Authority Site SEO Case Study

Hi BTB!

I just want to say you congratulations for this great journey, that is a great source of knowledge and motivation, and I know that in some months your project and this thread is gonna be huge!

Thanks to this thread I got the motivation to pick my authority site that i built some months ago and is currently 45 articles so far. I stopped adding content in July and since sunday I have added 5 new articles, between 500 and 900 words. I gave up, because I got bored and I dont want that to happen again.

Atm is receiving like 10 visits everyday and I just built like 9 links to this site, so I will be adding content daily and check for traffic increase before I start building links.

Thank you! Just waiting for new updates.

winosergio said:

Thanks to this thread I got the motivation

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You just made my day; that is one of the main reasons I am doing this... to motivate others to build, rank and bank off of a website.

Your post, as well as many others in this thread, keeps me motivated to continue to share my experiences with this particular venture.

THANKS!

Whoops - I forgot to add this as part of an update.

I added in an Adsense link unit to the site. It runs across the top, below the categories, and looks like if you click it it will take you to a new page on the site. I have that on most of my sites and it usually converts well and thought it made sense to add to this site also.

BTW, it is perfectly in line with Adsense TOS as I have been doing that for years.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Your post, as well as many others in this thread, keeps me motivated to continue to share my experiences with this particular venture.

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I'll send you a daily PM telling you how much it is motivating me it is if it means you will keep doing it...

MrBeastsOnToast said:

I'll send you a daily PM telling you how much it is motivating me it is if it means you will keep doing it.

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Dito .

Looking good BTB. Please keep the updates coming. It's definitely motivation to keep plugging along.

In an earlier post I made here I said my main difference with you is in the link pushing. I was referring to your placing of backlinks. I think you're a bit aggressive, but who am I to say so?

I don't know if you do the same, but I like to add a bit of "fluff" to the site as well. For instance, not all (or most) of my articles are obviously kw driven. Maybe half of them may end up appearing to be written by someone with no kw/seo knowledge at all. Let's say my site is on cars. My $ articles focus on selling various car parts. They are heavily worded (usually over 1k words), and tightly focused on pushing the sale. Then the fluff article comes in with me talking about my home town, maybe only 100 words or so, and a youtube video.In my feeble mind, this makes the site appear to be more natural, and not just a site built for seo. I'm not sure if I'm getting the point across very well, but it makes sense to me. Any thoughts on this?

Looking forward to your updates bud.

BTB, what kind of theme do you usually use? Forest?

Hi BTB, as mentioned before I am on a similar journey and just wanted to share a surprising result. After 60+ articles I decided to add a commerce option, selling this and that.... and rankings and traffic went through the roof. It is tactic I use for sniper sites, on one particular platform, so know it works. Maybe worth testing out in the future.

At the same time as building my authority site, I also built a splog in the same niche, and both sites are getting the same search traffic? As I built my authority site I also built up social accounts, mainly twitter and a fanpage, once I had a decent amount of content, I use nextscripts to post random articles, twice a day, which brought in an extra 100-200 visitors a day.

gtull2 said:

In an earlier post I made here I said my main difference with you is in the link pushing. I was referring to your placing of backlinks. I think you're a bit aggressive, but who am I to say so?

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I've done no linkpushing on this site (I'm trying to build this in a way that almost anyone can do it for under 100.00 or so) and I typically don't do a whole lot on my sites... I'll do some to a few of the inner pages but I'm no where near as aggressive as I was a few years back where I would hit each page with several linkpushes over time... maybe I'm moving more into some of your thought process in that respect.

I don't know if you do the same, but I like to add a bit of "fluff" to the site as well. For instance, not all (or most) of my articles are obviously kw driven. Maybe half of them may end up appearing to be written by someone with no kw/seo knowledge at all. Let's say my site is on cars. My $ articles focus on selling various car parts. They are heavily worded (usually over 1k words), and tightly focused on pushing the sale. Then the fluff article comes in with me talking about my home town, maybe only 100 words or so, and a youtube video.In my feeble mind, this makes the site appear to be more natural, and not just a site built for seo. I'm not sure if I'm getting the point across very well, but it makes sense to me. Any thoughts on this?

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That is a good point, I do a bunch of fluff but those are generally in the way of the conversational keyword articles. I usually don't push the keyword in there when I am writing those as to KW density. I think it is a good way to keep the site looking natural but I don't know that I could write anything in the 100 word range myself. For me that is a tad short but I have certainly put out some 250 - 300 word articles that are short tidbits of some conversational KWs that I am not so much looking to rank as I am to add a flavor to the site... good points you are making here.

johnnyd77 said:

BTB, what kind of theme do you usually use? Forest?

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I've never used any Theme Forest themes on anything I have ever built which sounds strange to me as they are very popular and typically pretty good. I've worked with them for others and I like them in general but not used one myself. I usually use a free theme and customize it a little to do what I want it to do. Some themes are out there saying, "Look at me, I'm a WP Theme!". I don't want the focus on the theme so I almost always do some changes to them.

