Authority Site SEO Case Study

Oh... BTB...you are slacking in your updates..what's going on? :D J/K, I know you're a big baller and this is like a side thing and you have business to take care...anyway, I have been following along with this journey and integrating it with the Amazon thread Nick Flame had, and the Silo Structure with Plug-ins thread.. together they've made an outstanding combination. I began in mid October or so. Things started out slowly, as you would think they would, but I kept hammering away with content and tweaking the site structure. Slowly started getting visitors and then, gradually, I was up over 100 UVs a day, then 200 UVs a day, 300 UVs a day, and now I am hitting over 600 UVs and day and have topped $400 in Amazon commissions so far this month already (Made $330 from them last month), and there are still like 10 days left in the month and am 7% commission level. Easily the most I've made through Amazon.

Anyway, just wanted to see if I could prod you into an update because your epic work ethic has inspired me to go as far as I have with this.

Very inspiring keadams. Thanks!!

I come here every day waiting for an update too. :)
 
Hey btb,

I wanted to ask you this privately but im sure there would be a lot of people that would also like to know about this and also i dont see any harm in asking.

How long do your Authority Sites "survive"?

I mean, in serps, traffic and earnings, how long do they stay around? And if they go down, do you try to revive them or simply start a new project?

Im planning and starting a new project that will have "Authority Sites' characteristics" as well as few other "Community-like" features so I was wondering how long a site of this caliber would stay around.

Paid traffic is never out of the question, but SEO is just a whole new beast regarding sustainability.
 
Hey btb,

I wanted to ask you this privately but im sure there would be a lot of people that would also like to know about this and also i dont see any harm in asking.

How long do your Authority Sites "survive"?

I mean, in serps, traffic and earnings, how long do they stay around? And if they go down, do you try to revive them or simply start a new project?

Im planning and starting a new project that will have "Authority Sites' characteristics" as well as few other "Community-like" features so I was wondering how long a site of this caliber would stay around.

Paid traffic is never out of the question, but SEO is just a whole new beast regarding sustainability.

Hundreds if not thousands of articles, gaining traffic depending on it's inner optimization, ranking for thousands of LTK naturally ! These types of websites only get bigger ! Like what can hit it !! It only gets more traffic, more views, better metrics over the time! These types have only one way to go, and it's UP
 
Hi Greg,More kudos to you and this thread. I started a site shortly after reading this thread. It is up and running and making money, though I have tweaked some of your methods. One question I have relates to monetization benchmarks. To whit, what is your target RPM for this site? What is your target RPM for authority sites in general? I realize that different monetizations methods will have different results, they will vary day to day and month and month (especially if the subject is seasonal), but what are you shooting for and what do you think is adequate when planning/building a site?

If I were to outsource this site entirely, and I have done that in the past, it would cost me between 10 and 12 grand... I'm comfortable with a return of 1K a month from any of them. That is not a high bar, I know, but the ROI is pretty strong if you just consider the math on the process.

I may have missed it reading a ton of pages, but what is your opinion on aged domains (checked for blacklisted/spammed/etc) vs a brand new domain?

I have my site up, its about 3 months old, with 111 articles, and started BLing the past 2 weeks using your service + my own mix. But only ranking for a few KW so far.
And getting 1-10 UVs a day.

Should I change something up? Or does it just take time with new domain/sites?

There are a couple of schools of thought on that; this particular site is an aged domain but that is really not necessary... it just gives you a little jump start. I usually buy a clean domain and start from there. They become aged domains with good backlinks after a while anyway and since I keep them for the long haul I don't really mind the wait for them to start getting traction ranking and earning.

Oh... BTB...you are slacking in your updates..what's going on? :D J/K, I know you're a big baller and this is like a side thing and you have business to take care...anyway, I have been following along with this journey and integrating it with the Amazon thread Nick Flame had, and the Silo Structure with Plug-ins thread.. together they've made an outstanding combination. I began in mid October or so. Things started out slowly, as you would think they would, but I kept hammering away with content and tweaking the site structure. Slowly started getting visitors and then, gradually, I was up over 100 UVs a day, then 200 UVs a day, 300 UVs a day, and now I am hitting over 600 UVs and day and have topped $400 in Amazon commissions so far this month already (Made $330 from them last month), and there are still like 10 days left in the month and am 7% commission level. Easily the most I've made through Amazon.

Anyway, just wanted to see if I could prod you into an update because your epic work ethic has inspired me to go as far as I have with this.

I like what you are doing there... stay the course and remain patient... patience in this particular aspect of Internet Marketing is very important... guys drop out way too soon to get the cash rolling in all too often.

Hey btb,

I wanted to ask you this privately but im sure there would be a lot of people that would also like to know about this and also i dont see any harm in asking.

How long do your Authority Sites "survive"?

I mean, in serps, traffic and earnings, how long do they stay around? And if they go down, do you try to revive them or simply start a new project?

