KGR With a Twist (Case Study Round Two)

[SEOMadHatter]

Sorry there's been a lack of updates. Partly because it's SEO and while I love it - it's about as fun as watching paint dry sometimes. Partly because I've taken on waaay too many projects at once even by my standards so it's hard to keep on top of them all.

Some good news for today though.

First up I had a look back over one of the original sites I tested out KGR with. The success rate was actually even better than I'd thought especially considering it was all duplicate content. This was a new domain with no links and duplicate content, I'm curious to see how another new domain will fair with unique content.

For this project, we have a number of all-time highs today including some new page 1 results. Traffic is up and the trickle of leads showing up to the landing page is starting to grow.

I'm slowly starting to work on expanding this. I picked up a stack of new keywords and started to outsource them so I can see how it compares with actual unique content. Starting up a new project running a site with BHW bought links and services and that'll be starting with KGR keywords as well so I'll want unique content for that domain.

I'm looking at getting into a new niche using a parasite and duplicate content on a bigger scale. Now I know it's a viable project it's worth spending some time on I'm looking for a full-time writer to start putting some time into it. Hopefully, start seeing some proper scaling happen this week.

Any updates? Interesting journey.

In other news:

Someone needs to go and rank for that one for kicks.

Related stupidity I found today: 'how to fall asleep after doing crystal' and (NSFW warning before searching this) 'flesh light ipad case' Have fun with that one.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

The new Google update seems to have gone in our favour. A good upswing of rankings today.

Outsourcing is a massive pain in the ass and I'm yet to find a freelancer that doesn't require a bunch of editing. I've got some new content coming up in the next few days and I'm going to start testing with unique content vs copied and start building some backlinks to some of it.

Trying to train a JV in the content style I've been using for this journal so that they can start scaling the content numbers. I'll hopefully be able to hand off the parasite side of things to them and leave it to scale for a while.

 

[Deleted member 1313244]

Outsourcing is a massive pain in the ass and I'm yet to find a freelancer that doesn't require a bunch of editing. I've got some new content coming up in the next few days and I'm going to start testing with unique content vs copied and start building some backlinks to some of it.

Trying to train a JV in the content style I've been using for this journal so that they can start scaling the content numbers. I'll hopefully be able to hand off the parasite side of things to them and leave it to scale for a while.

What sort of number are you offering? Still $12 per k?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

I've got a couple of other projects I need to get off my plate at the moment so I've chucked some money at the outsourcing for this project. We're $535 in the hole for this now but let's see what happens.

I want to build up a decent-ish niche site with content and links targeting a stack of KGR terms and 2-3 medium difficulty terms and then compare that against just blasting out more of these crappy non-unique parasite pages for KGR and see how that compares.

This is currently the closest thing I have to an active traditional SEO project. I've overhauled a bunch of content to make it better and stripped out any duplicate or thin content pages. I've got some links being drip-fed in over the next couple of weeks and once I'm done uploading the rest of the content I'll start some outreach as well.

On the other side of that coin, the non-unique parasite pages I started for this are at an all-time high. Most are now on the first page with a couple hitting all-time highs on the second page now. Hit a record for traffic yesterday.

Reasonably confident I could just blast out a bunch of pages like this and they'll pick up steam by themselves. I'm going to finish up with the legit-looking domain side of things and try and clear my plate for a week or two then I want to dust off my GSA and see what happens if we put some time into throwing links at KGR parasite pages.

What sort of number are you offering? Still $12 per k?

I got a couple of 1k articles done for $11~ for 1k words. They're not great but with a bit of editing, they'll do as filler.

I'm also testing a couple of other writers at a much higher price point the highest I've paid so far is about $65 for a much larger piece.

 

[karupoiss]

How many visitors are you getting/day?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

$40 in profit from the parasites in the last 24 hours. Super keen on scaling this now considering this was very little work compared to a traditional SEO project. Trying to balance it alongside umpteen other projects is tricky though but if I front-load a lot of this work I can leave it to run and see what happens.

I'm splitting the project up into two separate sections now.

One is relatively white hat. I mean it's totally black hat by Google standards but compared to what we normally call white hat around here it'll almost sparkle. I've put another $300 into content and links. About 30% through fixing up some of the older content which I'm trying to get through but it is time-consuming. I'm hoping to have it finished this week and then it's just a matter of letting content and links drip feed and see if it's worth building a site out of KGR content. It'll convert and I'll see a return on what's there (based on the traffic it already gets) but this will tell me if it's worth chasing quality.

Once I get through that setup we're going totally the other way.

