@ OP If you had to do it all over again...what would you do differently and why? (BTW love the idea and since I've never done this b4 its a bit tough to wrap my mind around. But I am looking to tear this apart and try it on a smaller scale....tnx!)
If I did it again I would deploy the content slower. I could have deploy 10K pages per week and probably would have been just fine. 300K all at once is what revved the backlink engine way too high too fast.
I would generate my content just as slowly if not slower.
I would continue to use proxies anytime I crawl the SERPs for any reason. Its never beneficial to be on Google's radar. I already know Google is associating website authority with email accounts and IP addresses. Throwing in excessive SERP crawling is just going to beg for extra scrutiny from Google's army of mechanical turks.
I would add a bogus "Add URL" form to the footer... Got a lot of inquiries asking how to add a site!
Should have been my first clue. Might look a smidge more legit if someone over at G takes a look too. I'd craft it with images only... I don't think terms like add URL and submit site are what you want to target... probably want to stay out of the directory keyword space 100%.
I'd add About, Privacy Policy, Contact Us, and other "legitimacy" pages... knowing it's an 11 month investment warrants the extra safety. Perhaps even some Press Releases for the press page...its just a few extra links.
Focusing on a single sector was a good idea too. There are a lot of keywords out there. I chose 300,000 of them that targeted searches "looking to buy" and "goods I had to offer" ... I deleted about 100K pages just for being mildly off target. It sounds silly but when you get into its just as easy to make 32,000,000 pages as it is to make 300,000... The very first time I ran this experiment I collected the internets most popular keywords...all 32 million of them.
Google did ask me to stop on that one.
Instead of static html it was a meta search engine with a keyword directory structure... I was sending too many requests to google if you can image that! They were actually polite about. They didn't complain about anything except the volume of requests... Thats why in this latest version I went with pre-fabricated static HTML files... no dynamic requests. Of course... I had to be more selective with my keywords... so delete the cruft.
Take your time... this is an 11 month project... if you do it right and don't quit and just hang in there you can end up with a site that generates a ton of traffic.... just dont forget to have all you static files reference 1 javascript and 1 css. That's how I updated ads...and look & feel. I swap 1 ad in 1 file and all 300,000 pages reflect the change. Would suck to forget that part.
