Rank and Rent with a Twist: Journey

jon_xx_x

Elite Member
Joined
Nov 15, 2008
Messages
3,457
Reaction score
1,605
If you don't know rank and rent, it's when you basically rank for a keyword, then rent out the site and charge to put another company's information on it, phone number, banner etc.

What I'm attempting to do is a step up. It's a ton of work, but why not. My plan is rather than rank and rent, I'm going to rank and build. I'm going to build businesses for the sites I rank. For the most part I'm going to just put up an answering machine in the beginning, then when things pick up I will either outsource the work to start, or just full out jump into it.

What this is, is a side project. I'm not going to get carried away and put too much time into it unless I see it turning into something good. I don't want to get side tracked from other things I'm doing and just wasting my time all over the place. So with that said, this won't be updated all the time. But I will give updates. I may sit and do nothing for a month on some of the websites.

Right now I have three websites up. The plan was another two, but I'm going to start with these three for now. They are three niches I like, all three I can get support with as people I know in the business, and all three are quite profitable. The plan is that one or two climb the search engines easier, and I put more focus on them.

Unfortunately I'm not going to reveal the business types, so I'll refer to them by numbers. My city is small but over 500,000. I think cities these sizes competition is big enough but usually not too many businesses really dominating.

Here is where we start at.

Site1.
Competition: low
Competition level: med to high
Ranking: 60
Work done: Press release. Didn't do a thing. But atleast gave me a couple links to build on.

There aren't a lot of businesses in this niche but they are all established and been around for years and years. So even if they haven't tried, they've slowly built up links over the years. Cracking the top three will take some work.

This site has been up for approx 1-2 months, mostly sitting there. It ranked at #60 right off the bat which is a nice sign, but not surprising considering not a ton of competition.

Site2.
Competition: med to high
Competition level: medium
Ranking: 125
Work done: None. This is an expired domain I'm going to 301 to a new domain in the near future and build links to the new domain. It was a DA28 domain with about 100 referring domains. This is my first time 301ing an expired domain, so let's see how it goes. THe expired was somewhat related. This one has been up for about a week now.

Site3.
Competition: med to high
Competition level: medium
Ranking: -
Work done: None.
Just finishing this website so it's not ranking at all. Quite a few competitors and some decently strong ones.

Next step. I need to finsih Site3. I'm building a few web2.0 links to Site2 using my new keywords before I 301 to a new domain. Site3 I'm doing a BHW review service on, manual outreach which I will report on when it's done. When I 301 Site2 I'm going to do a couple paid links with my keyword to help Google understand what I want to rank for. Site1 is a little funny because it's probably the one site I have the least support from (not knowing many people in the business). And it's a business where you need to be somewhat educated in. So I'm probably going to spend 1-2 hours per day studying the business. This was my original one, and the one I could see myself focusing the most on, mainly becaue of the low competition level.

I'm trying to keep these sites fairly grey hat. I don't do much black hat anymore, but these ones I may push a bit because it's more of a test project. Also, I wasn't overly cautious to protect the identiy of the sites from Google. So all three can probably tie back to me. I'm going to keep them as separate businesses, not intertwine severs, pbns, or anything like that.

If I fail I fail. And I will post if I've failed or given up on any or all of the sites. I am quite busy with other projects so if I'm too overwhelmed I may have to put one or more of the sites on hold.

If you have a service you'd like to donate/discount to one of the sites, feel free to PM me. Though like I said I don't want to go too far into black.

Feel free to ask any questions. My next update will more than likely be in a couple weeks when I have Site2 redirected and Site3's BHW service completed.
 
Good luck with your journey!
I have never done rank and rent (Unless you will count the MMO niche, where you get paid monthly for banner ads)
Am going to be watching.
 
Good Luck, hope you find success. It's a lot of work to do SEO on 3 sites. Stay focused
 
Thanks. Will be a lot of work, but I'm hoping competition is low enough I won't drive myself insane.
 
Small update.
Haven't done much work on these sites. Going slow with them, letting them age a bit.
Site 1
60 -> 55
Site 2
125 -> 105
Site 3
kw1: Na -> 124
kw2: Na -> 74

Site 1. Haven't done much on it. That's the one I have a lot to learn about so probably won't do much with it as I don't want to actually get any work, though I'm thinking about contacting another business and talking about sending them business. I think this one has a lot of potential, but big learning curve and big committment. I actually found an expired business in the same niche from a nearby city and thinking about 301ing it to my site and adding it as another location. It's a wild idea and way over my head, but I have thoughts of eventually franchising to small nearby cities. The PBN has been up for two months now and ranks #15 in the city, though it's a very small city and not much competition. So I don't know if I should 301 it to a subdomain location and maybe see if I can sell the work to someone there, or if I should keep it as is and just link to my main money site. I've also already found a couple other PBNs from the same city now which I am going to use to link to that site, so the will be tier 2 PBNs. What I'm worried about is the PBN is an actuall business, and I have his phone number on it still. I'm not sure if he's still in business or not, but if I keep rising up the SEs one day he's gonna wonder wtf is going on. or if I 301 redirect to my site, he's gonna wonder wtf is going on.

Site 2.
As mentioned above did some 2.0s to the site, and some blog comments to some of the tier 1 links. As mentioned this site has a DA of 28 with some really strong backlinks. I'm little disappointed that it's only ranked #105 right now, even though the links are totally irrelevant. I thought with title, h1, and authority links coming in it would be a lot higher. In the next couple weeks I'm going to move the site to a business named domain, rather than what it currently is. Then I'm going to start building anchored links to it, and I hope it jumps faster due to the authority links it already has to it, even though they are unrelated. Would love some feedback from those that have done 301s in the past. This is my first time doing a 301. I'm almost wondering if I should have creatd the business named domain first, built some links to let google know what it was for, then 301 the domain over to give it a boost. Also as of note, I haven't 100% completed this site yet, I still have a few pages that aren't up, so the site only has a couple pages up which probably doesn't help.