Here is something I wrote a few months ago about the themes I prefer that may give a more complete picture of my thoughts - http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...23-best-theme-authority-site-my-thoughts.html

BTB -

I think you said earlier that you are using a silo structure like BTB. I am too. A few questions to see what best practices are:

1. Are you using parent/child pages in WP? (I am assuming it's a WP site)
2. If so, are your URLs like this: www.sitename.com/parent/child/?
3. If not how are you setting that up and what do your URLs look like?

I'm just curious, since I'm new to this authority site concept. How much do your other sites tend to make?

can you give me some example of strong backlinks, i also want to get some drop domain

ASithLord said:

1. Are you using parent/child pages in WP? (I am assuming it's a WP site)
2. If so, are your URLs like this: www.sitename.com/parent/child/?

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Sometimes I do that on sites and sometimes I do not... I do not use the same structure on each site. But in general my urls look like#2 there. There is value in the structure, without a doubt, but I have not seen historically that it is imperative that I keep things the exact same as to structure on my sites.

DFWi Reaper said:

I'm just curious, since I'm new to this authority site concept. How much do your other sites tend to make?

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On average they generate between $1,200.00/$1,500.00 - $2,300.00/$2,700.00 per month. There are variances due to the amount of traffic there is on the internet for the month (Holiday Months are slower for me due to my niches). One site alone is not anything to jump up and down about but string a bunch of them together and you can have a nice passive (well, semi-passive) income for a long time.

ooocoo said:

can you give me some example of strong backlinks, i also want to get some drop domain

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Strong backlinks are those from authority sites and parasite sites/pages.

I'm a big proponent of using parasite pages as backlinks, as I have done a lot of testing there, and they are a very good base for an overall white hat backlinking infrastructure. I'm not overly concerned about them doing do or no follow as much as I am of Google seeing a site that it respects linking into mine.

Hands down, every site that I have tested with parasite page links, against similar sites does better in the rankings and sees much less in terms of negative effect when Google does a major algorithm change.

Thanks again for this thread dude. It has really changed how i am approaching my journey. Its certainly made the large project seem much more manageable.

You mentioned you have started adding links to your 2.0's - could you give us a rough idea of how long you spread these 50 out over?

Have you started tiering any of them yet?

BassTrackerBoats said:

On average they generate between $1,200.00/$1,500.00 - $2,300.00/$2,700.00 per month. There are variances due to the amount of traffic there is on the internet for the month (Holiday Months are slower for me due to my niches). One site alone is not anything to jump up and down about but string a bunch of them together and you can have a nice passive (well, semi-passive) income for a long time.

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Wow, with a handful of sites like that a guy could make a nice income. Question for you BTB. On average what does your daily traffic numbers look like to those sites?

Just gotta thank you again for this thread, it has been really motivational, and it has opened my eyes to the possibilities. I'm just working on one site right now, but I'm hoping to get to the point where I have a handful of these sites making those numbers.

Could you please elaborate a bit on how you would power up the parasite pages; do you run mainly contextual campaigns (wiki, article, 2.0), or is it basically hitting them with the kitchen sink? Do you use any indexing service to speed up the process? I've ranked a lot of 2.0s just hitting them with all sorts, but I've also read about people claiming to be hit by t2 links.

Also, do you target strictly US/English-speaking markets, or have you done any sites in targeting other nations?

Thanks in advance.

BeerBrewer said:

Wow, with a handful of sites like that a guy could make a nice income. Question for you BTB. On average what does your daily traffic numbers look like to those sites?

Just gotta thank you again for this thread, it has been really motivational, and it has opened my eyes to the possibilities. I'm just working on one site right now, but I'm hoping to get to the point where I have a handful of these sites making those numbers.

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I usually do not look at traffic stats anymore. I check revenue and if that looks off I check my rankings. In fact, I do not remember the last time I looked at traffic stats on my money sites. You see guys post "rinse and repeat" a lot here... I've been doing that for about 7 or 8 years now with these kinds of sites. You can certainly do the same and probably better than I have as I rely on more effort than intelligence.

MrBeastsOnToast said:

You mentioned you have started adding links to your 2.0's - could you give us a rough idea of how long you spread these 50 out over?

Have you started tiering any of them yet?

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I'll have them all linking in by the end of January. Some have backlinks to them already and are not even linking in yet. Some have a handful of pages on them as well as I like to build MOST of them out. I try and do that sort of thing, as most others (as you know since you know me a bit), in a way that is inconsistent, random and chaotic.

eveneven said:

Could you please elaborate a bit on how you would power up the parasite pages; do you run mainly contextual campaigns (wiki, article, 2.0), or is it basically hitting them with the kitchen sink? Do you use any indexing service to speed up the process?

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I use the kitchen sink most of the time... not always but usually. l'm not looking to rank them as much as bolster them with a backlink infrastructure. I have no issue with the "rank parasites" idea but I don't see that as a long term "white hat" business model and I prefer the long term model. I know the BH short term processes and biz models, and will mix one in here and there, but I cut my teeth on WH and believe that is a much better business model for how I think.

Also, do you target strictly US/English-speaking markets, or have you done any sites in targeting other nations?

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My sites are all English; I took 3 years of French and Latin but that was 40 years ago and I probably know more Spanish from my days in Miami than I do those from my school days.

