Link building with only raw URL. Testing done.

Good day, fellows.

I've been testing the effect of link building using just raw URL (That's right, no anchors). I've been going about this for about 5 months thus far, and the websites are ranking just as well as those with keywords in anchors.

I created these websites about 5 months ago, spent 1 month just adding content, then started link building.

Site 1 -

Niche: Financial
Main keyword ranking now: #14
Keyword competition: Medium high.
On-Site content: 600 words on home page, and and additional 15 300-600 word blog posts.
On-Site optimization: Main keyword in title and meta description, about 1% keyword density within the content itself.

Site 2 -

Niche: Advertising
Main keyword ranking now: #7
Keyword competition: Medium
On-Site content: Same as first
On-Site optimization: Same as first

My link building was heavily focused on hand made web 2.0's that consist of the following:

Home page - 500 words
Second article about niche - 400 words
About page - 300 words
Contact page - 100 words

I pretty much link wheeled 10 web 2.0's at a time. 1 wheel created every 2 weeks to each site.

Other than the web 2's, I also threw a few hundred social bookmarks and article submissions spread throughout inner pages. Wiki's, automated web 2's, and social bookmarks were pretty much my tier 2 for everything, and tier 3 was just miscellaneous blasting.

In all honestly, this could just be a fluke because it's only 2 sites, but I felt that it was worth sharing.

First of all , thank you for sharing your experience.

I can't find the rankings before you started link building to the websites with your raw Url. And did you experience any dancing with panda/penguin refreshes.

Did you build websites in the same niche and test them with ~10-20% keyword anchors as well?

ficfroc said:

First of all , thank you for sharing your experience.

I can't find the rankings before you started link building to the websites with your raw Url. And did you experience any dancing with panda/penguin refreshes.

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Before I started the link building, the rankings weren't in the top 100. They got there about 2 months later, and climbed up to the ranks I stated above.

Also, I only experienced the usual dancing.

I'm telling you building raw URL links works in volume.. That + keyword, no click here, no website, etc. Just raw url, brand name, and keywords work.

weruncompanies said:

I'm telling you building raw URL links works in volume.. That + keyword, no click here, no website, etc. Just raw url, brand name, and keywords work.

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Where do you usually place the raw url ? I mean the beginning , middle or ending of the article ? This questions goes for you too Adam178 if you'd like to answer.

ficfroc said:

Where do you usually place the raw url ? I mean the beginning , middle or ending of the article ? This questions goes for you too Adam178 if you'd like to answer.

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If it's blog comments I'll do something like: (Always try to wrap it in with other words..)

Blah blah your article and a related comment here. Also my site http://www.mywebsite.com also features cool stuff like this and I just wanted to share it.

Or if I'm lazy:

Blah blah your article and a related comment here. Also my site http://www.mywebsite.com Thanks all!

Doing that for all of my blog comments, other platforms the same wherever I can..

Expertpeon said:

Did you build websites in the same niche and test them with ~10-20% keyword anchors as well?

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Would love an answer to this too. Unless you conducted a test in the same niche with a different variable (ie: keyword anchor) then this is pretty worthless. It's pretty much saying "Build backlinks, get rankings".

Would keyword based anchor texts have ranked you better or worse in this case? That's what I'd be interested in.

ficfroc said:

Where do you usually place the raw url ? I mean the beginning , middle or ending of the article ? This questions goes for you too Adam178 if you'd like to answer.

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In most of them I add the link towards the end, sort of like a reference to the money site.

Expertpeon said:

Did you build websites in the same niche and test them with ~10-20% keyword anchors as well?

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I have 2 clients with the same kind of sites (Same niche, same topics). I used the conventional method with their sites; 20% keyword anchors, 20% LSI, the rest raw URL and generics.

Raw URL method ranked the websites just as fast.

Adam718 said:

I have 2 clients with the same kind of sites (Same niche, same topics). I used the conventional method with their sites; 20% keyword anchors, 20% LSI, the rest raw URL and generics.

Raw URL method ranked the websites just as fast.

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What about the rankings of LSI keywords, did ur website ranked well or did ur clients website?

I mean rankings overall across a fair number of keywords related to ur industry.

thx for this thread, really helped.

Thanks for sharing, I have been hearing this from a lot of people, post Penguin Raw url's are critical to ranking. This might sound dumb, but I want to be sure, the raw url is a link that has the raw domain url as the anchor text? It's not just the url without hyperlink?

Sparrow said:

What about the rankings of LSI keywords, did ur website ranked well or did ur clients website?

I mean rankings overall across a fair number of keywords related to ur industry.

thx for this thread, really helped.

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Both websites are pretty much ranking for the same long tails and LSI's.

This isn't a fluke; it's exactly how you want to go about doing link building these days.

1) Ensure the content on your pages is very high quality and relevant for whatever keywords you want to rank for

2) Ensure the content on the webpages hosting your inbound links meets the criteria for #1

3) Stop worrying about the links themselves as they won't matter as much. Ensure your anchors are diverse and by all means use a ton of naked URLs (hxxp://www.blahblah.com), branded URLs (BlahBlah.com), etc.

SEO isn't rocket science. It's just being done very poorly by a lot of people, and they are too stubborn to abandon their useless mass-blasting of junk links as it can be done cheaply and easily.

can anyone please explain me what is raw URL.

bryanmills said:

can anyone please explain me what is raw URL.

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It's just the URL of the page you want to build backlinks to. Instead of using different anchor texts, just use the URL of that page.