[CASE STUDY] Sending Scrapebox Blasts to Your Money Site

[azguru]

Nowadays, everyone is under the impression that a Scrapebox blast to the money site is "instant death" for any site. During recent campaigns I have seen mixed effects, so I am going to test this and find out for myself. I want to know both the short term and long term effects of this. I figured I would create a case study to log my findings.

I will be testing this on a couple month old site. I will be testing this for a keyword that was already ranking before the blasts as well as a new keyword that was not ranked before the blasts (to see if it helps rank new keywords). Both keywords are easy/medium competition.

I will be over-optimizing for both keywords using only the keywords as my anchor text. Essentially, this can be viewed as what many believe to be a "Negative SEO" campaign against one of my own sites.

So far, these are my findings.

KW #1
>>>Sent 50,000 links to money site using exact keyword as anchor text
Rank Change: 55 to 36
KW #2
>>>Sent 100,000 links to money site using exact keyword as anchor text
Rank Change: 0 to 0


Feel free to post any questions.

 

[grantrux]

Great OP and case study.

Over the last few year I have Scrabeboxed money sites. Without having logged any findings I would definately say the it has become less and less effective in terms of ranking a money site and more likely to cause a rankings "freeze" or drop.

I have also work on a lot of site with a scabebox legacy that have not responded to more diverse link building as positively as similar site with no scrapebox history.

My gut feeling is that there are still some good links to be had using scrapebox they are just harder to find than ever.

 

[cloakndagger]

I still use scrapebox directly,no issues.It won't look at high comp keywords they require intricate backlinking techniques but it is useful for getting those links and feeder sites sites indexed as well as building links therefore pr to the feeder sites.It'll rank a low comp site all by itself if you know what you're doing.
Anyone who does seo and doesn't use scrapebox in some form be it blasting comments,searching for high pr pages,checking site pr etc is missing out big time.It can be used for whitehat(which doesn't really exist if you read googles rules on linkbuilding specifically all links should be made by other parties because your site is so good) to find high pr manual links,guest post opportunities etc.

 

[miren6]

Waiting to see what will happen...

 

[azguru]

Great OP and case study.

Over the last few year I have Scrabeboxed money sites. Without having logged any findings I would definately say the it has become less and less effective in terms of ranking a money site and more likely to cause a rankings "freeze" or drop.

I have also work on a lot of site with a scabebox legacy that have not responded to more diverse link building as positively as similar site with no scrapebox history.

My gut feeling is that there are still some good links to be had using scrapebox they are just harder to find than ever.

There are definitely good links to be found with scrapebox. However, I am just going to be doing huge AA blasts - what everyone fears pointing at their site.

I still use scrapebox directly,no issues.It won't look at high comp keywords they require intricate backlinking techniques but it is useful for getting those links and feeder sites sites indexed as well as building links therefore pr to the feeder sites.It'll rank a low comp site all by itself if you know what you're doing.
Anyone who does seo and doesn't use scrapebox in some form be it blasting comments,searching for high pr pages,checking site pr etc is missing out big time.It can be used for whitehat(which doesn't really exist if you read googles rules on linkbuilding specifically all links should be made by other parties because your site is so good) to find high pr manual links,guest post opportunities etc.

I think people are still heavily using Scrapebox for new reasons nowadays. It certainly is effective for so many different link building techniques. However, especially with talks of negative SEO, people are not pointing huge Scarpebox AA blasts towards their site.

THAT is what this case study is about.

 

[acotut]

You're doing it the wrong way.You should drip the link building for at last 2 weeks,and increase the number of backlinks daily.This way you can achive some great results,but spamming blog pages with 4k other comments won't help.

Anyway,it's pretty interesting to see the results,so keep us updated.

 

[azguru]

You're doing it the wrong way.You should drip the link building for at last 2 weeks,and increase the number of backlinks daily.This way you can achive some great results,but spamming blog pages with 4k other comments won't help.

Anyway,it's pretty interesting to see the results,so keep us updated.

Contrarily, what you're saying is EXACTLY what I am trying to do. I am not trying to create an SEO campaign here. With talks of negative SEO, I am trying to see if Scrapebox blasts to the money site are as bad as everyone in the SEO community believes they are.

