Building Resilient Money Sites

myopic1 said:

I'm replicating your Twitter program in Python, what's the situation with IP addresses and API access for your 20 accounts, are you having to rotate or don't they care? Plus if you have any pointers, your input would be much appreciated PM'd or here.

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I have 1 twitter account that is phone verified, that uses the twitter API. That's all you need ... you can scrape hundreds of thousands of followers, retweeters, etc. from many accounts with just one twitter API account.

My 20 accounts are just regular account that I use PHP to simulate a real user simply posting, they are not phone verified and cannot use the API. I use the API account to make decisions like who my sub-accounts need to follow (splitting up RT.com's 900k accounts between them, each one following unique accounts so they don't overlap).

My reason for this is I eventually want to be running 1k twitter accounts, and it's unrealistic to get API codes for them all, so I'm making it work smooth with regular accounts. Plus, for whatever reason twitter is delaying activation codes to the philippines by up to 24 hours, and often when I try to use them it says its the wrong number ... so actually getting 1k twitter accounts that are on the twitter API would be near impossible for me.

megler said:

3 questions:

1. Why do you build a completely new site in the subdirectory for your niche vs following the same theme as the news site?

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My main site has an anti-war theme that doesn't suit the sales portion of the site.

megler said:

2. How many niches are you comfortable loading up in various subdirectories? ( ie. /skiing /sextoys /gadgets... etc)

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Unlimited I suppose. I have several niches and they all rank at least somewhere. Keep in mind I don't have a ton of sales pages, simply because I'm chasing after huge keywords with very long content and getting tons of longtails while I get the big keywords moved up. Right now I've got around 10 subpages, compare this to 100ish main site articles ... I'm adding root-directory articles around 2 per day now, by the time its 200 pages I'll probably have 20 subpages. Each of my subpages is chasing after approximately 15k to 100k exact search keywords with tons of related terms mixed in.

Also ... it helps that when you're writing something you believe in, that is a topic that interests you, it's SO MUCH EASIER. Words just flow out and you can pop out 2000+ word articles like they're nothing.

megler said:

3. I assume that in the niche directories, you're still writing review articles etc - vs building a store without articles? I ask this because I always assumed that review articles were mainly to get longtail links and pick up rankings for buyer keywords, but if your news site is ranking the niche stuff for you is it still necessary?

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On pages where I'm selling something, its 100% sales copy. On pages that I'm testing out adsense worthy topics, its 100% raw information. Some sales copy pages are kind of like reviews, where I'm comparing 5 products ... but every single one has "add to cart" or "buy now" buttons so its like ecommerce pages too.

Wonderful, guess I need to go through all of your posts to learn lots of new stuff.

phpbuilt said:

Last year I spent over $10k on over 1k expired domains, on over 1k class-c hosted IP addresses. Wish I hadn't. Part of the reason I disappeared last year is because Google made me a newbie again, I decided I wanted to take a break and spend some time with my 3 boys. I had to figure it all out from scratch again. I have methods I'll be posting sometime soon ... but pretty much you can figure that if I've been laying low, Google spanked me pretty hard and I needed to regroup.

I'm not a big fan of using expired domains anymore. Even if someone could convince me they're doing fantastic with expired domain PBN's, and they avoided the huge shakedown of PBNs last year, that's not to say Google won't toast them on their next update.

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Just wondering about this. I primarily build small sites (1 to 10 pages with low-medium comp keywords) and use pbns and web 2.0s exclusively.

Do you feel pbn relevance -- ie; buying a site that was previously about fitness, and then linking to your diet pills site is more "safe" than buying an expired domain that was previously about, say, art galleries, and linking that to your diet pills site? Or do you feel that either way they are out to get smacked?

Because you say you are not using expired domains at all anymore. And if someone was to tell me that in a year majority of pbns are going to get hit -- relevant or not -- I would probably milk the irrelevancy factor that doesnt seem to matter at the moment. However, instead I am trying to find only pbns that are relevant to my niche sites, thinking I am safer, but which of course is eating into my profits by taking a lot longer to do.

good job mate. Thank you for sharing such a informative post. It is very useful thread. Something worth trying in it.

SupremeBoner said:

Just wondering about this. I primarily build small sites (1 to 10 pages with low-medium comp keywords) and use pbns and web 2.0s exclusively.

Do you feel pbn relevance -- ie; buying a site that was previously about fitness, and then linking to your diet pills site is more "safe" than buying an expired domain that was previously about, say, art galleries, and linking that to your diet pills site? Or do you feel that either way they are out to get smacked?

Because you say you are not using expired domains at all anymore. And if someone was to tell me that in a year majority of pbns are going to get hit -- relevant or not -- I would probably milk the irrelevancy factor that doesnt seem to matter at the moment. However, instead I am trying to find only pbns that are relevant to my niche sites, thinking I am safer, but which of course is eating into my profits by taking a lot longer to do.