I'm putting together a big list of KGR terms in a niche I know converts well and the plan is to go totally the other direction with the parasites. Whether I hire someone to do what I've done this time or I maybe try training some machine learning with specific niche content I want to see if I can do this on a bigger scale.

Truth be told - I'd actually love it if the domain did well. I don't do a whole lot of traditional SEO at the moment and this would rekindle my interest in making some good quality sites. Maybe I'm just too cynical but I think the parasite spam is likely going to perform better though.

How many visitors are you getting/day?

The metrics are pretty messy at the moment but the handful of parasites are averaging a few hundred a month at the moment. They're converting pretty well and still trending upwards.

The domain is getting around 2k a month but it's had more time to improve and also has about double the number of posts. This was when it was just duplicate content with no links - I'm assuming the work going into it now will improve things somewhat.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

I’ve been on a kick recently of actually getting projects finished so here we go.

Starting with the (relatively) white-hat side of things we’re at just of $1000 invested into content and links for the domain. Both of these will be dripping through over the next couple of weeks. I have an outreach campaign going which has netted a few links so far and I’m pushing some legit social traffic from other projects bots.

Nothing is below 1k words and some of the KGR posts are pushing above 2k. I’ve two freelance writers working on it to get the site bulked out even more.

The niche is high margin and it’s already going to pay itself off within a month at this rate, so I don’t mind spending the time putting in this kind of content for low traffic numbers but I’m still curious to see if it’s worthwhile.

The metrics look good, existing traffic is converting and existing rankings are slowly improving across the board with new content for KGR terms coming in. I’ll not be doing anything with this site for a while. Leave the drip-feed running and see what happens.

If there’s an argument for me doing more white-hat projects in the future this is it. Maybe I’m just cynical but I do completely expect the blackhat setup to massively outperform it.

Speaking of - we’ve also scaling that.

Doubled the number of parasites posted. 90% automated content and we had page one rankings for some of them in under 24 hours. And we have automated content sitting in a #0 snippet.

Come on Google. I’m trying to be good here.

Some rankings do, of course, take longer so it’s not an overnight flood of traffic but it’s certainly bringing in leads. I’m debating scaling this but I’ve another couple of projects needing some time at the moment so I’m going to give it a few weeks. If the parasites are outperforming the good quality domain we’ll be teaching a VA how to build this content and start getting a little silly.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

The parasites took a jump and hit some all-time highs on the first page. I'll be adding to the parasite this week and looking into a scalable way to produce slightly better quality content at a decent rate still.

Part of me is looking at the leads coming through from this and thinking it's maybe just worth scaling on the first content build. It takes a few minutes per article maybe 10-15 tops to make something human-readable. I could train a VA to do this and it's bringing in leads. I can set up landing pages for a dozen niches and send a list of the KGR terms to a freelancer. Fairly quickly this could scale into some real traffic.

Back on the more 'white hat' side of things:

We're up to $1,810 in content and links on the domain. I'm about done putting time into this, for now, other than editing some of the money site content once in a while to keep it feeding through.

This is probably the most effort I've put into a legit site in a while. We'll see what comes of it.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Obvious tip: If you find your competitors doing KGR keywords look at what other keywords they're going for. It gives you some easy KGR terms and you know Google is ranking based on the title.

I found a competitor site in my niche that seems to be doing just KGR terms. Content is pretty mediocre so I'm guessing cheap outsourcing and have no links to speak of. Some good linking rankings including some huge snippet slots. I'll be passing them to the freelancer to rewrite.

Got a couple of backlinks from the outreach we did and I might do a little more to expand that. Otherwise it's just a waiting around game now.

 

[SEOMet]

How are you using traffic at parasites? Funnel it back to your site/money pages?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

I made some final tweaks to the outreach code and nabbed another backlink so far today. It's one of these projects entirely automated but I love watching it plod away on the side screen.

I do know manual outreach is far more effective but the way I look at it - I'm never going to take the time for it on a project like this so automated is better than nothing. It's getting me some free backlinks I wouldn't have otherwise.

The domain hit all-time highs for ranks after a Google shuffle up and I think I'm going to have to try and find a new writer again. $20 for 1,000 words isn't cutting it and still requires way too much editing. I'll look into that tomorrow.

The parasites also had a pretty good day taking a number of new page one results and brought in a couple of sales.

I'm starting to seriously consider putting more time into this. I have an affiliate program I've been wanting to push more traffic at and I could probably dig up a ton of KGR terms for it. Realistically even at 10-15 minutes per post, I'd struggle to find the time at the moment so I think that one is going on the back burner for the moment until I can train a VA or get enough other projects off my plate.