Site 3.
Did a news release and did an outreach service from here. I've gota couple dozen replies about guest posts, so I have to follow up and hopefully I can get a few legit guest posts.

I don't have citations to any of these sites. Only site 1 is in google business. I'll do the rest over the next month.

I know nothing really exciting, but I wanted to try and keep this updated. My goal is to eventually rank these up high and I'm sure there will be more interest in this when it comes to a point where I (hopefully) am actually ranking at the top and running a legit business.

I'm just going to keep building PBNs. What I am noticing is this is going to get quite costly spreading out my time and resources over multiple sites rather than focusing on one. I'm doing local SEO for one business, and starting another. So Even if I use 10-20PBN for each site, I'm going to be at 50-100PBNs, and may be a while before I'm making real money on those sites (aside from client fees).

I'm also looking into donating to some local sites to get listed as a donor. Good thing is if I can find some somewhat affordable ones, then I can easily use atleast two of my sites (including client sites) on them. So two links for the effort of one link.
 
So you're saying you're going to start a business with the sites you rank?

If you rank for "brain surgery City" you're gonna do brain surgery? nice
 
Small update.
Site 1, which I have a domain for the same type of business in another city (found an expired one), I just linked it to site 1. Ranking went from 55 > 30. There's not a ton of competition in this niche but the ones that are there are somewhat strong. So I guess jumping that high shouldn't be surprising. Going from 20 to top 5, that is going to be the hard part.

Site 2, which I bought the higher metric domain, I just 301d it to a new domain with a better more related name. I also sent one PBN to the old site so it would appear more relevant to my niche before I did the 301.
The 301 has now took affect. So the combo of new domain with a relevant keyword in it, plus the PBN link went from 105 -> 45. Pretty happy with the progress it's made. I'm hoping with the strong link profile from the old domain that any new links I add give it a bigger boos than normal. Going to add this to Google Business and do citations next. I also had a few pages that needed to be finished, so that may have also played a part in the jump, as there was only a few pages before.

I'd really like to focus on site 1, but I have to so much to learn about the industry, I probably shouldn't try to move it up too much right now. I have about 20-30 PBN sites ready to go for these sites as well, and they are all niche related for the most part.
 
interested because of thinking of doing the same.
just think my city is maybe to small .... 200k
 
interested because of thinking of doing the same.
just think my city is maybe to small .... 200k

Mine is bigger, and I think it's in the right sweet spot. Big enough for regular business but not too big there is a ton of competition.
In your case I'd just be worried about putting all the work into ranking and setting it up but not getting regular customers. I even have that with mine as the niches I picked aren't really high volume.
 
Interesting to know the journey
 
interested because of thinking of doing the same.
just think my city is maybe to small .... 200k

If you look at any major rank and rent strategy seller they all say the sweet spot is more than 100k population
 
Good luck. Looks interesting.
 
Going to update because even when things go shitty I'm not going to just walk away.
But I'm having a real fuck of a time.
Site 1 is at #30 for one kw and #40 for another which isn't too bad considering I haven't done much. I have added two very relevant PBNs, so I guess it is kinda disappointing to not be higher. Though other than citations and press release, haven't done anything.
Site 2 is my concern. I really wanted to focus on this one being my main one, but it took an unpleasant turn. After some great results from the PBN, it was ranking at #30. Then after about ten days (posted this in another thread) it all the suddent dropped about 30 spots. So now I'm sitting in the 60s. Really frustrating. Almost as if the 301 redirect had no affect at all, or I should say lost it's affect. I added one PBN, plus I got a link from my local university, and a link from a decent quality niche related directory. So I was really hope to see a jump, not a 30 spot fall. At the very least I was hoping for a bounce back with the new links. I also added a 1500 word article to my blog. I'm going to experiment with content gap and created large articles that cover many topics vs more frequent short articles.

on another note, a client of mine that was sitting around #30 for his kw dropped 15 spots for no reason. So I'm quite frustrated right now.

I posted in another thread, but I just don't understand this local algo. I look at the competition in some niches and they look like they should be a walk in the park. Domain age obviously has a fairly big ranking factor, but I just don't understand how some of these sites in the top 20 are there. They have terrible on page SEO, no links coming in, no citions, maybe 3-5 links. And yet they rank. My one client I've built quite a few quality links, citations, a couple PBN, a couple paid links, and I can't budge past 30. To make matters worse it just dropped. My backlink profile is on par with anyone in the top 5, and better than anyone 10-30, yet I can't move up past 30. And it's not a new domain. I just can't come up with any reasoning why it won't move. I'm #6 nation wide for a 80,000monthly keyword term for my own money site, competing with Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, etc, but I can't move my fucking client past #30 for a low-medium competition term. I just don't fucking get it.

So this update is right shit on all fronts. What I should have done for one of these sites was buy an aged domain that was 5+ years so I could track that vs the other sites to see if it moved faster. Technically my 301 site should be doing just that, but that appears to be fucked now.
 
Local citations are important. Did you try to use as much as possible?
 
Local citations are important. Did you try to use as much as possible?

About 40 for now. And yet there are guys in top 10 without a single one. I've only done a few sites with local seo now, and I've never once seen any movement with citations
 
Speaking from experience, and having catapulted my clients' rankings up sometimes by 20-50 spots per week and I do it with content, it's the only long term strategy to rank in my opinion, plus it's the most stable.
 
Back
Top