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It's not cut and dry, and nobody really knows the answer. Like ... questions:

Are links to an expired domain discounted 100% of the time? Are they entirely discounted, or partially discounted? Are they discounted only if the topic changes? Are they re-counted if the domain goes a year or two with the original sources still linking? Does Google merely apply a more strict filter in validating the links ... i.e. if all other factors look good, perhaps the links are validated, but if other things look fishy (like it has a footprint of being a PBN site) then the old links aren't valid? Is it a matter of Google intending to always invalidate links to expired domains, but it doesn't always execute that plan very well? Will the links be valid if the website continues to pick up more valid links in the same niche? Are expired domains good for money sites, but not PBN sites?

I don't know the answers to all these questions, but I do know that a PBN made up of expired domains can go boom. Is the expired domains part of it a vital aspect, or would a regular network have been fried under the same conditions?

I'm not going to say PBN's don't work. I've seen them work really well. I've seen them not work well. I've seen them get deindexed. I believe I'm competent enough today to put together another PBN and make it work just fine ... but it would be an enormous amount of investment, work and risk.

I have domains set aside for a new PBN. If I had to do it over again:

I would use relevant expired domains -- those are harder to find than you might think. rayforgovernor2008.com isn't going to do much for you, even if it's DA60 and TF30.

In fact, I'm going to make an entire new post about this, one sec. Writing a new article, will post the link here: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/767279-quick-dirty-relevant-expired-domains-pbn.html

I'm not saying I'm not using expired domains anymore. I'm saying I can't recommend doing it because I was fried in the past, and I'm continuing to experiment with it on a smaller scale -- by being more diverse in hosting etc. I hope for great results, but its not something I'd promote as being effective at the moment. Also, knowing it's Google's intention to disable this method since 8+ years ago, I'm inclined to not want to put all my eggs in this basket.

@phpbuilt
What is more powerful in terms of ranking value based on your tests - putting the articles/keywords in a directory of your main domain or in a subdomain(eventually again in a directory(inner page)).For example:
1)domain.com/directory/article-title-with-your-keyword
2)sub.domain.com/article-title-with-your-keyword
or say
sub.domain.com/directory/article-title-with-your-keyword
------------
There is not that big of a difference between the last two(in the second option) and the main question is 1) or 2) ?

theonly1 said:

@phpbuilt
What is more powerful in terms of ranking value based on your tests - putting the articles/keywords in a directory of your main domain or in a subdomain(eventually again in a directory(inner page)).For example:
1)domain.com/directory/article-title-with-your-keyword
2)sub.domain.com/article-title-with-your-keyword
or say
sub.domain.com/directory/article-title-with-your-keyword
------------
There is not that big of a difference between the last two(in the second option) and the main question is 1) or 2) ?

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It's all the difference in the world. A subdirectory (domain.com/directory/) is considered a part of the main site. It assumes all the credibility of the main site. It also suffers from the same penalties as the main site, if the main site is penalized. For instance, hubpages.com got hit hard by Panda, lost most of their traffic: http://www.seobook.com/subdomains-google-panda The reason was that many of the pages on hubpages were considered spam, and they were all in directories like hubpages.com/author/. Hubpages was pulling their hair out, finally they ended up consulting directly with Google what to do. The answer, by moving all the authors to subdomains, each author could stand on their own ... if it is a good quality author, they'll rank again (and not be weighed down by the junky articles on hubpages), and the bad authors would just suffer on their own subdomain with no traffic. After implementing it, hubpages traffic soared.

So there's good uses for subdomains, and subdirectories. If you have a high quality domain that receives good links to the root domain, put the content in a subdirectory domain.com/subdirectory/. That way, it will rank better, based on the authority of the main domain.

If, however, you want to be separate from everything else (which is good on web2.0s ... you don't want your content to be mixed in with other people's spam), then the proper choice is a subdomain like subdomain.domain.com. This will be evaluated on its own, without influence of the potential junk on other subdomains. Google treats it almost like it is a different domain (at least it does with popular web2.0s like blogger, wordpress, tumblr, etc.)

So,in the end of the day if I have a strong site and create a sub domain on it,without further backlinking the subdomain directly very little authority will be passed to that subdomain from the main domain and in this case creating just a subdirectory domain.com/subdirectory is the fastest way to get started and rank faster?

theonly1 said:

So,in the end of the day if I have a strong site and create a sub domain on it,without further backlinking the subdomain directly very little authority will be passed to that subdomain from the main domain and in this case creating just a subdirectory domain.com/subdirectory is the fastest way to get started and rank faster?

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Yes, Google considers a subdomain to be a seperate site.

klawre1221 said:

Yes, Google considers a subdomain to be a seperate site.

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But not when your main site gets banned though, i have had a lot of site where the mainsite was legit and i had a view spam subs, the whole thing got banned and de-indexed.

@PHPBuilt, maybe google can separate links from phone verified accounts, maybe but still they can't figure out if the accounts are real or not no matter how much money they are worth if you can't even see it as a human being how do you expect a ALGO to figure that out, and also why would they want to? it means a huge investment in computer power for something that they don't have a high opinion of in the first place.

I am a 100% certain (according to my data and not just guessing) that social signals no matter how real your accounts are have no real impact on your rankings, if you have other data i would love to see it, i wish you well with your project, have a good one.

fc-dh said:

But not when your main site gets banned though, i have had a lot of site where the mainsite was legit and i had a view spam subs, the whole thing got banned and de-indexed.

