Ranking with manually paraphrased articles - small case study results

Alexion

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First of all, I wish to apologize for the lack of rich media. However, even though my presence on this forum is short, I tend to belive I never left the impression I ramble stupid facts without anything to back it off.

This being said, I wish to share my small, personal results in terms of paraphrasing other people's work.

In December, I started a new blog on a fresh new domain, in the tech niche, informational articles.

Since I'm no Tolstoy, and I suck at coming up with my own ideas, I tried something different.
I picked another tech blog that was(and still is) doing fine with his 150 or so articles. All in the same tech niche.

Hand picked about 30 of them which weren't affiliated oriented (none of those best PRODUCT for NICHE in 2022 articles), but information content, basic how-to, why, etc.

I paraphrased the articles completely, line by line.
I did it manually, using my own english, applying a small principle that journalists(some, not all) use, and what healthline has been doing for a while.

I kept the sentences short, or shorter, more concise, no fluff, and made it sound as if I would explain it to my really dumb friend.
But I did keep the keywords, or LSI keywords, or long tail variants the same.
But anything else was differently written, by me, in my non native english.

First week, most of the articles were ranking on page 5-6. I said great, wow, at least shit is out there, who cares on what pages, but they show up. GSC impressions were present as well.

Didn't make much of it, as the intention was to sell it later on this year.

Besides a few twitter and reddit backlinks(for indexing purposes), there was no linkbuilding done, as I suck at that as well.

Ok, here are the results.

First of all, the most impressive part, I shit you not, are the 35 backlinks appearing in GSC, naturally, organically, however you want to call them, from real people. All of them on forums, weird boards for reference in a discussion about cpus/motherboards/etc.

As for ranking, out of the 30 articles I paraphrased, 11 of them are on page 1 for the main keyword. More specifically, all of them range between #7 and #9.
Traffic wise, I get roughly around 2,500Uv/month since the last two months.

July adsense earnings(yes, it got accepted into adsense in the first month with just 15 articles) are at a staggering $22.81.

All graphs(analytics, adsense, GSC) have an up trend for the last 4 months.

Theoretically, if I chose to sell this website as it is, I would probably get around $1,000 or so for it.
That translates to $30/article. It took me 10 days to do them in my free time as I also work.

For now, I tell my wife I worked 10 days to afford to pay disney+, netflix, and two prepay sims every month for the next 1-2 years. She congratulated me with a nice tuna salad only she knows how to make. Win-Win.

The moral of the story is, that you can make SOME money just by copying other people's work.
Ethical? No, it's not. Does it work? Very much so.

I could talk about my other project with translated articles from english to another European language I know, but I don't want too much competition over there. This sentence would be enough to get some ideas around.

Working works. It's just a matter of patience, and time invested vs the expected outcome.
For me, it takes about two hours to rewrite 1,500 words. Three hours if I really want to polish it. But two is enough with media included, formatting, etc.

If your english REALLY sucks, I suggest getting Grammarly just for those special touches.
I don't personally use the premium version, just the free one as it's enough.

I'm sorry if I made you think this is a get rich quick scheme, it's not.
But it does bring SOME money on the table, even more if you are smart about it and scale it up.

Don't be afraid of the presumed competition.
From what I've seen in the last 3 years, 90% of that competition completely disappears over time, probably misusing PBNs, etc.

Ok, that's it, sorry for the long story.

L.E. Bing definitely knows what's up. After 2 months and a crazy surge in traffic from bing, the blog vanished from their search engine. So yeah, keep this into account.
 
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You write good, what does short period mean?
3 months, 6?
Not sure what you mean.
The blog started in December.

The results I mention are from July, present date.
Significant results started ~3 and a half months ago

So I would say to give it at least 5-6 months waiting time to actually see something.
 
L.E. Bing definitely knows what's up. After 2 months and a crazy surge in traffic from bing, the blog vanished from their search engine. So yeah, keep this into account.
I think Bing is having issues. Two of my websites were deindexed for absolutely no reason. I wasnt doing anything remotely blackhat (yet). Unless that bot is psychic, IDK.
 
I think Bing is having issues. Two of my websites were deindexed for absolutely no reason. I wasnt doing anything remotely blackhat (yet). Unless that bot is psychic, IDK.
Yes, I've seen people reporting they got deindexed completely innocent.
But since I am not innocent, I have to assume they know what's going on, or at least have some doubts about it.

Or they just randomly do this kind of shit, who knows.
 
The moral of the story is, that you can make SOME money just by copying other people's work.
Ethical? No, it's not. Does it work? Very much so.

I'm not sure what is unethical here. You took articles and paraphrased them in your own words. Sure, you may kept keywords for the sake of SEO but they are technical your idea. You may of even enhanced the intent of the articles as the originals were of lesser quality.

