Current Working SEO Strategies - May 27th 2014

As some of you know I create and test brand new websites with various SEO strategies and record the changes in rankings.

I wanted to share with you current strategies that either dropped or increased in rankings since the Panda 4.0 update.

1st strategy - Rank a website with EMD pure low cost and high quanitity spammy links purchased from forums. Up until mid April this website was ranking for the EMD on position #9 and had 4 related keywords on position #11-22. After the Panda update the website dropped rankings to pages 5-8. No manual web spam action taken on WMT

2nd strategy - Rank a partial EMD website with PBN links (not purchased from a forum but created myself) that are mostly natural URLs and Domain name links. Was ranking on page 1 for the partial EMD and the main targeted keyword until May 4th when I received a Manual penalty. The only links created were 10 PBN links all with natural URLs and 3 domain name links. (I think that a competitor reported the website)

3rd strategy - Rank a website with only social signals, was ranking up until this update for 12 keywords ranking on pages 5-9 and now the rankings are completely gone.

4th strategy - Rank a website with only guest posts. Was ranking for the domain name only and now the rankings are completely gone.

5th strategy - Rank a website using Public "Private blog network" links, was ranking for 11 keywords on pages 2-8 and now there is only 1 keyword ranking on page 3.

6th strategy - Rank a website using just local citations, no keywords ever picked up rankings in top 100.

I have a couple older websites that still have rankings but these are 2-3 years old with many different methods used. So hard to tell what works and what doesn't at the moment.

I would love to hear your thoughts on these strategies and share your experiences with the current state of SEO strategies.

p.s. keep in mind that most of these websites were created for testing purposes and only have about 4-5 pages on each site and I don't update/pay much attention to them other than view the ranking results.

There are a lot of variables to consider, the quality of your linking is huge. Your onpage, content, age of the site? Diversification is key to link building, so when running isolated tests like this it's going to be difficult to glean very much useful information. Just my thoughts.

How about quality link building? like high pr web2.0 tier 1 etc. not working anymore?

Most of your tests revolve around link building and off site variables. What is the content like on each of your test sites? Seeing that Panda was focusing on onsite factors and content, I would be curious to know what your content was like.

Big thanks for detailing the different tests that were running. I think it would be even better to add onsite factors as well. Maybe you could even do a couple of tests either updating or adding content to see if it comes back?

Andrew Scherer said:

There are a lot of variables to consider, the quality of your linking is huge. Your onpage, content, age of the site? Diversification is key to link building, so when running isolated tests like this it's going to be difficult to glean very much useful information. Just my thoughts.

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Yea it is difficult to do fully isolated tests because niches can be ranked differently, and there is always causation doesn't equal correlation. I think diversification was one of the key things that caused those websites to get hit. I was doing one strategy at a time and not doing multiple things such as social signals and linkbuilding.

nakamura said:

How about quality link building? like high pr web2.0 tier 1 etc. not working anymore?

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I have tried handmade Web 2.0's in the past and still continue to drip them on my older sites every now and then. I think their power of ranking has diminished substantially but that doesn't mean it won't help a little. At least, it will help bring in some diverisification

i beleive that the main problem was the "4-5 pages" website, it's way too thin . But I could be wrong anyway.

RightInTwo said:

Most of your tests revolve around link building and off site variables. What is the content like on each of your test sites? Seeing that Panda was focusing on onsite factors and content, I would be curious to know what your content was like.

Big thanks for detailing the different tests that were running. I think it would be even better to add onsite factors as well. Maybe you could even do a couple of tests either updating or adding content to see if it comes back?

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Great points, all of the websites were setup on Wordpress (if that matters) like an actual premium themed website. I basically copied themes and did easy banners/logo's from previous website design clients and used this for the tests. The website's look good aesthitically with call to actions and testimonials.

The content is rewritten text that I found from other websites already ranking for the keywords. So I basically read what other websites were doing and re-wrote the content in my own words. ONE BIG Thing to note, is that if you take out the testimonials, footer content, and call to actions only 2 of the website have about 2-3 paragraphs of content. The other websites only have the banners, call to actions and testimonials.

This could be a big reason why the rankings dropped. I will add fresh new content to the homepage and let you know what happens

RightInTwo said:

Most of your tests revolve around link building and off site variables. What is the content like on each of your test sites? Seeing that Panda was focusing on onsite factors and content, I would be curious to know what your content was like.

Big thanks for detailing the different tests that were running. I think it would be even better to add onsite factors as well. Maybe you could even do a couple of tests either updating or adding content to see if it comes back?

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Yep this is exactly what I was going to say - Panda is a content based update so backlinking should not have played such a big part. It sounds to me as if your content quality was pretty low on most of these test sites so I wouldn't be surprised if they all got hit by the latest update.

They ran a Penguin update and then around Monday they ran a Panda update. So would be curious as when you got hit or when you saw the most changes. Was it around the 14-18th of May or that Monday (19th) there after?

1st strategy: Keep in mind there was also a Payday Loans 2.0 update, in case it was Panda related then look at your site, huge images/headers above the fold seem to be a killer

2nd strategy: Again check if your site complies with Panda guidelines, it's easy to mess up with 10 testing sites that are likely quickly setup (also check your theme btw, I used a theme where the header was wrongly coded and thus Google read it like it covered the whole site, a batch of 10 of my affiliate sites under performs heavily due to that, I found this issue when I installed a popup plugin that should only be activated when people move their mouse towards the back button but it got activated no matter where my mouse was on the page, first I thought it was a buggy plugin, now I know better). Just read you got a manual penalty so probably reported yes, still a bit weird for just 10 links but well.

