[Journey] Using Grayhat Tactics To Build A Semi-Authoritative Site

[kn1ves]

This is my first journey so first off, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm currently studying at a University and will be graduating in May this year. I established long back that I had no intentions whatsoever to be stuck in a 9 to 5 for the rest of my life. This is the reason I got into Internet Marketing around the same time last year.

With that being said, let's talk about what I plan on doing in this journey.

Last year, in December, I bought an expired domain from @Nargil and used it to build a website. In my opinion, I pretty much nailed the keyword research and found some really good keywords with decent search volume and relatively low competition.

Here's the link to the guide I used to classify the keyword difficulty which is "Easy".

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...ompetition-without-spending-a-dollar.1074066/

Search volumes are determined by Ubersuggest.

Keyword Research

​

Whenever I start working on a new website, I use something which I call the "Backward Approach". Most people, whenever they have an idea for a new website do the following:

• Get a designer to design a sexy af logo
• Start writing great content
• Stay up all night making their website look beautiful

This approach is a little flawed according to me, the reason is you're focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Most people know the Pareto principle, 80% of the results come from 20% of the work and the rest of the 80% work yields just 20% of the results.

In SEO, the 20% work which yields 80% of the results is getting your website to rank in the first place. You can worry about the beauty of the website later when it actually starts getting some traffic.

Keeping this in mind, before going all-in on any website, I first test if it can actually rank.

Today morning, one keyword (8100 searches/month) was ranking #1 on mobile but dropped back down to #5 within 2 hours.

Here are the current rankings (please note that I haven't really tapped all the keywords which I'm about to target, I just have like 3 articles on the site)

Rankings are according to SEMRush.

Desktop

Mobile

​

I"ll be focusing mainly on the mobile rankings, the reason being, before starting to put any kind of SEO efforts for the website, I run some ads using Google to test the kind of traffic which is very important to do in my opinion.

After running the campaign for like 15ish days I got this result:

This ad campaign helps me with 2 things:

1. Running this campaign made me realise that I should focus more on Mobile based rankings
   
   
2. It helps me to increase my CTR once I break the top ten. This is because I tested different ad copies while running the campaign.

As far as the SEO is concerned, I've done the following so far:

• Wrote 3 articles by myself.
• Used an expired domain because I didn't really want to go through the initial pillowing phase of a new domain. It already had some branded anchors in place which is nice.
• Did on-page for all the important pages.
• Created markup for most pages.
• Improved site speed. (could do better really)
  
  
• Bought a 2.0 package from @710fla
• Got 3 domains and turned them into PBNs and linked them to a single article on my site.

As you can see, I haven't really made any efforts because I plan on only using these rankings as a portfolio to get clients/job if the need arises.

I'm not really concerned about making money out of this domain as of now, I might sell this site later. This is because I have bigger plans (Digital Marketing Agency).

I'll try to update this thread every week as I'm really busy with college shit as of now.

Thanks for reading!

 

[phoenix9]

Great plan. Good luck OP!

 

[Salamouna]

Nice and detailed thread
i will follow

 

[busaboss]

This journey looks interesting. Good luck! I wish you success!

 

[SEO FOX]

Good luck OP

 

[TheVigilante]

Nice journey and I see you mentioned Greyhat...any particular method you following on BHW when it comes to that Greyhat method?

 

[Mksands]

I like the methodology. How much did you spend on the pbn domains?

 

[earthamoyer]

Good luck!

 

[shafi432]

I run some ads using Google to test the kind of traffic which is very important to do in my opinion.

That's a smart move.

At Rs 1.81, your CPC was pretty low. Did you run the ad for Indian audience or US?

Good luck OP.

 

[jamie3000]

Good luck mate. Seems like a solid plan. I'll follow along

 

[Backlink Database]

Looks good, following

 

[SuppWhitey]

You seem to have a solid plan! I'm following it , good luck

 

[rinoahart]

Looking forward to hearing more about this - and testing is a solid approach. You're right - initially I spent my time trying to make it look good and work out where all my affiliate links would go, when really I should have been getting the traffic in the first place.

 

[linobeyers]

Good luck OP Following.

 

[Tishina]

Seems interesting. I've a few questions:

1) I'll be soon buying an expired domain too from Nargil and I'm wondering how did you choose yours?
2) What kind of a markup did you use? Visitor votes?
3) The 3 domains you turned into PBN, are they again expired domains from Nargil?

Cheers!

 

[YujinTan]

This is my first journey so first off, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm currently studying at a University and will be graduating in May this year. I established long back that I had no intentions whatsoever to be stuck in a 9 to 5 for the rest of my life. This is the reason I got into Internet Marketing around the same time last year.

With that being said, let's talk about what I plan on doing in this journey.

Last year, in December, I bought an expired domain from @Nargil and used it to build a website. In my opinion, I pretty much nailed the keyword research and found some really good keywords with decent search volume and relatively low competition.

Here's the link to the guide I used to classify the keyword difficulty which is "Easy".

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-analyze-your-seo-competition-without-spending-a-dollar.1074066/

Search volumes are determined by Ubersuggest.

