Alex, how competitive is the niche you're in? Are you going after long tails or the more stronger ones?
I'm using NHS mainly for 3 sites: brand new, a penalized domain and an autoblog. They all target longtails mostly.
For the new site, the majority of keywords didn't even get into the top 100 after several weeks, only the 2 most uncompetitive keywords for that site would bounce from nowhere to page 7, to nowhere, page 7, nowhere etc.
For the penalized domain, I'm obviously not expecting anything, I just wanted to see if it would make any difference (got probably hit due to anchor text overoptimization so NHS would be great to de-optimize it). The funny thing is that I'm getting a few first page rankings on yahoo for even some medium+ keywords. Sadly, it did pretty much nothing for my traffic and still nothing in G and Bing (well, it's penalized after all)
The autoblog obviously only goes after longtails. I have no way to track the individual rankings since it's a couple thousand pages but traffic from that site is still the same as weeks before using NHS.
Not sure what else could cause a problem. I created a big variety of anchors for each site in NHS and on top of that set it to use 40% generics and 10% URL as anchor. My comments are mostly scraped and spun stuff via kontent machine (i.e. niche/keyword relevant articles to the site I'm promoting). Using all platforms, like you mentioned in your NHS case study thread (
thanks!). Search keywords are all very relevant but I notice that the pages my links are posted on are sometimes completely off topic and don't have remotely to do with my site. Maybe that's a factor.
Another factor could probably be an OBL setting of 750 and no PR filtering but I currently can't afford private proxies. I hope to recall correctly that Jim mentioned he's getting good results with similar settings (OBL of several hundreds and no PR filtering) so I didn't worry too much.
Anything else I might have missed?