Hey Everyone,
Sorry for the delay in my posting! I just finished a huge contract with a very large company and will have the next 3-4 weeks to dedicate way more time to this thread as well as launching the SB site as well as helping all you guys out. To all who have PM'd me, I've gotten to all of your messages. Thanks for sending them!
First I'll do a long over due update, then I'll tackle questions and comments.
UPDATE:
Traffic to the site as stayed pretty steady since I stopped blasting the site after moving into phase two. Rankings have also held pretty well. All my main traffic generating keywords are maintaining there place on Google including my primary keyword which is still holding at position 7, page one.
Yahoo Site Explorer is reporting a mild decrease in links to 34,934. This is to be expected as pages and sites do go down. I expect this to stay right around there for a while. I have lots of deep links all across these blogs that may only be visited by a spider once a month, so I suspect I'll have a trickle of undiscovered back links being discovered as others go down.
Overall I am very happy with how the site has held up. It has been well over a month since the last blasts and content updates. I'll continue to monitor this site and provide periodic updates.
In the next week I will be launching a second open experiment, this time with a few observers from this thread to report back. I definitely want to provide verification, but have to stop short of openly sharing the URL due to trolls who would want to destroy something just for fun.
I am still looking for a few people who would like to volunteer and would agree to post in the thread at least twice a week verifying the site's progress. If you are interested, please PM me or hit me up on Skype.
QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
Sorry if this has already been covered in this thread, but how do you go about creating your comments file?
Do you do generic comments, or spun comments related to your niche? Could you explain your process and thinking on this topic?
For comments, I used generic spun comments. Since I am targeting only AA lists, I just need something to stick in the comment box. I just add a few new comments to a master list that I use. All the comments are pretty heavily spun but still readable.
Any update to this, in the post-panda 2.2 world? I'd be interested to see if you saw any negative impact on rankings.
I've conducted this experiment all post Panda and have done great with it. Since Panda targeted article directories heavily, I think it has actually helped small content sites. I've had a much easier time ranking after changing my tactics away from directories.
good tips here, do you still increasing traffic?
Traffic is holding right now since I have stopped link building and content updates.
After looking at your thread(and having SB sitting doing nothing). I decided to blast directly to the domain which had penalty/sandbox as it was sitting on 80th page or so after ranking on 4-5th page for few weeks. I left the site for few weeks after it dropped (the reason I think it dropped was it didnt have diversity). I decided to blast to 6k Unique Domains with SB as a attempt to collect Autoapprove list while still gaining link. I had to go through 250k urls to find this 6k domains but I managed to get 6k Different IP linking back so I think that was good.
Atm after waiting two weeks after blasting I am sitting on the 2nd page. If this is dance, I dont mind since I made quite few $$$ in adsense already enough to pay for the blast (if i paid for it), if its not dance then blasting directly doesnt hurt as much if you have diversity from different links / ips.
That's awesome that you decided to act and just go for it. Been a big reason why I have done this thread is to motivate others to just go for it. Awesome results too. How are you doing now?
One thing I would caution against is doing one time blasts then nothing more. I'd blast at least once a week for 4-6 weeks at a minimum to build up link velocity. You want much more of a bell curve than a sharp spike in links.
question: So I'm guessing it's like steroids, once you're on it you have to keep it up? Do you plan on tapering off or just continue blasting?
For link building with SB, you need to maintain link velocity. Some point soon I will write a detailed article about this. Once you build a large base of links over time, you can taper off and maintain rankings. The biggest no-no is to just do one or two mega blasts then do nothing after that. You need to build links for several weeks, then taper back over a couple more weeks so that it doesn't look so artificial.
thank you a lot for this useful thread, your expirience is great, i'm also looking for a blast, I have a 8 years domain, but the content was added 1 month ago, what do you think, is it ok to start a 50k blast?
tnx
50k is fine, but make sure you have more than that to follow up with. If you are going to start direct blasting and only have 50K links to use in SB, then I would divide that up into 10K chunks and blast it over 5 weeks (10k a week over 5 weeks). This way Google doesn't see a huge spike and then nothing. The links look a lot more natural.
Also be sure to continue to add content as you are building links. You want your site to come across as natural as possible. There definitely is a balance between off page link building and on page content. Make sure you maintain both.
Thanks everyone for your questions and comments! More are always welcome. Hoping to have some great stuff for all of you in the coming week.
