Authority Site SEO Case Study

I just ordered the small package of Howard_Hughes and BTB's Parasite Pyramid JV in the market.

I'm going to see how they do it and then create some of my own based off that and then hit that with Linklure. I'll probably still order some more from the HH/BTB pyramid service as my time is limited.

I trust most link sellers on here as about as far as I would an Afghanistan Gem Merchant (anyone that's been with the US Military/NATO will get that reference), but I think Greg is the real deal and I tend to favor his recommendations/JV partners much more than average guy in the market place (where I've been burned before).

brchcar1445 said:

parasite pages make bad backlinks... never link a parasite to a money page.

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We have actually tested it on a bunch of different sites and I wrote about the benefits of using those kinds of sites as backlinks on my blog back in August. You may not get an immediate BOOM in the rankings from them, and the link juice is sometimes no follow, but they pass authority to your site and if you are building a large site there is value and it is an important part of one's backlink infrastructure.

I've never tried it on small sites but i don't build small sites nor do I "preach" for others to build them. Nothing wrong with that but it is not my business model in general and my testing on small sites has given me different results as to backlinking processes and infrastructures.

Which parasite type pages do you feel would be most benificial? I don't want to use the wrong one and hurt my site.

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I use FB, Twitter, About.me, moonfruit, soup.io, weebly, tumblr, wordpress, yahoo answers, etc... it is rare that a site, whether denoted as a parasite/authority by some of us or not, is "bad" for your backlink infrastructure. There are some, of course, but hey usually involve porn, pills, gambling and such.

I could get into the nitty gritty about link types here but that is really not what I am trying to share here so I'll leave that for another day.

On this particular project I have an about.me (http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ne-optimization-case-study-2.html#post7209832) as one of the first backlinks to the site and that is considered a parasite site by many.

And kind of the same question with Press Release sites. Which free sites would you suggest for most effective press releases?

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mohsinmajestic posted a nice list of free press releases. I'm sure that the majority of them are fine although I have not looked and I'd be looking at that list and seeing which ones made sense to you.

A lot of what I do is what makes sense to me when I am trying to see what works... then I spend time, energy and money to test it before implementing it. I also employ others to do testing for me as I don't always have the time nor the patience but, in this industry, if you don't test hard you could fail hard.

Just read through the keyword research link that you posted at the start of this thread - that got me hooked and I recommend everyone read that as its a good introduction to what makes an authority site different (I think).

Read through this entire thread as well.

Most of the questions I had have already been asked and answered, but I have a few more:

1.How do you organise such a big site - do you make posts or pages, do you organise them into sub categories or what? How much of the content can be seen as links from the homepage?

2.how long do you expect it to be until it starts generating income, and how long before you break even (assuming you could spend quite a lot up front on content etc)?

3.do you "tick off" each keyword from your list as you target it with a page/post?

4.Do you track ranking for all keywords or just for the original seed keywords?

5.I know it's an authority site, but do they ever get hit with penalties? Do you consider that a big risk?

1.How do you organise such a big site - do you make posts or pages, do you organise them into sub categories or what? How much of the content can be seen as links from the homepage?

Most of the content is in post format but I do have some pages there and those are usually set up in a menu on the top of the site with some of them having parent pages. I keep my categories to a minimum and have them in a widget on the side with less than 10 recent articles on the side in a widget as well. I try and keep it clean and make it so that Joe Visitor does not have to go through a lot of different pages to get to any particular one.

2.how long do you expect it to be until it starts generating income, and how long before you break even (assuming you could spend quite a lot up front on content etc)?

I'll monetize this site in a few weeks to catch the Christmas shoppers as I am monetizing it with my eBay partner acct. I would expect that if I outsourced all the content it would be in the 8 - 10K range and would get that back inside of a year.

3.do you "tick off" each keyword from your list as you target it with a page/post?

I do tick them off my spread sheet but I am almost always adding on when building a site so the list does not usually get smaller until I am well into it.

4.Do you track ranking for all keywords or just for the original seed keywords?

