Journey to ranking my site

[RoadAvenger]

Hi. I?m starting this journey to hopefully get some traction on the first niche site I?ve built. The site is almost 4 months old. Here are the ?rankings? until now.

Well, ?rankings? is an exaggeration TBH, I?m absolutely nowhere.. The site has 20 or so pages with articles of 500-1500 words. Main competitor is the most awesome Shit-site I?ve seen: 5 words hyphened EMD, very little content with grammatical errors and bad links, but he?s ranking better and better every day and laughing all the way to the bank.

Others are standard 20-30 pages niche sites. This is why I choose the niche. Thought it was going to be easy. Apparently not.
For off-page SEO I?ve done the most sensible thing I could have done. Try and replicate the best links I could find from my competitors, which wasn?t as easy as it sounds, with links from pages with so many outbound links that almost made my browser crash. I?ve analyzed backlink profiles from different sites over and over.

For now I have 14 links. Somehow I managed to get 20TF/ 30CF on Majestic, almost as good as a PBN domain. Maybe I could sell PBN posts on this domain if it doesn?t rank?
As for visitors, G analytics is so polluted with referral spam and inaccuracies I don?t know why I bothered installing it. Impressions in webmaster tools: 100-200 a day, with little clicks. I don?t know what counts as an impression, but obviously no one is going to go to the 4 page to click on my site.
The keywords I?ve chosen seem low-medium competition at first, but what the hell do I know. Maybe they?re hard to rank.

Like the idiotic moron I am, once I saw this website giving some signs of life, I started 2 other sites:

• 1 niche site similar to this one, with 20 articles. (2 months old and going ABSOLUTELY nowhere for now)

• 1 site on an expired domain, with big possibilities. (I put 12 articles on low competition keywords, and they ?rank? decently, between 20-50 position, on buying keywords for items between 200-1000$ on amazon. I have hundreds of these low competition keywords, and if I?d put 100-150 articles on the site, they will probably rank top 20 only with on page SEO and the power of the domain. Then again, this is pure speculation and the ramblings of a madman. Right now, I don?t have the spline to work on something slow, tedious and long term, and in the end, it might not be as profitable as I speculate.

Everything is put on hold until I manage to get some traction on the site I?m tackling in this journey. I might be doing something terribly wrong, and I don?t want to ruin my other sites.
Bottom line: I don?t know if I?m a couple of steps away from achieving something, or I?m running full speed in the wrong direction. Either way, I hope this journey will keep me accountable.
There is also no monetary goal; it?s futile. I?ll worry about that when I start getting some decent rankings and traffic.

 

[hekke]

Will you be using a PBN or just doing web 2.0's, pdf submissions, etc? Is your niche scale-able like your third site? I would personally start building it out as fast as possible, it will require you less links (from my past experience).

Anyhow, best of luck with your journey!

Best,
hekke

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update #1
-Wrote 3 articles and scheduled them over the next week. This should put me at around 20 total articles for site #1

Will you be using a PBN or just doing web 2.0's, pdf submissions, etc? Is your niche scale-able like your third site? I would personally start building it out as fast as possible, it will require you less links (from my past experience).

Anyhow, best of luck with your journey!

Best,
hekke

I'll be using web 2.0 for now. I don't know how google makes the difference between root domains and subdomains, but I were to buy crappy PBN posts solely for the stats, i could probably do that with web 2.0. I mean this is a web 2.0 i built 2 weeks ago:

 

[Professor7]

good luck for your journey mate..

 

[LoftPower]

Wishing you the best of luck. Good luck.

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update#2
- Apparently i build all the links to the non www version of the site, while i changed it to www 1 month ago. I did all the 301 redirects in htcacces, but I checked them again.
- I also had some inconsistencies in internal linking, so I changed all the links to the www version. I also played around with interlinking, linking from the pages with the best stats to the ones that have the "easiest" keywords.

This is exactly what I was talking about when i said i need to get some traction on this site before i tackle the others. Now i don't know if the site doesn't rank because of my own fuck-ups, because it needs more links or because the keywords are too difficult.

On the bright site i'm ranked #11 on bing for a keyword that gets 1,5k monthly searches.:breakpc1:

 

[Dioni]

Good luck, I hope you reach your goal!

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update #3
-Rankings have improved slightly on some longtails, but still nothing to write home about.

Main kw is dancing between 60-100. A couple of other kws with 3000-4000 m/s have stabilized at 40-50.

