[Live Case study] CTR Manipulation Vs Link Building

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Since @macdonjo3 launched his CTR manipulation service I've been waiting for a real review.

Not because I give a fuck or I'm excited about it or anything, I just want to see if it works.

Unfortunately the only reviews I've seen are from people I've never heard of or blog posts that Josh himself shares... I don't really totally trust anything he's done or shared or I've seen.

I'm not calling Josh untrustworthy or anything, but if I created a service like this I would be bias as fuck also.

So what are we going to do
Over the next few weeks we're going to see the short term and long term effects of CTR manipulation, we're also going to compare it to traditional link building and "normal" SEO.

On top of that we're going to have a control test, a web property that will have nothing done to it so we can confirm that the effects of both of these techniques are the reason for any success that we see.

How exactly am I going to do this
Building this out with being as fair as possible will not be as simple as you think.

Building 3 separate websites with 0 authority is time consuming, slow and there are too many variables. So we're going to be building 3 parasite pages on the same platform.

I will focus on the following:
  • Everything will be the same, a 1500-2000 word article on the keyword.
  • Use of partial match/LSI keywords will be used in the content.
  • Headers/titles/meta info will be the same
  • Keyword density will be the same
  • They will contain 3 OBL's to relevant authority sites
  • They will be left to age for 2 weeks before we being the CTR/link building
  • The keyword they all target will be the same
I can't see a fairer way to do this.

There will be 3 properties built:
  • A control that will have nothing done to it, no links, no CTR.
  • A property for CTR manipulation only
  • A property for link building only
The money spent on each strategy will be the same, $47 over a month.

This is the lowest SERPClix package

I will not be sharing URL's until the experiment is over and if possible I will be tracking analytics (to actually see the clicks provided) to see if Josh does anything stupid and provides extra clicks to make sure his service gets good results. I should only expect 107 clicks according to the SERPClix website.

The service I use will be a SEO package, I've not looked for one which matches the budget and requirements yet.

How are you measuring results
When I have built all the properties I will use SERPBook to share the results live, so you can check in and see the exact results you see whenever you want to see them. I will be editing this post and keeping it up to date over time.

What do you think, is this a fair test, what can be improved?

What do you think we will see?
 
I do agree CTR provides value and good signal. But i dont think its the factor that can overcome baklinks <Backbone>

Excited to see the result.

If its me, i'd short out some, non-targeted keywords, which virtually never targeted or can't be targeted.

Eg. pogmgmykwiw

will test 5 different domain while having all factor same but only one variable. i.e. 2 with high CTR, no backlinks and other 2 with Backlinks but no CTR.
And One with Both included.

This way i get my result sooner than anything.
 
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I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome of this.
 
You're on fire. Great idea and I'm interested to see if it works.

I take it that the sites have to rank at least somewhere for the keywords to begin with?
 
I had little experience with CTR. One of my CPA site was ranking in 3rd spot.
I modified the title like

old title [UPDATED 2017]

got more clicks, and my site went to the 1st spot.

This kinda works,
But first, we need to bring the site on 1st page (top 5) to make it work. For that we need backlinks.

IMO : You can't move 100spot to 1st post with just CTR
 
Let me save your $47, CTR manipulation has more or less no impact on rankings.
Google knows the top 3 results in a page gets the maximum CTR in almost all cases irrespective of how bad the title and meta t is and it will highly conflict with the bounce rate even if you succeed in manipulating it.
Also, won't you have to send the fake traffic for life to keep up with the CTR % ? even you see a rise in position and if CTR is a ranking factor the ranking will fall once the campaign stops.
I have tried it twice and could not see any significant change in the rankings.
TOTAL WASTE OF TIME
 
You probably know that but serp position bonus from positive CTR (and even bounce rate) will fade as these two will fade too. Its not long effect like power from a link.

But yes its important for moneysite (and maybe even for Tier 1). however if you have access to meta title and description then you can boost CTR like crazy. bounce rate is also easy to manipulate.

However i never considered having low CTR would be bad. Bounce rate was way more influential. The differencies i saw while locking download with time locker which made the session last on average 4 seconds was shockingly big change in serps.


But now i think of it, CTR is probably now as influential as bounce rate because if people click there then thats the right place for your website in SERPS - its related.
 
I tried it a few months back and saw no results whatsoever.
 
I tested it a few times using a couple services. I'm firmly in the it doesn't work camp, because it doesn't fucking work. Plus the guy that runs serpclix is a dick, one more reason not to waste your money.
 
Interested to see how this goes, been really interested in serpclix

also since seeing this article i have been wondering if this is correlation causation bias, maybe because the ctr is high more traffic is leading to more links so one doesent influence the other

fH9ML5u
 
I've tried most CTR services out there and never seen any results from them.

It will be nice to test it again
 
Tried various services, no effect at all. Better spend your bucks for some backlink power.
 
Following. Awesome case study. I also think there could be a fourth website with ctr + links.

Thank you for your work, stefishkin
 
If the site isn't at least in the top 10 CTR manipulation is useless.
 
I think time on site and actually emulating a human with a mouse - like hovering over things and clicking other links would help. But sure that G knows a paid for bot as opposed to a real search request!
 
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