Anyone Having Positive Search Results this Summer?

Are you having positive search engine rankings?

Is your website ranking on the 1st page of Google?

Share with the community some advice on what you did to get those rankings! Sometimes it is frustrating reading through hundreds of posts of do this and do that black hat vs white hat Matt Cutts vs the World etc.

I will start by saying, I currently have 30-40 websites being tracked and trying to rank on the 1st page. Currently about 9-12 websites have great results (80% of keywords on 1st page) and a majority of the websites are stuck on Page 2 or 3.

Here is what I did,
Sent out PRweb press releases, created Youtube videos with links in description, manually created Web 2.0 properties (about 8 per month for each website), ordered linkbuilding services from a trusted provider, used SEnuke on a few websites (those are not ranking currently for anything, lost whatever rankings they had 1 -2 weeks after SEnuke campaigns), set up rel=authorship tags for Google + profiles, and used GSA for tier 2 links.

So far I have some results/websites on the 1st page but it seems like this past few months has been much harder to rank than past years.

I invite you to share with us your methods, strategies, techniques, etc. Even if you did something that got your website penalized be share so we know what to avoid

yes still ranking

Ok, what kind of linkbuilding or optimization is working for you?

I have been getting very good rankings for my websites by doing a few different things - and nothing overly complicated either.

First I will only go after KWs that aren't overly competitive, using EMD's and great content (e.g. 1000+ words, with embedded videos, real customer reviews, etc.). For me this is what works at the moment and is what is currently giving me the greatest return on my investment of time/money.

Then, I initially build backlinks fairly slowly, using only blog comments. I scrape a whole bunch of different blogs in my niche and post maybe 2 or 3 comments per day.

After a few weeks I start throwing in some harder hitting backlinks, from various backlinking services such as LinkItPro, or even some good private blog networks. Since I've already built up a base of generic anchor text links from relevant blogs, these high PR backlinks seem to float under the radar.

There seems to be lots of ways to rank a site these days (some people do it more aggressively than me). But the way that has been working for me is by doing it slowly initially without raising any red flags with Google and keeping my backlink profile diverse and heavy with generic, no-follow, blog comment links. So far, most of the websites I have used this strategy on are ranking in the top 3 spots in Google, and have maintained those rankings for several months now.