-Site#3 gets 5-10 visitors a day, but with my luck it's probably crawlers and bots.(I use statcounter so i'm probably safe from referral spam). It needs work on the structure because i have some similar groups of kws and the wrong pages rank for the wrong kw.
-Site#2 is an absolutely messy clusterfuck that needs a lot of work to be saved. (For some reason i added categories in the urls, and now i have duplicate urls indexed, and althought the domain/category/page redirects to domain/page, Ggl hasn't dropped them yet from index. It was going relatively well before i did this idiotic move, and now i have easy longtails ranking #250. Apalling.

Recently, I've entered the most awful phase of procrastination: procrastination because i have no ideea what to do next and no ideea if it will work. Also, i'm fairly sure i bit off more than i could chew with site #1. Oh Well...

What i'll do next
I'll build 3-4 web 2.0s next week for site 1 and see where that takes me. I have no exact anchors for now, it's all brand name, url and generic anchors. Trying to play it safe but what the hell do I know. The web 2.0 I build 2 weeks ago seems to have pushed many kws from bumfuck nowhere to 4,5,6 page.

This can' be THAT hard. I've seen a small niche site being sold for 22k on flippa a couple of weeks ago. I won't give the poor guy a backlink from here but if you look for it you'll find the site.
Semrush shows it ranks for 1700+ keywords so it must have been atleast in part legit. His backlink profile showed appaling easy-to-get-in directories, blog comments, social bookmarks and a couple of web 2.0s. Maybe he used some super duper hidden PBN, maybe not.

 

[RoadAvenger]

 

[RuthSam]

Will be following your thread to see how it goes. What ranking website are you using ?

 

[fitnah]

Try to change your theme
I was changed my theme to a simple and fast one and almost a every keyword jump few place

And try high pr tumblr blogs
Add few spinned articles and add a handmade article that link to your site
Try make 10, so simple and work for me

You can add lovers pbn service for tier1 or tier2


Can you ranking 1 site first andand left others?
I can't focus if I were you


Will watching your thread
Good luck

 

[RoadAvenger]

Small update:
- Site#1 I linked from 2 web 2.0 to my best ranking pages (1 each). I had some pretty heavy internal anchors so i removed most of them. I also never bothered with social stuff, so i created twitter and facebook accounts for the website. Let's see what this does.
- Site#3 I change the theme i was using, and reverted the articles to their original state. Atleast wordpress is usefull for something.

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update#5

Something very weird happened to my sites and many of my competitors: Majestic TF dropped. Site#1 went from 20TF/30CF to 0TF/30CF. Not even 1 or 2, ZERO. I don't know how or why it happened, maybe Majestic updated something or I don't know.
Rankings:
Site#1

Traffic:~400 impressions and 4-5 clicks in WT. Absolutely disgusting.
I installed Bing WT and i'm getting a couple of visitors from there too. Semrush says my bing traffic is worth 110$. HAHAHA, yeah right.
How disheartening.

Site#2 has a couple of keywords in top 100.
Site#3 never got back.

I'm still trying to get around this brick wall i'm hitting.

 

[JuggernautJukey]

What competition level are those keywords? 5 months is a long time for none to be ranking high, unless of course the keywords are very difficult.

 

[Aatrox]

You are doing a good job so far. Keep at it and you'll rank soon enough. Good luck.

 

[wizard04]

YOu maybe don't see it but you are doing really good.
Also I want to ask you do you use any T2 links on your web 2.0's?

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update#6
Good News!


Something very eerie happened. I asked a member on this forum for advice and he told me 2 things: kw density too high and that my site wasn't ranking for the brand name at all. Well, 2 days later and without changing absolutely anything, the site started ranking as you see above. Main kw is actually on the second page.

Maybe it was pure coincidence and the web 2.0s i built started kicking in. Maybe the redirect from non-www to www took effect (that was a big fuck-up).
I'm trying to diggest the advice he gave me, maybe that will put me on the first page (or maybe i'll fuck everything up).

It felt like Schrodinger's cat; My site didn't exist until someone observed it. I'm getting really off-track here...

Site#2 needs attention and SEO

Site#3 needs a PROPER theme and structure (I'm still trying to wrap my head around silo's). This site is supposed to be my magnum opus, but i haven't even finished my first work yet.

YOu maybe don't see it but you are doing really good.
Also I want to ask you do you use any T2 links on your web 2.0's?