The only way to know if your competitor can take you out with a simple SB blast is to see if they actually have a lasting negative effect. That is what I am testing.

 

[I-J-T]

You're doing it the wrong way.You should drip the link building for at last 2 weeks,and increase the number of backlinks daily.This way you can achive some great results,but spamming blog pages with 4k other comments won't help.

Anyway,it's pretty interesting to see the results,so keep us updated.

You've forgot that this is only a case study.

 

[HP.Bryce]

OP, I am glad you are looking into this. I am getting tired of the "Chicken Little", mind set. After the recent changes I do admit we must adjust and adapt to the new SERPS landscape but people are going off the deep end. We also cant forget the other 30% of SERPS users. I see nothing wrong with targeting yahoo/Bing and not giving a damn about Google. Despite lower traffic they tend to provide a higher conversion rate. So, it is all about the strategy and goals established for the campaign.

 

[Chicilikit]

I'm pretty sure that especially the part "exact keyword as anchor" is gonna send these sites to hell, but its good that someone is doing this so we can be absolutely sure.

 

[dario111cro]

Can you give us some more details about previous backlinks to your money site? If they are strong, then it's reasonable that you can get it sandboxed/penalized just like that. It would be great to test it on site with almost no backlinks.

 

[azguru]

I'm pretty sure that especially the part "exact keyword as anchor" is gonna send these sites to hell, but its good that someone is doing this so we can be absolutely sure.

We will see. I have done it before with positive effects, however, I am sure people have seen negative effects as well. Thus this case study

Can you give us some more details about previous backlinks to your money site? If they are strong, then it's reasonable that you can get it sandboxed/penalized just like that. It would be great to test it on site with almost no backlinks.

The site has a diverse set of backlinks, however, not many "powerful" backlinks were built to it. Just some basic senuke campaigns and stuff like that.

I may be testing this on a new site with 0 backlinks in the future, however, a prime focus of this case study is to see whether negative SEO is as simple as just sending an SB blast to a money site. An aged site will be a better determinant for this.

 

[azguru]

UPDATE:

Sending 100,000 links to my money site with both keywords as anchors

 

[chad362wiley]

Looks interesting!

 

[azguru]

RANKING UPDATE:

Previously ranking keyword: 36 to 59
New keyword: 0 to 0 (no change)

 

[theqavish]

I dont want to hear: from 59 to no where.
Keep going......

 

[azguru]

I dont want to hear: from 59 to no where.
Keep going......

Neither do I. But I don't use this site too much anymore. To me, it is more valuable to see the long term effects of a blast to the money site...

I will keep going

 

[TheBlueWizard]

Would be awesome to see various variables tested at the same time, namely link velocity. It's definitely resource intensive, but it could really put things to the test. For example:

Website 1: Blast 50,000 links with 1 anchor text, 1/30 days a month
Website 2: Blast 50,000 links with 1 anchor text, 30/30 days a month
Website 3: Blast 1,000 links with 1 anchor text, 30/30 days a month
Website 4: Blast 50,000 links with 100 anchor text, 30/30 days a month

and so forth. When the time is right, I plan on investing some time and money setting up my own experiments.

Either way, looking forward to seeing what happens with your site, thanks a lot for making it public.

 

[azguru]

Would be awesome to see various variables tested at the same time, namely link velocity. It's definitely resource intensive, but it could really put things to the test. For example:

Website 1: Blast 50,000 links with 1 anchor text, 1/30 days a month
Website 2: Blast 50,000 links with 1 anchor text, 30/30 days a month
Website 3: Blast 1,000 links with 1 anchor text, 30/30 days a month
Website 4: Blast 50,000 links with 100 anchor text, 30/30 days a month

and so forth. When the time is right, I plan on investing some time and money setting up my own experiments.

Either way, looking forward to seeing what happens with your site, thanks a lot for making it public.

Honestly, I don't think you need that extensive of a test to gauge the effects of a scrapebox blast to the money site. I will be doing about 100,000 links a day using 2 anchor texts.

 

[alexgsp]

I use scrapebox to my 2.0 only these days