I track the first hundred or so but after a while I don't even bother as I just look at traffic and revenue. I know I'll rank for lots and lots of KWs and if I am making money I don't spend the time doing all the tracking. That is probably not getting the best mileage for the site as I believe in lots of analysis so perhaps I should be more diligent there.

5.I know it's an authority site, but do they ever get hit with penalties? Do you consider that a big risk?

Only when I do crazy stuff... I recently took down and de-inexed a site that had 400 articles on it as I used it to test something out and the test failed but I don't have penalty issues as my stuff is very WH.

^^Thanks for the comprehensive replies.

One more thing: Does it matter how broad the niche is? I am thinking of picking quite a broad niche that I know quite a lot about, then dividing it up into sub niches and just building a massive keyword list based on that.

Ill still be targeting long tail keywords for each individual post, but my site will have a wide range of topics in a broad niche.

Is that a good or bad idea?

You have the idea that I like... broad with sub niches. In fact the broader it is the bigger the site can be and the more KWs you can target.

This particular site I am working on is not as broad as I usually go with so at some point it will be more of a static than dynamic site.

davids355 said:

^^Thanks for the comprehensive replies.

One more thing: Does it matter how broad the niche is? I am thinking of picking quite a broad niche that I know quite a lot about, then dividing it up into sub niches and just building a massive keyword list based on that.

Ill still be targeting long tail keywords for each individual post, but my site will have a wide range of topics in a broad niche.

Is that a good or bad idea?

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^^Thanks for confirming that, I know Im not making an initial mistake doing that then.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Yesterday was a bit of a lazy day as far as this project went; I set things up to get a few links to the soup.io and about.me pages I built. Ended up with just a little over 33K links to them as of about an hour ago and stopped the process as that is plenty.

I don't think I'll do anything but add another article to the site today as it is Sunday; if I get a little crazy I'll add a tier 2 to those 33K.

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Is there anything you do special on your about.me page? I only have one website and its the only website I plan on creating. I pretty much just made my about.me page.....about me lol. Do you place any special content with your kewords, how many times to you link back to your page, is building backlinks to the about.me page necessary? Sorry for all the questions

Wow great plan and a lot of action Definitely subscribed!

I stumbled across this post at the right time as I am thinking of starting a site in a completely new (to me) niche. Now my question is, would you do such thing for a smaller niche?
Let's take "muscle cars" as example. There is a big enough demand yet it's still "small".

First I thought I would run out of content very fast. But then I thought I could write:
- headlights for 1980 Mustangs
- tires for 1970 Chevrolet
- door handles for 1986 cutlass

... I mean the niche can be huge if I start going through every make, model, year of the car and talking about every single part...

1. Does that make sense? Do you think I can use your model for such site?
2. Can this be done without a PBN?
Thanks!

p.s. If someone wants to "steal" the muscle car niche idea - run with it. It's not my niche

When doing on page optimization do you add your own meta descriptions for your articles or just leave them empty?

Good questions guys as I know I am leaving things out that some folks want to know.

jtluongo said:

Is there anything you do special on your about.me page? I only have one website and its the only website I plan on creating. I pretty much just made my about.me page.....about me lol. Do you place any special content with your kewords, how many times to you link back to your page, is building backlinks to the about.me page necessary? Sorry for all the questions

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The about me page is really an after thought page and just there for Google; nobody has any interest in who I am, and rightfully so as I live an extremely unremarkable life, and it does not give any real value to the site as to making money from the KWs I am targeting.

Argent said:

Let's take "muscle cars" as example. There is a big enough demand yet it's still "small".

First I thought I would run out of content very fast. But then I thought I could write:
- headlights for 1980 Mustangs
- tires for 1970 Chevrolet
- door handles for 1986 cutlass

... I mean the niche can be huge if I start going through every make, model, year of the car and talking about every single part...

1. Does that make sense? Do you think I can use your model for such site?
2. Can this be done without a PBN?
Thanks!

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That kind of idea could turn into a real nice site after a year or two... you have the thought process that I like to use when building a site.

I don't often use a PBN with these kinds of sites so I doubt you would either.

Cebula said:

When doing on page optimization do you add your own meta descriptions for your articles or just leave them empty?

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I add my own; all those little things may not make a huge difference on their own but over the long haul as a group, they matter so I take the extra time to do that.