I did a manual tier 2; 5-10 half-decent links are enough to put the web 2.0 at 30PA and 15TF/CF (If you're into those kind of metrics). The links were Blog comments and directories mostly. I don't know if i'll ever get into GSA and other tools, i seem to be a little late to the spam game.

The key of this journey is reverse engineering. I found small niche sites (20-100 pages large, you'll recognize a niche site when you see one, as opposed to big authority sites) that were ranking and checked their backlinks. If it was a web 2.0, check their tier2. I mainly used ahrefs and majestic. Moz's crawlers seem to be VERY lazy; they don't find any new backlinks.

You can also use Openlinkprofiler and backlinkwatch. These last 2 ones have a VERY limited reach but between the 4 of them you can see the whole picture. I used the free version on all these tools.

Go down the rabbit hole and see how far it takes you. If a site is ranking, it's for a reason. Find out that reason and apply it to your own sites. No super duper SEO services and guaranteed rankings.

Be careful not to replicate bad links, because both sites will probably go under in the next update.

What competition level are those keywords? 5 months is a long time for none to be ranking high, unless of course the keywords are very difficult.

I'd say they're easy/medium competition. And yes you're absolutely right, this journey is long overdue. Let's hope i'll bring good news in a week or two.

 

[Joethemonkey101]

Update#6
Good News!
View attachment 66430

Something very eerie happened. I asked a member on this forum for advice and he told me 2 things: kw density too high and that my site wasn't ranking for the brand name at all. Well, 2 days later and without changing absolutely anything, the site started ranking as you see above. Main kw is actually on the second page.

Maybe it was pure coincidence and the web 2.0s i built started kicking in. Maybe the redirect from non-www to www took effect (that was a big fuck-up).
I'm trying to diggest the advice he gave me, maybe that will put me on the first page (or maybe i'll fuck everything up).

It felt like Schrodinger's cat; My site didn't exist until someone observed it. I'm getting really off-track here...

Site#2 needs attention and SEO

Site#3 needs a PROPER theme and structure (I'm still trying to wrap my head around silo's). This site is supposed to be my magnum opus, but i haven't even finished my first work yet.



I did a manual tier 2; 5-10 half-decent links are enough to put the web 2.0 at 30PA and 15TF/CF (If you're into those kind of metrics). The links were Blog comments and directories mostly. I don't know if i'll ever get into GSA and other tools, i seem to be a little late to the spam game.

The key of this journey is reverse engineering. I found small niche sites (20-100 pages large, you'll recognize a niche site when you see one, as opposed to big authority sites) that were ranking and checked their backlinks. If it was a web 2.0, check their tier2. I mainly used ahrefs and majestic. Moz's crawlers seem to be VERY lazy; they don't find any new backlinks.

You can also use Openlinkprofiler and backlinkwatch. These last 2 ones have a VERY limited reach but between the 4 of them you can see the whole picture. I used the free version on all these tools.

Go down the rabbit hole and see how far it takes you. If a site is ranking, it's for a reason. Find out that reason and apply it to your own sites. No super duper SEO services and guaranteed rankings.

Be careful not to replicate bad links, because both sites will probably go under in the next update.





I'd say they're easy/medium competition. And yes you're absolutely right, this journey is long overdue. Let's hope i'll bring good news in a week or two.

good luck bro! I'm going through almost the exact same thing with my site.

 

[RoadAvenger]

Competitor for site#1 got penalized. Great. I tried to replicate his best links and leave out the spam, but just great.
Main kw dropped again to the sixth page because why the hell not.

 

[RoadAvenger]

Update#7
Site#1 Rankings

I've been really inactive lately with work on these sites. Motivation is at an all time low.
This ain't working out at all. AT ALL.

You might see the "illusion of progress" with rankings on site#1, but being ranked 20 is the same as being ranked 2000. It gives you the same traffic. The whole site is allergic to the first page. The best ranked kw is a crappy longtail with 100 monthly searches in the middle of page 2. Main keyword was ranked #15 for 2 days, then it bounced back to #40. CTR from search engines is horrible: 400-550 impressions with 2-3 visits.

Site #2. Age seems to make it rise a little bit, but it's the same deal as with site #1. Being ranked at #25 is all fine and dandy but that gives you exactly ZERO traffic. Scrath that, anything outside the top 5 shouldn't be called "ranking"; maybe top 10 if you have thousands of keywords.

The only reason I haven't quit yet is because i haven't got anything better going on right now.