Parts of your morality I may question but this, I think you managed to stay ethical.
 
Just a few quick questions @Alexion :
  1. What was the reason for the success of this site (according to you)?
  2. Is there a way to scale this process using tools (and without knowing to program)?
  3. How did you decide on that specific "tech" blog and why?
 
Just a few quick questions @Alexion :
  1. What was the reason for the success of this site (according to you)?
  2. Is there a way to scale this process using tools (and without knowing to program)?
  3. How did you decide on that specific "tech" blog and why?
1. Knowing english and spending 2 hours paraphrasing an article. Having 5-7 months of patience is also a plus )) Point I was trying to get across is that anyone who speaks English can do it, there was no luck, just work.

2. I don't see what tools would be involved, I sure didn't use any. Going through 8-10 cheap writers until you find one that's good at paraphrasing and charging you $10/article would be a good scaling solution.

3. Ever since I got into seo/IM I always went for a tech niche because more or less, I at least have SOME ideas about the topic. Not an expert, but at least I know why an m2 SSD with dram is better than one without, as a quick example.

Why I chose that particular blog was because he had multiple snippets featuring on google for a lot of keywords, with a 9 month blog. The guy knows his keyword research. I just piggybacked on his work. I can make an educated guess that, if I would choose articles and keywords for which pcmag is ranking #1, the results wouldn't have been that great.
 
So you didn't build any backlink for this site? How many keyword you targeted per articles?
 
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1. Knowing english and spending 2 hours paraphrasing an article. Having 5-7 months of patience is also a plus )) Point I was trying to get across is that anyone who speaks English can do it, there was no luck, just work.

2. I don't see what tools would be involved, I sure didn't use any. Going through 8-10 cheap writers until you find one that's good at paraphrasing and charging you $10/article would be a good scaling solution.

3. Ever since I got into seo/IM I always went for a tech niche because more or less, I at least have SOME ideas about the topic. Not an expert, but at least I know why an m2 SSD with dram is better than one without, as a quick example.

Why I chose that particular blog was because he had multiple snippets featuring on google for a lot of keywords, with a 9 month blog. The guy knows his keyword research. I just piggybacked on his work. I can make an educated guess that, if I would choose articles and keywords for which pcmag is ranking #1, the results wouldn't have been that great.
For tools, check out quillbot and quetext. Quillbot is a paraphrasing tool. Quetext checks for plagiarism and has a built in citation generator. :)
 
So you didn't build any backlink for this site? How many keyword you targeted per articles?
No backlinks besides reddit/twitter for indexing purposes. I never counted the number per article, since I just used whatever the original used, sometimes more, sometimes less. Completely random.
For tools, check out quillbot and quetext. Quillbot is a paraphrasing tool. Quetext checks for plagiarism and has a built in citation generator. :)
I've tried quillbot, maybe it's me but I never liked what it returned.
I never checked for plagiarism as it's almost impossible someone else used the exact wording I did.

I also have a personal theory this doesn't count as much, for the sole reason of websites like healthline.com
80% of their sentences are SO GENERIC if someone would run a queuetext on it, it would go crazy.
Nice work!

I don't think the "other" search engines caught up with this and main one didn't. I think it's something else.
I also have some theories, but it's hard to prove so I just assume its content related. Although I bet it's either something to do with wp themes or website ownership.
If you don't mind sharing what you think was, it would be great.
 
I think Bing is having issues. Two of my websites were deindexed for absolutely no reason. I wasnt doing anything remotely blackhat (yet). Unless that bot is psychic, IDK.
Maybe because their new IndexNow protocol, launched few months ago (I suppose they're still testing). However, I've had no problems so far.
Ok, that's it, sorry for the long story.
Good job!
 
I've tried quillbot, maybe it's me but I never liked what it returned.
I never checked for plagiarism as it's almost impossible someone else used the exact wording I did.

I also have a personal theory this doesn't count as much, for the sole reason of websites like healthline.com
80% of their sentences are SO GENERIC if someone would run a queuetext on it, it would go crazy.

I also have some theories, but it's hard to prove so I just assume its content related. Although I bet it's either something to do with wp themes or website ownership.
If you don't mind sharing what you think was, it would be great.
I agree there’s not much better than the brain for rewriting. Quillbot is essentially an upgrade of “the best spinner” lol. I use it when I have a ton of articles to paraphrase and schedule for posting :)
 
Can you guide how did you make those Reddit backlinks? Or did you use a service here on BHW?
 
Great work ethic.
I have a few blogs which are non english as well. Much can be done by manually translating content, even google translate helps a lot.
 
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