all sorts of different ways of crawling/indexing/pinging/nothing to get the most cost effective approach. But it's always good to get outside testing. (We love testing, btw)

Do you mind if we copy this case study as long as we reference your bhw username?

Excellent Post. I will be waiting for the results of the rest of the study. Thanks for the time and effort to share this.

Great post indeed! Rep + thanks given!

I love these kinda threads, thanks a bunch for actually taking the time to do it right.

Thanks for doing the case study. When I get more free time some day I'm going to do some similar tests.

Nice case study OP, +Rep.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the series!

You deserve a lot of recognition for the effort and time you put into this. Hope to see further studies from you in the future. I actually feel that the test didn't conclusively show that link crawling was that important or necessary, but anytime we have data like this, it surely helps. Without the links being built by yourself, there is too many variables that could come into play. I think we would have to see around 5 more studies with the same results to consider it conclusive.

Lets bump the thread in a month and check again also, to see if the no indexing control catches up to the Linklicious site.

This is and interesting point worth coming back on. At what point, if ever will the links found naturally catch up with linklicious??

Kickflip said:

Lets bump the thread in a month and check again also, to see if the no indexing control catches up to the Linklicious site.

Click to expand...

Rep added. I actually thought the .com would outrank the others.

I'd love to see a case where you compare .com against .info if you ever need more work ;-)

It was a great case. Thanks for it.

Wow...nice case study!

OP - Any update?

I got a few backlinks (500) from (3-5)PR sites, do youn reckon I need to use a link pinging/crawling tool?
I can't see any of these links on google webmaster tools, it's been a week since I purchased those backlinks.

That's a nice one. Keep up the good work.

Nice case study, looking to see how the non-crawled domain does after an extended period.

This is a great test. I have always known that indexing links helps a lot with google actually finding the links but I never knew which services were the more effective.

I signed up with linklisous about a week and a half ago and I am already seeing results. Good stuff!

Extropy said:

You seemed to do a pretty thorough job. Have you tested other scenarios and not posted them? I'd like to learn what else you've seen. We've tried all sorts of different ways of crawling/indexing/pinging/nothing to get the most cost effective approach. But it's always good to get outside testing. (We love testing, btw)

Do you mind if we copy this case study as long as we reference your bhw username?

Click to expand...

First I want to say, sure! You or anyone else can use this or any other case study for anything they want. Spreading facts and truth is the most important thing.

As for your other questions, yes I am always testing for my clients with my partners and when we find something definitive, I will share it.

Also since you are here, I want to say I was really impressed with your service! (I really liked the discounts you guys offer for dripfeedlinks users.) You have put together some top notch services that work really well together, were simple to use and setup!