In all honesty, I'd prefer if the domain outperforms the parasites in the near future. I don't mind investing in quality content and links for a domain I actually own. I'm not going to spend a bunch of money on parasites the same way which means I actually have to do the work myself.

How are you using traffic at parasites? Funnel it back to your site/money pages?

Some have affiliate links directly on them going to the vendor others take them into my sales funnel and generate leads that get sold to via email. So far I've been doing this with niches I know well so the conversion rate has been pretty healthy.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

A couple of smaller updates.

More first page rankings this morning on both the parasites and the domain.

Some of the niche edits and outreach links starting to show up for the domain. Surprised at how poor quality some of the content is. Super spammy looking considering the price tag people charge.

I made some tweaks to how I've been doing the keyword research and found a crapload of KGR terms even in small niches I wasn't expecting. I went from about two dozen in one of my niches to at least 100. A new site I'm starting up has even more potential keywords so I'm really going to have to scale the content production.

$20 for 1k words doesn't cut it for the money site and is overshooting for the parasites. I've got a job listing up for another writer (hopefully one I don't have to edit too much) and I'm testing out a more automated approach to the parasite content. Overall this is going pretty well and we're in the green but I'm definitely in a bottleneck for content and with two more projects starting up, I don't have time to sit and write at the moment.

 

[EntertheDeals]

Can you share any tips on keyword research?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Alright, some bad news.

Real-life checked in yesterday and without getting into it I'm about to lose a whole bunch of time and money. I won't know the full extent of either yet but it's forcing me to re-evaluate what I'm currently working on and I need to focus on the projects which are making short term gains and cut the investment budget for SEO.

This project has gone well and is converting daily at the moment at a decent margin. I'll be keeping it running just not investing any more time/money into it until I sort things out.

I expect it to be on hold for at least a couple of weeks - potentially a little longer. I will update when I'm able to devote time to it again and we'll see where the SERPS are.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Quick update for the end of Feb:

The project is still paused at the moment. Waiting on a couple of things before I'm focusing on longer-term projects like SEO so I've put no time or investment into this at all since the start of Feb. Profit for the last 30 days has still been $1,099.45 so I guess it's not all bad news.

As for rankings, we have some good news and some bad news.

First up (since I've just had my evening coffee and I'm feeling pretty good) let's go with the good news. The parasite rankings have done exceptionally well lately. A whole bunch of new page 1 and 2 listings even for complete junk content. I've been testing everything from handwriting to pure AI-generated crap and it's all ranking and generating leads.

On the flip side, the domain has dipped about 40% in search traffic. It could be a number of things causing it which have all lined up around the same time.

• I made a lot of onsite changes to the structure and content so it could just be a dance caused by that.
• We've had a lot of links come through (more on that in a moment) from outreach and services so it could be a dance caused by that (especially since the anchor ratio will be out of whack until more of it gets picked up).
• There was a large core update recently and it could have been that.

Any or all of these could have been a factor. It'll just be a waiting game now to see what happens with it and whether or not it bounces back.

A lot of the niche edit links were very underwhelming. Some providers still haven't done anything a month later and most of the ones which did come through are less than legit. The cynic in me would say they're just selling overpriced PBN links and hoping nobody else bothers to notice - and I know I'm not the only one encountering this.

I remember saying a few weeks ago I was enjoying doing some relatively standard SEO and creating good quality content. Maybe the domain will improve again but currently auto-generated junk content is winning out against building a decent quality site. I'd like to be wrong on this but as it currently stands it looks like KGR and blackhat scaled content is my next project.

 

[king0735]

Quick update for the end of Feb:

The project is still paused at the moment. Waiting on a couple of things before I'm focusing on longer-term projects like SEO so I've put no time or investment into this at all since the start of Feb. Profit for the last 30 days has still been $1,099.45 so I guess it's not all bad news.

As for rankings, we have some good news and some bad news.

First up (since I've just had my evening coffee and I'm feeling pretty good) let's go with the good news. The parasite rankings have done exceptionally well lately. A whole bunch of new page 1 and 2 listings even for complete junk content. I've been testing everything from handwriting to pure AI-generated crap and it's all ranking and generating leads.

On the flip side, the domain has dipped about 40% in search traffic. It could be a number of things causing it which have all lined up around the same time.

• I made a lot of onsite changes to the structure and content so it could just be a dance caused by that.
• We've had a lot of links come through (more on that in a moment) from outreach and services so it could be a dance caused by that (especially since the anchor ratio will be out of whack until more of it gets picked up).
• There was a large core update recently and it could have been that.

Any or all of these could have been a factor. It'll just be a waiting game now to see what happens with it and whether or not it bounces back.

