[CASE STUDY] - EMD + Light Spamming still working?

16-2-2013 to 19-2-2013
Traffic: 61 visits (15.25/day)
Backlinks: 307 (lost a few bookmark sites)
Conversion (to client site): 5 (1.2/day)
Bounce rate: 46%


and the big news... Rank: #1




Now the thing is how can my traffic still be so low..? G keyword tool says 1300 exact local monthly searches, is it possible that its just a load of BS? I really don't get it.. I'm going to tweak my page title and snippets to see if that will make me stand out more but I was expecting at least 200-300 visits a day... but this won't be part of the case study.


CONCLUSION


EMDs still rank like crazy (I think you just need good content, not even that many backlinks).

Congratulations, great case study!

Remember, being number one still only gets you 30%-50% of the traffic for that keyword due to the adverts above you, so I guess 15 local visits per day is about right.

Your case study is perfect because many affiliates are still afraid of EMDs The problem is not with the EMDs but with the content they used to add to these domains and the backlinks they used to create. To ban some domains just because they are EMDs would have no-sense.

To BAN them because they hace poor and over-optimized content, well...this was a great idea

All the best

Congrats on case study. The numbers seem right to me. Why were you expecting 200/300 visits per day? That would make 6000 visits per months which is 4x the Exact Searches.

GiorgioB said:

16-2-2013 to 19-2-2013
Traffic: 61 visits (15.25/day)
Backlinks: 307 (lost a few bookmark sites)
Conversion (to client site): 5 (1.2/day)
Bounce rate: 46%


and the big news... Rank: #1




Now the thing is how can my traffic still be so low..? G keyword tool says 1300 exact local monthly searches, is it possible that its just a load of BS? I really don't get it.. I'm going to tweak my page title and snippets to see if that will make me stand out more but I was expecting at least 200-300 visits a day... but this won't be part of the case study.


CONCLUSION


EMDs still rank like crazy (I think you just need good content, not even that many backlinks).

Click to expand...

GiorgioB said:

16-2-2013 to 19-2-2013
Traffic: 61 visits (15.25/day)
Backlinks: 307 (lost a few bookmark sites)
Conversion (to client site): 5 (1.2/day)
Bounce rate: 46%


and the big news... Rank: #1




Now the thing is how can my traffic still be so low..? G keyword tool says 1300 exact local monthly searches, is it possible that its just a load of BS? I really don't get it.. I'm going to tweak my page title and snippets to see if that will make me stand out more but I was expecting at least 200-300 visits a day... but this won't be part of the case study.


CONCLUSION


EMDs still rank like crazy (I think you just need good content, not even that many backlinks).

Click to expand...

1300 / 30 = 44

44 - 50% = 22

GiorgioB said:

Dear fellow blackhatters

Hypothesis 1: Do EMDs still carry any value?
Hypothesis 2: Does spamming still help to rank a website if pointing directly to the site?

Click to expand...

EMD will rank for the exact keyword with little spamming. It gets a little difficult if you are going for a related keyword.

i have an EMD i think i'll follow your case study but mine is in french so is there any service here that gives backlinks for non english sites (cheap ones , its just the start) or is it ok to put the french keyword in the english text ??

gorang said:

1300 / 30 = 44

44 - 50% = 22

Click to expand...

Hmm, that's not quite accurate.

1300 local searches and No1 organic spot gets around 40% (maybe more based on the call to action signals in the meta description and title) so, he'll be getting around 520/month -> 17.3 visits/day which is similar with the 15 visits/day he registered till now.

To the OP: You could try improving your call to action signals in the meta tags. Add texts like "If you're looking for "whatever" you will surely find it here" or "click here to learn more about "whatever". Just test and be creative, use psychology phrases.

Going to follow this one!

thnx for the case study mate

Nice case study and congrats for your success. Yeah EMD still have some juice........

UrsuAke said:

Hmm, that's not quite accurate.

