How I re-animated my site after G spanked me

Ok, I'm no SEO expert, just a regular old guy who tries to do things sensibly when it comes to ranking my site.

Anyway, I run a financial services business here in England, a proper bricks and mortar biz which I have done since 2002 and I do ok financially. I have 21 sites in various niches but my main site brings in almost 70% of my income and I earn a low six figures every year but I have decided that after a recent life changing event (I had surgery four weeks ago to remove a non cancerous brain tumour for which I am recovering from and from which I know I am one of the lucky ones) I am going to go for it for the next 12 months, starting from now.

My main site was number 1 in G for over 3 years and I used to receive over 150 enquiries every day and then in late 2012 my site got hit by G for over use of anchor text (guilty as charged) and I spent the next two years using very expensive adwords as my site laboured around page 4.

Fast forward to the last 4 weeks and I have been laid up and all I have done (apart from thanking the gods that I am alive) is study, read and read again, every SEO technique, tip and trick and no joke, just 1 week after my surgery I was working 12 hours a day trying to figure this stuff out and testing on a few throwaway sites.
I forgot to mention,about 9 months ago I started from scratch effectively by disavowing every single backlink to my main site because I thought, what the heck - I've nothing to lose and two months ago (approx.3/4 weeks before my hospital admission) I started to create new content like crazy.

I should point out that I really don't mind writing at all and combined with Dragon, I regularly knock out 1800 word articles at least twice a week and in the first week at home after my admission three weeks ago, I wrote about 5500 words for my site and scheduled the posts.

So fast forward to today and my main site is now at position 10 on page 1 with just 1 backlink which is a bookmarking link from stumble upon and the only reason I knew is because I started to get some leads through my CMS. I have stopped writing new posts for now because it is dancing like crazy and it needs to find its footing in G. Once it does I will continue with my writing strategy and bang out 4000 words a week and not just filler content, I always link out and I always make sure I add value not fluff.

I'm not saying I won't hit it with backlinks because I will but not just yet because it is doing ok on its own so far.

So along with the great thread on building an authority site that BassTrackerBoats is doing here http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...te-search-engine-optimization-case-study.html, it is possible to build an authority site with fresh, original and well written content as the backbone and get it ranked.

good luck and wishing you a fast recovery to your site!

-Sasha

Good to hear that, mate! Keep up creating content, I did this with my site as well and it works. The problem is that it is still dancing but it will find it's place, I'm sure.

Best of luck with your recovery pal. I dissavowed last year on a site that I couldnt afford to bin and with some other activity its starting to be a player again.

Just bought Dragon. Makes sense for me to try it out I type out thousands of words a day to clients in emails, If I can just blast it out and it works like Ive been told then I will free up a few hours a day.

Duffers5000 said:

Best of luck with your recovery pal. I dissavowed last year on a site that I couldnt afford to bin and with some other activity its starting to be a player again.

Cheers. Just bought Dragon. Makes sense for me to try it out I type out thousands of words a day to clients in emails, If I can just blast it out and it works like Ive been told then I will free up a few hours a day.

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Yeah, the thing with Dragon is that it really does get better the more you use it, far better to spend 5 minutes editing what you dictate than writing the whole thing from scratch and the conversation flows as well which makes for a better post/article. Ibarely look at what I have dictated now as it will be there or thereabouts, the one thing it does have a problem with is when I say "us" which it always transcribes as "those" for some reason. Must be the accent!

Im from Dublin so have concerns with the accent ! I type too much and Im not a natural typer. Ive heard terrible reports, but as you say people that stick with it seem to win that would be a big breakthrough for me.

hmeister said:

Yeah, the thing with Dragon is that it really does get better the more you use it, far better to spend 5 minutes editing what you dictate than writing the whole thing from scratch and the conversation flows as well which makes for a better post/article. Ibarely look at what I have dictated now as it will be there or thereabouts, the one thing it does have a problem with is when I say "us" which it always transcribes as "those" for some reason. Must be the accent!

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