A lot of the niche edit links were very underwhelming. Some providers still haven't done anything a month later and most of the ones which did come through are less than legit. The cynic in me would say they're just selling overpriced PBN links and hoping nobody else bothers to notice - and I know I'm not the only one encountering this.

I remember saying a few weeks ago I was enjoying doing some relatively standard SEO and creating good quality content. Maybe the domain will improve again but currently auto-generated junk content is winning out against building a decent quality site. I'd like to be wrong on this but as it currently stands it looks like KGR and blackhat scaled content is my next project.

That's an interesting take I'm going to start testing out an actual site and parasite pages with unique content and see what happens. You seem to be having alot of success with it

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Currently grounded since my travel plans have fallen through so I'm trying to plan out what projects I'm working on for the next few weeks.

I took a glance at the analytics for this and wasn't surprised to see the rankings bounce back across the board. Organic traffic has doubled in the last couple of weeks now with some new all-time highs recently. The domain with quality content and links has bounced back but what's really interesting is the black hat parasite stuff is just constant growth. Even the awful looking AI-generated ones are bringing in traffic.

I'm still focusing on shorter-term projects for the moment which means new SEO projects are still mostly on the back burner however I'm running a quick test. Took a few dozen new KGR terms for a new niche and some semi-automated content which means I can put something together in under two minutes. I can see some further openings to improve inter-linking and maybe some automated backlinks and social traffic but I just want to see what happens if I produce a bunch of pages and leave it for a couple of weeks. The current ones are bringing in buyers so if this actually works I'd have no real choice but to start doing this on scale.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

So.

The tests I put up yesterday afternoon - already hit multiple first-page results. We're not talking floods of traffic but we are talking very, very little effort bringing in converting traffic. Wouldn't have even bothered checking if it hadn't brought in leads today and I saw where it was coming from.

So I did say I wasn't going to focus on long-term traffic but then again I've just wrapped up two major projects and I have time to kill. I'm going a bit stir crazy staying inside at the moment but at least I'm being productive. It looks like my problem might be sorted and this test showed some surprising results right as I was between projects.

I'm going to switch things up a bit. I'll leave the domain alone for a while to see how it goes but in the short term scaling the parasite setup seems like it could bring in traffic. I'm going to take a whole bunch of affiliate niches, and generate parasite pages for them semi-automated. Let's say the first milestone is 500 or something then assess whether it's worth taking further.

Scaling this side of things up does mean having to deal with parasites potentially being banned but looking at the results so far that might be a problem worth dealing with.

 

[karupoiss]

How is it going @SEOMadHatter?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

I've been caught up with a bunch of different projects lately so I hadn't checked in on this one for a while but I'm pretty glad I did. Funnily enough, right as I look at the analytics I'm just in time to see a $60 sale come through the parasite KGR posts.

The parasite setup is doing well. The last test group I setup 23/30 are on page 1 with a chunk of them in #1 or at least the top 3. They're still growing pretty steadily.

And this is all duplicate content. No backlinks. I did pretty much nothing for this.

The CTR to the offer is pretty low but I threw a single call to action at random points on each post. I'm planning to go through them tomorrow to improve the copy a bit and maybe add a banner or something. Considering the complete lack of work it's a positive ROI now but I'm pretty sure I can double it.

I've set up a few things today to start scaling this.

First was the obvious. I removed a couple of bottlenecks to finding KGR terms. I'd also like to find more within each niche - the KGR numbers seem a bit arbitrary to me so I'd like to loosen the numbers a bit and test terms with higher allintitle to see when the falloff starts. Added in some improved filtering and set things live again. I have a few affiliate niches I know well enough I'm going to start getting batches of a few hundred terms together.

Using a parasite has benefits. They'll probably rank faster than a bunch of fresh domains and I don't have to brand a domain for the niche so the setup is easier.

The downside is having all the rankings wiped out not just by Google - but the parasites themselves. If they take issue with the duplicate content then they'll likely delete the accounts. Not the ideal for an SEO project but I think the tradeoff is worth it. I had a similar SEO project a while back which got hit from time to time but it was easily scalable so made a few hundred a day.

I've set up some automation to help warm up accounts and to back content up as it gets posted. At least then if they do get wiped I can have it easily repost everything elsewhere. There is some work to do in making the posting go a little faster which I'm hoping to get done over the weekend but it depends on how my workload is looking.

I have put up a few new posts while testing this in the last 24 hours and some have gone straight to page 1 already. I don't plan on going too crazy with this right away but the plan is to get at least a few hundred of these up and see how it looks.