Keyword Research

​

Whenever I start working on a new website, I use something which I call the "Backward Approach". Most people, whenever they have an idea for a new website do the following:

• Get a designer to design a sexy af logo
• Start writing great content
• Stay up all night making their website look beautiful

This approach is a little flawed according to me, the reason is you're focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Most people know the Pareto principle, 80% of the results come from 20% of the work and the rest of the 80% work yields just 20% of the results.

In SEO, the 20% work which yields 80% of the results is getting your website to rank in the first place. You can worry about the beauty of the website later when it actually starts getting some traffic.

Keeping this in mind, before going all-in on any website, I first test if it can actually rank.

Today morning, one keyword (8100 searches/month) was ranking #1 on mobile but dropped back down to #5 within 2 hours.

Here are the current rankings (please note that I haven't really tapped all the keywords which I'm about to target, I just have like 3 articles on the site)

Rankings are according to SEMRush.

Desktop

Mobile

​

I"ll be focusing mainly on the mobile rankings, the reason being, before starting to put any kind of SEO efforts for the website, I run some ads using Google to test the kind of traffic which is very important to do in my opinion.

After running the campaign for like 15ish days I got this result:

This ad campaign helps me with 2 things:

1. Running this campaign made me realise that I should focus more on Mobile based rankings
   
   
2. It helps me to increase my CTR once I break the top ten. This is because I tested different ad copies while running the campaign.

As far as the SEO is concerned, I've done the following so far:

• Wrote 3 articles by myself.
• Used an expired domain because I didn't really want to go through the initial pillowing phase of a new domain. It already had some branded anchors in place which is nice.
• Did on-page for all the important pages.
• Created markup for most pages.
• Improved site speed. (could do better really)
  
  
• Bought a 2.0 package from @710fla
• Got 3 domains and turned them into PBNs and linked them to a single article on my site.

As you can see, I haven't really made any efforts because I plan on only using these rankings as a portfolio to get clients/job if the need arises.

I'm not really concerned about making money out of this domain as of now, I might sell this site later. This is because I have bigger plans (Digital Marketing Agency).

I'll try to update this thread every week as I'm really busy with college shit as of now.

Thanks for reading!

hmm your webstie performance scores so high I guess you never put adsense code?

 

[Wizard King]

Nice journey mate. As its already doing good, I hope you will get success as soon as possible.

 

[kn1ves]

Great plan. Good luck OP!

Nice and detailed thread
i will follow

This journey looks interesting. Good luck! I wish you success!

Good luck OP

Thank you people!

Nice journey and I see you mentioned Greyhat...any particular method you following on BHW when it comes to that Greyhat method?

I am not really following a particular method, however, most of my knowledge about SEO and IM in general is from BHW only.

I like the methodology. How much did you spend on the pbn domains?

For the PBN domains, I bought one of them from @Nargil a few days back for $10 (+$10 for registering), it got indexed pretty quickly.
For the other two, I used scrapebox and manually checked them. ($10 + $10)

Good luck!

Thanks!

That's a smart move.

At Rs 1.81, your CPC was pretty low. Did you run the ad for Indian audience or US?

Good luck OP.

Indian audience only. The CPC is reduced in proportion to your quality score. Mine was at 8/10.

Good luck mate. Seems like a solid plan. I'll follow along

Looks good, following

You seem to have a solid plan! I'm following it , good luck

Looking forward to hearing more about this - and testing is a solid approach. You're right - initially I spent my time trying to make it look good and work out where all my affiliate links would go, when really I should have been getting the traffic in the first place.

Good luck OP Following.

Thank you guys~

Seems interesting. I've a few questions:

1) I'll be soon buying an expired domain too from Nargil and I'm wondering how did you choose yours?
2) What kind of a markup did you use? Visitor votes?
3) The 3 domains you turned into PBN, are they again expired domains from Nargil?

Cheers!

1. I just went with one which had the most RDs and had a high TF. As far as spam/cleanliness of the domain is considered @Nargil does a good job of making sure that it is clean.
2. Yes, I used the review one. (with the star ratings, can't remember the exact name lol)
3. Only one of them was from @Nargil.

hmm your webstie performance scores so high I guess you never put adsense code?

Nope, no Adsense codes as of now. I generally don't like using Wordpress, one of my old sites used React and I had page load time of like 400ms. It poses SEO related problems though.

Nice journey mate. As its already doing good, I hope you will get success as soon as possible.

Let's hope for the best. XD

 

[kn1ves]

Update #1
The page for which I built PBN links is now ranking #1 in the SERPs (mobile), however, I'm getting outranked by a video SERP feature which sucks. Also, the rankings for desktop improved from #8 to #5.

As of now, I have 3 articles published on my site, I'll be writing more soon. I plan on passing some juice from the already ranking page to my next target article (already published) which has 14,800 monthly searches. As of now, it is ranking:

• Nowhere in desktop
• #51 in mobile

This is will how my site's structure will look like after I've made the internal link.

 

[kuywhy]

This post is really motivating. I've lot of questions :
So according to the Pareto principle your saying that the 20 % is kw research ?

Keeping this in mind, before going all-in on any website, I first test if it can actually rank.

How do you test it ?
l am assuming that you target specific kws and then publish the content, do you go with expired domain ?

Or do you so something else ?

what tools do you use for kw research semrush or the niel patel's 'uber suggest'.