I wanted to do something similar related to gaming but there are many big authority sites competing for those keywords. I think the solution is quality and to be able to build and audience with videos and other content.

LordofTempest said:

I wanted to do something similar related to gaming but there are many big authority sites competing for those keywords. I think the solution is quality and to be able to build and audience with videos and other content.

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Competition has never been an issue for me when I build a site... I'm probably leaving money on the table because of that but I believe that I can rank just like the "other guys" and am a little arrogant in my thinking as I think that I am their competition, they are not mine.

Seems to have worked out for me over the past 7 - 8 years or so.

Loving this thread BTB. I have been following along and have built a site with 51 posts so far, but have also used GTS translation plugin which makes 72 more pages in different languages. These posts are pulling in some nice longtailed traffic but do you think it could harm SEO in the future?

I have just started another authority site, but am using a 20 page silo, each page will be 4-8K words of content, with wiki style tables of content, should be fun seeing what it does.

Do you only target keywords that are "high" competition in Google keyword tool or are you also going for the medium/low competition ones?

dandan594594 said:

Loving this thread BTB. I have been following along and have built a site with 51 posts so far, but have also used GTS translation plugin which makes 72 more pages in different languages. These posts are pulling in some nice longtailed traffic but do you think it could harm SEO in the future?

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I don't know enough about using that plugin to create those additional pages as to being good or bad or even neutral. had considered trying that on one of my sites about a year or so ago and heard a bunch of negative comments but again, first hand, I'm pretty clueless.

One of these days I'll have to put that on one of my sites that is ranking well and see if it helps, hurts or does nothing as to Goofle and his silly little ways.

Cebula said:

Do you only target keywords that are "high" competition in Google keyword tool or are you also going for the medium/low competition ones?

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Because I go after so many different KWs, I end up targeting super easy ones to super hard ones and all in between. I really don't look at the competition very much when choosing KWs... if I was building smaller sites, say under 350 - 400 pages or so, that may be a consideration though.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Because I go after so many different KWs, I end up targeting super easy ones to super hard ones and all in between. I really don't look at the competition very much when choosing KWs... if I was building smaller sites, say under 350 - 400 pages or so, that may be a consideration though.

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I ment high in competition as high in many advertisers competing for the keyword. Do you only target the keywords where many competitors target or do you also go for the medium/low ones? (I mean the competition tab in Google keyword planner).

Cebula said:

I ment high in competition as high in many advertisers competing for the keyword. Do you only target the keywords where many competitors target or do you also go for the medium/low ones? (I mean the competition tab in Google keyword planner).

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I typically do not pay much attention to that column any longer. I no longer look at that as part of how I do any keyword research and I don't always monetize with adsense (this site is going to be mainly eBay partner revenue) so it is not a metric that has much value to me in terms of choosing what I am going to attack.

BassTrackerBoats said:

60 Articles up total and it is time to start doing a little off site (I know you're happy to see that, Dead Joe). My approach for this site is have built 50 Web 2.0s with NO BACKLNKS. I'll have them done for me as the content does not have to be website quality content, and let them sit while I continue my efforts.

At some point I will start to add backlinks into the articles on them but not right off as I don't think that is always the best strategy and for this site it is certainly not.

I'll continue to add content on site, of course, as those are being made.

Here is a nice pic from Serpbuddy with this AM:

There are actually 33 KWs showing up in the tracking now but these are the only ones on the first and second pages at this point.

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The majority of those Web 20s are indexed and this is my next step.

We are now adding some backlinks from those Web 2.0s using some anchor text and some naked urls. I'll be linking to inner pages only and using long tails for the anchor text and NOT the exact anchor text I am aiming for the site.

While those Web 2.0s are being changed I'll also be adding some other pages to each of them so they are not just one page sites... this will not be an overnight deal but should take about 2 weeks.

Ranking 9 KWs on page 1 now too which is pretty nice and getting some traffic as well.

Hi, BTB
Been following your journey since i'm trying to build an authority site myself. I'm thinking of doing some niche relevant do follow/nofollow blog comments to some of my articles daily, do you think this would this be a good idea?