3rd strategy: You might want to check if the social accounts are still alive or deleted due to spam (which happens too frequently)

4th strategy: I start to get the idea that there is something that Panda doesn't like about your site as it seems all sites tanked by now

5th strategy: Same as above

6th strategy: Citations can be seen as low quality spam, same like web directories, bookmarks etc, as it comes from pages with thin content, besides that most local citation sites have so many site links in the footer and sidebar and everywhere that even if there was a tiny amount of juice you would lose it all on the internal links so not too surprising that you didn't rank solely based on them.

Still I suspect you got hit by Panda4.0, can have to do with your theme, can have to do with the fact that your sites are so small, can have to do with over monetization. I've seen many small sites been hit with little link building, especially affiliate / adsense type of sites.

@steve, yea that is what it's starting to look like. I am going to upload some new content to about half of the domains and see which half moves in the proper direction.

@jstover, most of the websites described here lost rankings since May 19th-May 25th. My other websites that have been around longer (not described in these posts) started losing some 1st page rankings in Mid April like the 14th-18th. Those sites were ranking for about 5-8 keywords on page 1 and now have on average 2-3 keywords page 1 and the rest on pages 2-3.

Also, I love to experiment with new strategies/methods so if anyone has something that they heard or are doing please share!

jstover77 said:

They ran a Penguin update and then around Monday they ran a Panda update. So would be curious as when you got hit or when you saw the most changes. Was it around the 14-18th of May or that Monday (19th) there after?

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That Penguin update from half May seems to have been reversed for the most part or it has been made a lot less tight as 90%+ of the sites I track fully recovered between the 22th and 24th.

@SEObs, thanks for you analysis. I think that the On-page was probably a factor. I don't think the themes had much to do with it because for about 4 months the sites were ranking on page one. (I also used 3 different themes across all tests sites).

If large banners on the homepage can cause issues with Panda that might make sense for my sites as they all had the large homepage banner. We will see what happens in a couple of weeks because I just added 500+ words of content on the homepage to half of my test websites

IProvideSEO said:

Great points, all of the websites were setup on Wordpress (if that matters) like an actual premium themed website. I basically copied themes and did easy banners/logo's from previous website design clients and used this for the tests. The website's look good aesthitically with call to actions and testimonials.

The content is rewritten text that I found from other websites already ranking for the keywords. So I basically read what other websites were doing and re-wrote the content in my own words. ONE BIG Thing to note, is that if you take out the testimonials, footer content, and call to actions only 2 of the website have about 2-3 paragraphs of content. The other websites only have the banners, call to actions and testimonials.

This could be a big reason why the rankings dropped. I will add fresh new content to the homepage and let you know what happens

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Get rid of featured slideshows, banners, call to actions above the fold and please update next month when Panda refreshes.

IProvideSEO said:

Great points, all of the websites were setup on Wordpress (if that matters) like an actual premium themed website. I basically copied themes and did easy banners/logo's from previous website design clients and used this for the tests. The website's look good aesthitically with call to actions and testimonials.

The content is rewritten text that I found from other websites already ranking for the keywords. So I basically read what other websites were doing and re-wrote the content in my own words. ONE BIG Thing to note, is that if you take out the testimonials, footer content, and call to actions only 2 of the website have about 2-3 paragraphs of content. The other websites only have the banners, call to actions and testimonials.

This could be a big reason why the rankings dropped. I will add fresh new content to the homepage and let you know what happens

Click to expand...

Yea if you only have realistically 2-3 paragraphs of content, that is probably what caused the drops. It makes sense if Panda was targeting thin content sites and yours only had a little.

The good news though is that your test isn't dead! It would be awesome if you could really expand your content across all of the pages and really improve it. Then the next time the Panda refresh comes around, we could see if anything bounces back. Thanks again for your experiments and look forward to hopefully following along once the next refresh comes around!

It may be worth giving it all some more time, as various updates seem to have at least lead to loss of some rankings.

IProvideSEO said:

@SEObs, thanks for you analysis. I think that the On-page was probably a factor. I don't think the themes had much to do with it because for about 4 months the sites were ranking on page one. (I also used 3 different themes across all tests sites).

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The 3 different themes filters that out indeed, 4 months is irrelevant though as the above the fold area is much more sensitive after Panda 4.0 so I suspect your large homepage banner might have to do with it.

However what I experienced / seen, is that huge headers/banners above the fold don't result in sites tanking, they just lose 5-30 positions depending on where you rank.

SEOBS said:

The 3 different themes filters that out indeed, 4 months is irrelevant though as the above the fold area is much more sensitive after Panda 4.0 so I suspect your large homepage banner might have to do with it.

However what I experienced / seen, is that huge headers/banners above the fold don't result in sites tanking, they just lose 5-30 positions depending on where you rank.

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It appears you might be a previously banned member:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/770388-seobs.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/259389-nik-0.html

Also I hope the PBN you keep jabbering on about is better hidden than the almost 300 sites I found registered to you:



Seriously Mate, you have left footprints all over the place.
Even on your blog case studies you are leaking too much information.
You really should invest in some Domain privacy.

W130SN said:

It appears you might be a previously banned member:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/770388-seobs.html
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/259389-nik-0.html

Also I hope the PBN you keep jabbering on about is better hidden than the almost 300 sites I found registered to you:



Seriously Mate, you have left footprints all over the place.
Even on your blog case studies you are leaking too much information.
You really should invest in some Domain privacy.

Click to expand...

You really like to point this stuff out huh