1300 local searches and No1 organic spot gets around 40% (maybe more based on the call to action signals in the meta description and title) so, he'll be getting around 520/month -> 17.3 visits/day which is similar with the 15 visits/day he registered till now.

To the OP: You could try improving your call to action signals in the meta tags. Add texts like "If you're looking for "whatever" you will surely find it here" or "click here to learn more about "whatever". Just test and be creative, use psychology phrases.

Click to expand...

thanks for all the feedback guys..

What I was thinking for more traffic is indeed tweaking the page titles and snippets to see if I can attractr more clicks..

I'm also going to try to drive some referral traffic thru blog and forum commenting (not spam) close to my niche.

I've also got 1-2 secret ideas up my sleeve, I'm sure there's much more potential for traffic in this niche, but it'll take a bit of out of the box thinking.. !!

Good to see that EMD's still have some juice. I may have to try out some of my own ranking case studies when I try to get back into MNS.

you have same problem with low traffic as me..i also have 1000 exacts locals, and 1300 exacts worldwide, and i got no1 spot a few days ago (you can check my thread..or please get into contact, so we can compare site, you said you dont want to be PMed )
how much money did you invest into link building ? or you just use your own tools ?

GiorgioB said:

16-2-2013 to 19-2-2013
Traffic: 61 visits (15.25/day)
Backlinks: 307 (lost a few bookmark sites)
Conversion (to client site): 5 (1.2/day)
Bounce rate: 46%


and the big news... Rank: #1




Now the thing is how can my traffic still be so low..? G keyword tool says 1300 exact local monthly searches, is it possible that its just a load of BS? I really don't get it.. I'm going to tweak my page title and snippets to see if that will make me stand out more but I was expecting at least 200-300 visits a day... but this won't be part of the case study.


CONCLUSION


EMDs still rank like crazy (I think you just need good content, not even that many backlinks).

Click to expand...

Nice share dude. EMDs still alive we just need good quality content.

iknowjack said:

you have same problem with low traffic as me..i also have 1000 exacts locals, and 1300 exacts worldwide, and i got no1 spot a few days ago (you can check my thread..or please get into contact, so we can compare site, you said you dont want to be PMed )
how much money did you invest into link building ? or you just use your own tools ?

Click to expand...

Sorry, this is for a client's site, so can't disclose URL or niche. Congrats on getting #1 sweet spot!

Tbh I bought one forum profile gig for $5 which you can see in the OP for this, did a very small blast of social bookmarks and a couple of scrapebox comments, all with my tools. I thought it would be much harder and thought we would be able to study different link building techniques but that'll have to be for a more challenging case study in the future.

anishrip23 said:

Nice share dude. EMDs still alive we just need good quality content.

Click to expand...

Yeeeep, that's also what I think.


Update on the case study


Slapped adsense on there about a week ago, got about 4-5 clicks.. not really worth it but well, its my first experience in adsense so its interesting just for the sake of it.. averaging $0.1 / day lol, but this isn't whats putting food on my table so am not going to fret about it much.

What wordpress theme did you used? I have a good keyword for lawyers but i dont know witch theme to choose. I mean i see goodlooking themes but the fornpage is static and isnt that good for optimisation. Al the SEO courses use a blogtype frontpage for there site but isnt that a little weird to do that for a laywer website? How does your frontpage looks im a little stuck there?

And does your keyword show ppc results on the fronpage, if people pay for ppc ads for your keyword it would be strange if it would not bring some clients for you clients company.

The power of the EMD loses after a year. It is still good but your site will disappear in one year. You will end up doing the same SEO as everyone else.
The power of EMD isn't even good, it is like 10-20 good backlinks. If you are going to build backlinks on your site, you don't really need an EMD.

Oh, kind of forgot about this case study.. thanks for bumping guys.