Im planning and starting a new project that will have "Authority Sites' characteristics" as well as few other "Community-like" features so I was wondering how long a site of this caliber would stay around.

Paid traffic is never out of the question, but SEO is just a whole new beast regarding sustainability.

Pretty much forever. I do have to pop in and feed them vitamins here and there but they generally stay earners for as long as I own them. I have had several that died out and ended up getting almost no traffic but that was because I spammed the tar out of them with all kinds of backlinks... that was more of an experiment than anything but I wanted to see if a 300 page site with a bunch of content could handle tens of thousands of backlinks.

The couple I tried did not. Maybe if they were older or something but they ended up on the cutting room floor.

I've since deindexed them and pulled all the content and am slowly rebuilding them on new domains with the content that was in place... that is actually going on right now as I build this particular site.

To address the paid traffic; I'm not a genius there although I do some for a few different projects. I have not done any media buys for my larger sites though. I would think it would not hurt them at all and perhaps if I had an Adwords expert setting me up it would be of value.
 
I'm back again for more questions... :-) Sorry, but this thread is just too good.

This time about wordpress optimization. Do you use post tags at all? I have just noticed that google indexed all my tag pages and of course most of them contains only one article at the moment. This way it could look like massive duplicate content to google. I have heard that tags doesn't help to rank a post for a particular keyword anymore.

So the question is: do you use wordpress post tags? I am thinking of not using them at all, so my site will look a little cleanier in googles eyes. I mean we already have categories to organize our content.
 
I'm back again for more questions... :-) Sorry, but this thread is just too good.This time about wordpress optimization. Do you use post tags at all? I have just noticed that google indexed all my tag pages and of course most of them contains only one article at the moment. This way it could look like massive duplicate content to google. I have heard that tags doesn't help to rank a post for a particular keyword anymore. So the question is: do you use wordpress post tags? I am thinking of not using them at all, so my site will look a little cleanier in googles eyes. I mean we already have categories to organize our content.
there are alot of ways of blocking tags pages to get index i usually do it with robot.txt
The basic structure of your robots.txt to avoid duplicate content should be something like this

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /trackback/
 
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I'm back again for more questions... :-) Sorry, but this thread is just too good.

This time about wordpress optimization. Do you use post tags at all? I have just noticed that google indexed all my tag pages and of course most of them contains only one article at the moment. This way it could look like massive duplicate content to google. I have heard that tags doesn't help to rank a post for a particular keyword anymore.

So the question is: do you use wordpress post tags? I am thinking of not using them at all, so my site will look a little cleanier in googles eyes. I mean we already have categories to organize our content.

I usually, but not always, do use post tags... what I do for a tag is to use a synonym or a long tailed keyword variation of the targeted keyword in the article itself. I will put together a handful of tags that are longtailed KWs or synonyms that I know will be relevant to the majority of my content and use them.

To me that is just one more way to slip in a KW and garner some more attention from Google.

I've not experienced any negative issues doing that but I do not always add in tags anymore as I don't want to be seen as the guy that ALWAYS uses variants in his tags in Google's eyes either.
 
I'm back again for more questions... :-) Sorry, but this thread is just too good.

This time about wordpress optimization. Do you use post tags at all? I have just noticed that google indexed all my tag pages and of course most of them contains only one article at the moment. This way it could look like massive duplicate content to google. I have heard that tags doesn't help to rank a post for a particular keyword anymore.

So the question is: do you use wordpress post tags? I am thinking of not using them at all, so my site will look a little cleanier in googles eyes. I mean we already have categories to organize our content.


If you use All in one SEO or yoast you can choose noindex for tags to prevent duplicate content
 
If you use All in one SEO or yoast you can choose noindex for tags to prevent duplicate content

I do not no index them and have not had any issues with any of my sites over the years.
 
I do not no index them and have not had any issues with any of my sites over the years.

Hey basstrackerboats thanks for the wonderful case study :) I have few questions. I also have this problem when I search my site on google like


it shows something like mysite.com/tags/post-here

do you think it will decrease my visitors from search engine if I no index tags ?
 
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Don't want to bother you, but it seem like you missed my questions above...

Sorry, looks like I did miss the questions:

1. Do you care about keyword density for long tail keywords? Like I naturally use it in my article and keep it under 3%, so does it matter in long tail keywords with 5-8 words... will Google penalize my blog post for keyword stuffing?

I don't KW stuff, it is not natural and can hurt you should you get caught. If it flows naturally out or my mouth, or from my keyboard, I write it. I don't think I have looked at KW density real closely in a while but I know it is never anywhere near 3%. That would not be natural for me the way I communicate.

2. Do you use multiple long tail keywords in your article? I use 2-3 long tail keywords tin a 1000 word long post, with one main keyword that I target and 2 secondary keywords, is it okay?