Hi BTB,

Just finished reading all 8 pages of this thread and I gotta say, it's one of the best journeys I've read here. I like that you didn't give up after a few days like many guys do

I subscribed to the thread and I'll follow it closely, since I'm thinking about starting an authority site myself, but I can't even think about adding this much content, don't have the writing skills, nor the money to outsource it, but hopefully I will post at least 100-200 articles (lol, for me this is authority site, for you it's something you build in a week or two )

I have a question though, before I start my own "authority" site. You mentioned you got an old domain with some nice backlinks. Do you think a fresh new domain would work as good, or some of your site's success is credited to the old domain with backlinks? Is it worth buying such a domain for a few hundred $ (I guess they aren't very cheap, if they have strong backlinks), or better use a new domain and spend the money on articles or other things?

Merry Christmas!

fotgs said:

I like that you didn't give up after a few days like many guys do

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This is actually about my 60th site like this so I know going in what it will take from me in terms of effort... lots of people don't complete tasks because they do not realize all that is involved... I'm fortunate that I've got the history behind me with them. Also, I know what they pay out long term (I have 35 or so sitting in my portfolio) and that is certainly some motivation.

don't have the writing skills

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Just from reading your post I see you have come skills there and you do not have to write, you can use a talk to text program like Dragon Naturally Speaking if you are not much of a writer... I think you are much better than you are giving yourself credit for though. We are all a little harder on ourselves in areas where we think we have deficiencies and your thinking your writing is not good appears to be an example of that normal human trait.

Do you think a fresh new domain would work as good, or some of your site's success is credited to the old domain with backlinks?

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I think that the domain part of the equation is not all that significant as part of the whole work. Yes, it helps, but the majority of my sites, ones that I currently have, those that I have given away to family members, and the few that I have sold, were all built with fresh domains and all do fairly well. Those revenue numbers are mentioned a few posts above.

Is it worth buying such a domain for a few hundred $ (I guess they aren't very cheap, if they have strong backlinks), or better use a new domain and spend the money on articles or other things?

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You can get a quality domain for 37.00 from accelerator_dd, as well as from others on this site at varying prices, with good backlinks... no need to spend hundreds. It's hard to say spend X amount on this and Y amount on that as we all have different budgets but I would value the content on the site over a domain with strong backlinks in place if I had to choose.

Thanks for your reply, BTB.

The problem is I'm not a native English speaker and my accent makes it a bit hard for apps to understand me. I downloaded a Virtual Assistant app for android and most of the times, that app didn't understand what I was asking it to do, lol.

Actually, I like to write, but on topics that I enjoy and I know a lot about, and when I wrote some articles for a few sites I started a few years ago, it would take me like 10-15 minutes to write a 500-word article, but it wasn't really HQ article, well documented, etc, it was a conversational-style article, like I would be "chatting" with the blog reader directly. That's a good style for some articles, but for an authority site that should focus on high quality, most of the articles require a lot of documentation, making sure the info provided is accurate.

I'll check accelerator_dd's offer to see if I can get a good domain, thanks for the advice. I'll be looking for a brandable domain though and also I would like to promote it very heavy on social media. Not sure if this helps for SEO, but for traffic and building brand awareness/authority, could work. I purchased about a month ago Buzz Bundle with a 70% discount I guess and I was thinking about using it, because it seems to be a great tool for SM promotion.

I guess I'll put all this on the New Year's Resolution list and make this authority site one of my main goals in 2015. I'm really tired of trying to rank 5-pages micro niche sites with spam links, hoping they will rank long enough to make some money out of it. I really need a long term project and an authority site fits great. I just have to see the niche (I have a few things I'm passionate about) and decide how broad it should be. I'll be using your keyword research technique, ty for that by the way.

One last thing. Not sure why people start these journeys, but I'm guessing the biggest reason is that when you share your journey with others and you get lots of "thanks", "subscribed", "keep up the good work", etc, these help you keep going. Is it true? I mean, sure, it takes some time to update the thread here, post screenshots, etc, but I guess the time invested to update the journey here gives you plenty of motivation to help you keep going with the project. Am I right?

fotgs said:

One last thing. Not sure why people start these journeys, but I'm guessing the biggest reason is that when you share your journey with others and you get lots of "thanks", "subscribed", "keep up the good work", etc, these help you keep going. Is it true? I mean, sure, it takes some time to update the thread here, post screenshots, etc, but I guess the time invested to update the journey here gives you plenty of motivation to help you keep going with the project. Am I right?

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I do not know about others and I am not one to generalize so I can't speak for others but I am doing this for a couple of reasons:

1) To share how one can make a very nice long term living in IM.
2) To get some of the BHW community seeing something aside from the short term revenue streams, which I believe are bad for the industry and bad for the person doing them, if that is all they are doing.
3) To motivate others by sharing success in this kind of long term venture.

I don't need others to slap me on the back to move forward; I don't think I ever had that need in my life. I do think it is an important part of my responsibilities to give to others in my little corner of the world. The few minutes I take out of my day to share is infinitesimal compared to the value it can have to those that read, learn, implement and earn from my little knowledge.