Actually I've now stabilised around #5-6 for the EMD keyword, but i'm ranking for some other keywords which is awesome, drawing in around 30-50 visits a day, and funneling 2-3-4 even 5-6 clicks everyday to my main site. Got 60 visits from Facebook alone on Friday so someone must have posted something viral on there...

not quite banking on adsense, but now I actually feel involved in all the adsense threads, so its not a complete failure. Main objective is to pass link juice, and if possible, funnel a bit of traffic to my client's site anyway.

marikoe said:

What wordpress theme did you used? I have a good keyword for lawyers but i dont know witch theme to choose. I mean i see goodlooking themes but the fornpage is static and isnt that good for optimisation. Al the SEO courses use a blogtype frontpage for there site but isnt that a little weird to do that for a laywer website? How does your frontpage looks im a little stuck there?

And does your keyword show ppc results on the fronpage, if people pay for ppc ads for your keyword it would be strange if it would not bring some clients for you clients company.

Click to expand...

I use a theme that was shared here, I think its U Turn or U theme or something. And my front page is static, but I've got some fresh updated contents on my blog and in the widgets, not sure if that really equals having a blog homepage.

dragonrage01 said:

The power of the EMD loses after a year. It is still good but your site will disappear in one year. You will end up doing the same SEO as everyone else.
The power of EMD isn't even good, it is like 10-20 good backlinks. If you are going to build backlinks on your site, you don't really need an EMD.

Click to expand...

Hmm.. possibly, this is my first 100% EMD experiment and for now has gone quite well.. It was only intendeed to be a Tier1 for my client's main site, so as long as it passes juice I don't really mind if it ranks #29837280 in google.

Cool study, keep us updated - would love to hear more details about the experiment.

Well, I almost forgot about this case study, i apologise for the lack of updates. However, i do have some very juicy updates since the last time.

I downloaded a WP theme from here and slapped it on the website.. couple of weeks later, I start receiving a email from a banksaying my website is hosting phishing pages. I was like "wtf, some spam or smthg..its that email is probably leading to a forged site' and ignored it. Turns out I started receiving more and more, i checked it out and indeed there were some phishing pages on my website! I removed them and thought the problem was solved.. actually, it hadn't even started yet.

After a couple of days my website went offline.. contacted the hosting company, they said that they blocked my hosting because my servers were sending out thousands of emails a day. To cut a long story short, I had to move the website to another host cos they wouldn't put it back up.

So.... I guess the first update would be be careful when downloading 'free' premium templates from here, or from anywhere actually.. I believe in the generosity of people, but I also believe people do things for a reason.. not just random kindness.

Anyways, this fucked me up pretty bad. I had 2 sites hosted on that account, and both were offline for about 1 week (thank the lord it wasn't my money sites). My rankings suffered a bit, went down from first place to about #23-24.. which is not too bad, thought it would be worse.

However, once it was back online I straight away started making some nice manual links, high DA/PA and manual unique content.. and last week I moved back up to #8.

Anyways, here what the traffic looks like since the beginning.. slowly but surely getting back in the groove. Let's have a look at what's happened over the past 6 months...

Since beginning

4072 visits
Rank: #8
Conversion to client site: 162
Bounce rate: 58.92%

Here's what the number of pageviews looks like since the beginning:




Backlinks profile

- Couple (about 5-10) of nice dofoll0w blog comments that were heavily spammed already (I think these are what pushed me back up the serps after the incident)
- 1 sitewide link on a similar site
- couple (around 100) of social bookmarks (pligg, etc.. pretty crap quality)
- 2-3 nice hand made web 2.0s with plenty of unique content and nice photos, etc.
- got a few organic social shares on facebook and pinterest which drove nice traffic (i post a lot of photos with the intention of people sharing them on social networks)

On site

- unique articles posted weekly (1-3 / week). Sometimes I was lazy and just posted 4-5 lines of text and a dozen photos, or some videos.

That's it, nothing spectacular, but obviously seems to be working.

Not sure if there is much more to update, but well, will keep you all in the picture if anything exciting happens.

Best of luck to all of you,

Signing off for dinner

GiorgioB