Almost always... in fact, always. I'll have what I would consider the base KW and have a handful of long tails that would be a natural fit for the article and slip them in. To be honest, I'm not thinking about making sure that I get in the keyword extremely prominently, I do want it in there, and I want some long tail variations but I want the article to flow and be natural as that will keep the visitor on the site longer giving me more of a chance to sell them something. The content, if written naturally and on point, will rank for a lot of KWs and KW variations.

3. I heard that many people get there article ranked on the basis of their content only, is it true?

Beat me what they think works... I rarely pay attention to what others are saying or doing in this kind of thing. I know that a lot of related quality content, published on a regular basis, with a little kick here and there from backlinks will get noticed by google. Once noticed it can end up ranking and usually does with the approach I use.

4. Many long post on some authority site rank for some long tail keywords also. During my research I found out that an article with 3500+ words is ranked for main keyword with 10k+ monthly searches and for some long tail keywords also. So, my question is should I target that keyword?

I have a thread on BHW about how I do KW research, that will give you an idea about what I think is worth targeting.

Will it matter to Google in comparison to that 3500+ article? Should I build backlinks for that long tail keyword also to improve my chances?


It is pretty rare that I do not build backlinks to my pages after a while... in fact I build backlinks to images on my pages as well.

5. I only like to target long tail for now so that I can build some decent traffic. So, should I go with 500-2000 searches per month and write 100-200 articles? or should I target all kind of keywords?

Again, you want to read that thread I have on KW research as that will help you there as to my thinking on that.

Here's a link to that thread on KW research that I shared a bit back - http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...d-research-when-building-authority-sites.html
 
Sorry, looks like I did miss the questions:

1. Do you care about keyword density for long tail keywords? Like I naturally use it in my article and keep it under 3%, so does it matter in long tail keywords with 5-8 words... will Google penalize my blog post for keyword stuffing?

I don't KW stuff, it is not natural and can hurt you should you get caught. If it flows naturally out or my mouth, or from my keyboard, I write it. I don't think I have looked at KW density real closely in a while but I know it is never anywhere near 3%. That would not be natural for me the way I communicate.

2. Do you use multiple long tail keywords in your article? I use 2-3 long tail keywords tin a 1000 word long post, with one main keyword that I target and 2 secondary keywords, is it okay?

Almost always... in fact, always. I'll have what I would consider the base KW and have a handful of long tails that would be a natural fit for the article and slip them in. To be honest, I'm not thinking about making sure that I get in the keyword extremely prominently, I do want it in there, and I want some long tail variations but I want the article to flow and be natural as that will keep the visitor on the site longer giving me more of a chance to sell them something. The content, if written naturally and on point, will rank for a lot of KWs and KW variations.

3. I heard that many people get there article ranked on the basis of their content only, is it true?

Beat me what they think works... I rarely pay attention to what others are saying or doing in this kind of thing. I know that a lot of related quality content, published on a regular basis, with a little kick here and there from backlinks will get noticed by google. Once noticed it can end up ranking and usually does with the approach I use.

4. Many long post on some authority site rank for some long tail keywords also. During my research I found out that an article with 3500+ words is ranked for main keyword with 10k+ monthly searches and for some long tail keywords also. So, my question is should I target that keyword?

I have a thread on BHW about how I do KW research, that will give you an idea about what I think is worth targeting.

Will it matter to Google in comparison to that 3500+ article? Should I build backlinks for that long tail keyword also to improve my chances?


It is pretty rare that I do not build backlinks to my pages after a while... in fact I build backlinks to images on my pages as well.

5. I only like to target long tail for now so that I can build some decent traffic. So, should I go with 500-2000 searches per month and write 100-200 articles? or should I target all kind of keywords?

Again, you want to read that thread I have on KW research as that will help you there as to my thinking on that.

Here's a link to that thread on KW research that I shared a bit back - http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...d-research-when-building-authority-sites.html

Thank you very much BTB, it really helped.
:D
 
I'm significantly grateful that you started (and have continued) this thread, Greg.

For the last few months, it's been playing on my mind that I absolutely need to diversify my IM revenue streams, but I'd thus far failed to identify a course of action in order to do that.

After spending a couple of hours reading this thread today (indeed, I'm not sure how I missed it in the first place), I now know who my next hire is going to be, and what project they're going to be working on :)
 
This adsense revenue graph is from a different site that I am building while I build the current one in very much the same manner. It is monetized only by adsense but what I wanted to point out is the way the revenue is building as I add content. You can see the progression as the highs get higher and the lows get higher as well as the content is added. The period of time covered is just about a month.

The reason for the difference in the highs VS lows in revenue is that this site is geared towards business and it dies on the weekends as to traffic. But it is very clear that as the content is added the traffic increases and the revenue goes up.

That is the driving principle for the kinds of sites that I am sharing... the bigger you build them correctly, the more revenue you will be seeing as time moves forward and the correlation between content and revenue is right below in that image.

g1PsRTm
 
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