@PHPBuilt, maybe google can separate links from phone verified accounts, maybe but still they can't figure out if the accounts are real or not no matter how much money they are worth if you can't even see it as a human being how do you expect a ALGO to figure that out, and also why would they want to? it means a huge investment in computer power for something that they don't have a high opinion of in the first place.

I am a 100% certain (according to my data and not just guessing) that social signals no matter how real your accounts are have no real impact on your rankings, if you have other data i would love to see it, i wish you well with your project, have a good one.

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Somehow this thread has transitioned from "having popular social accounts will get you REAL links from REAL people with REAL blogs", to a "hey phpbuilt, spamming socials doesn't work for tricking Google's algorithm for SEO" dumping place.

So you don't believe in socials? Don't use em. Did my original post try to convince you that you need to spam social signals to improve your SEO? Sorry you misread it, I said being active on socials will get you real links from the people behind those socials. I have zero experience spamming socials trying to rank better in SEO, so I couldn't tell anyone first-hand whether spamming socials strictly for SEO purposes makes any difference.

OP, like someone said earlier, i guess you are trying to own an authority site that can be used as a parasite.
A quick question about PBNs,
* I read you new thread , Do u build PBNs with only deleted domains? Have u tried building with expiring domains won via auction. And which do u think is more powerful and less detectable.
* With the explanation you gave earlier on this thread about Google working to discredit backlinks to expired domains/pbn, do you think that also applys to PBNs built from expiring domains and not deleted domains.

workahollic2 said:

OP, like someone said earlier, i guess you are trying to own an authority site that can be used as a parasite.
A quick question about PBNs,
* I read you new thread , Do u build PBNs with only deleted domains? Have u tried building with expiring domains won via auction. And which do u think is more powerful and less detectable.

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Right now, I'm building PBNs with free blogs. I have a few cherry domains set aside for my next blog network, but they're not having outgoing links yet while I age them a bit. I consider my last blog network toast, and I let them all expire.

workahollic2 said:

* With the explanation you gave earlier on this thread about Google working to discredit backlinks to expired domains/pbn, do you think that also applys to PBNs built from expiring domains and not deleted domains.

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In a video, Matt Cutts said "expired domains, or effectively expired domains", which I assume he means domains bought at auction. When Godaddy, for instance, is putting a domain up for auction, there's a telltale page that goes up saying the page can be bought at auction, and the same for most auction places. The only thing I can think of that would be 100% clean would be buying a domain that never had its content taken down.

If you're building a PBN now, I'd highly recommend building each one with a different hosting, different DNS, the hosting shouldn't be promoted-as SEO hosting, the outgoing link graphs of each PBN site should be diverse (link out to many authority sites as well as your own money site) ... and as you link out to different authority sites, don't link to the same set from your entire blog network -- keep the outgoing link destinations diverse for each blog. If you have 20 domains, make 8 from Godaddy, 6 from Namecheap, etc. etc. mix up your registrants. Use fake names and addresses as the whois, each with different email (no private whois). Lastly, don't go promoting your PBN with links from the exact same link sellers who are mixing links to your network with links to other people's networks (if those other networks are found, it'll lead back to you).

I had to skim over most of this thread before, just wondering if I can ask some more questions on this web2.0 stuff as it interests me.

You are taking portions of articles from relevant news sites and spinning them. Additionally, you are taking 1 to 2 portions from that article and blockquoting it. You then put these on all on your tier 1's with link to the original source. Tier 2's and 3's do the same but link to the web 2.0 source up the tier pyramid. They also blockquote portions of the spun article up the tier. In all scenarios the articles purpose is to seemingly respond to the source.

1. So I guess I am wondering: How are you getting so many real RT's and assumably real engagement to the Tier 1's? I know you are forcing it with your twitter accounts but you said you are getting natural links and engagement -- even using disqus. The fact it is all spun and automated makes it hard to imagine that it's getting natural links and good engagement -- much less that spun content in this fashion is even sensical to begin with. I mean even the blockquotes wouldn't mesh well with the content given that its positioning in each article would be automated. Maybe I am overthinking it or missing something.

2. Are the blockquotes also spun?

3.This feels like a dumb question but if everything is being pulled from the original sources and spun, how exactly is the article coming off as a response to the source? Rather, it would just be saying the exact same thing...only spun? Would it not? Maybe I missed the part where you said you manually write replies for each article as well and then spin that?

4. How are you actually powering up these web 2.0s so its not a bunch of PA 0 blogs all pointing at each other? I know the tier 1's are getting twitter links but is that really enough? And what about the tier 2's and 3's?

5. On your subdirectories are you building out entire branded domain secondary sites, or subdirectory emd's to target single pages? Really, I guess either would work but just wondered what you were doing.

Thanks

Amazing info ........

Great thread so interesting to read - think twice before starting a PBN as the investment needed is big time.

fulgensaurio said:

Great thread so interesting to read - think twice before starting a PBN as the investment needed is big time.

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Definitely not a quick win. I'm in the beginnings of a slow, varied and time-invested network, will be sure to post a thread soon!