What is your opinion about this?

I have a pretty big authority forum. I am building backlinks for it gradually. I focus mainly on long tails (e.g. 100-1000 monthly US searches).

I am tracking the forum using Ahrefs. I observe this:

• Number of organic keywords increases (pretty) consistently
• Traffic is pretty unstable. Sometimes I feel great when I see that the traffic increases for a few days. Then a few days or 1-2 weeks later, traffic decreases and it returns back to the initial state (I feel frustrated). So traffic stays same (no significant improvement).

Why doesn't my traffic increase? How can I solve this?

Other details:

I resumed building backlinks to the forum a few months ago. So I am not doing this for a long time. Rankings increase but I did not achieve top 10 on purpose for targeted keywords yet (as I said I did not do this for long)

I try different link building strategies for testing. But my primary link building strategy at the moment:

- Tier 1: web 2.0 blogs
- Tier 2: web 2.0 blogs or cheap PBN posts

I use handmade articles for Tier 1 and spun articles for Tier 2.

I hope to hear some good tips to beat G safely.

Your traffic doesn't increase because ahrefs and most other estimators are shit. If you're ranking outside the top 3 you probably aren't getting any traffic from it. So it may show up on ahrefs that you're ranking and getting traffic from it, but you're not. Worry about ranking #1-3, more importantly #1, and forget the rest.

You need better tier links not just web 2.0.

jon_xx_x said:

Your traffic doesn't increase because ahrefs and most other estimators are shit. If you're ranking outside the top 3 you probably aren't getting any traffic from it. So it may show up on ahrefs that you're ranking and getting traffic from it, but you're not. Worry about ranking #1-3, more importantly #1, and forget the rest.

Click to expand...

Yes, as far as I see, I can not move keywords to top 10 yet. Most of keywords are in 20-200 range.

Can we consider the consistent increment of number of organic keywords good? Can I say this: "If I continue executing the same strategy, my traffic will increase in the long term" ?

I could not describe this well but the main behavior that I can not interpret is this: it looks like google prevent quick traffic changes for my website. When I start to increase the traffic, G shows up and prevents me increase traffic more. This happened several times. For example, before building web 2.0, I have bought many high quality guest posts (Dzone, Lifehack etc.). I saw some positive effects in short term. And after 1-2 weeks, as I described above, something (G) prevented this and the traffic decreased considerably. Is this something you see for your websites too? Is there a kind of G filter which detects sudden changes in traffic?

jon_xx_x said:

You need better tier links not just web 2.0.

Click to expand...

What kind of better tier links do you suggest? Developing my own PBN?

The problem is that I want to target long tail keywords. I should rank these long tail keywords with minimal cost because I am earning with CPM and one long tail keyword does not mean much. (I have 22K organic keywords according to Ahrefs at the moment). If I build one PBN domain per keyword, I can not earn money.

OWN PBN and just links from high authority sites in general. You're not going to simply rank with web2.0 links, or you'll hit the wall like your'e talking about.
I'm having a similar issue with a local site I'm doing SEO for. I add a high quality link it jumps up, then falls back down a couple weeks later. And repeats.

I'd add PBN to the root, and it will trickle down to the other posts and long tail keywords. Maybe add a couple to some of your more popular ones as well.

jon_xx_x said:

OWN PBN and just links from high authority sites in general. You're not going to simply rank with web2.0 links, or you'll hit the wall like your'e talking about.
I'm having a similar issue with a local site I'm doing SEO for. I add a high quality link it jumps up, then falls back down a couple weeks later. And repeats.

Click to expand...

Yes, exactly.

Did you solve this problem with the local site? Did PBN solve the problem?

jon_xx_x said:

I'd add PBN to the root, and it will trickle down to the other posts and long tail keywords. Maybe add a couple to some of your more popular ones as well.

Click to expand...

Yes, that was what I was expecting from guest posts: trickle down to the other posts and long tail keywords. It had some positive effects but as you said I have lost most of the positive effects after a short time.

I will try PBN approach.

casperl said:

Yes, exactly.

Did you solve this problem with the local site? Did PBN solve the problem?

Click to expand...

Haven't done anything with it in a while. I'm going to throw a few PBNs at it. Really annoys me wasting this time and money and not moving while top 5 results have absolute shit links. This is one of the few clients I do work for and of course it's doing fuck all for me.

jon_xx_x said:

Haven't done anything with it in a while. I'm going to throw a few PBNs at it. Really annoys me wasting this time and money and not moving while top 5 results have absolute shit links. This is one of the few clients I do work for and of course it's doing fuck all for me.

Click to expand...

I am sorry to hear that you're having so much trouble but trying a PBN as worked for me in the past when I had a similar issue. Your best bet is probably to just keep trying to use PBN playing around with a couple PBN's eventually you probably find something that works though it may be a long hassle. Good luck.

That type tiered linking won't do you much good as all of those properties have very little power (that PBN maybe a little).

You should consider building yourself a PBN or getting homepage links (inner pages on cheap PBN again have almost 2 power)

Also, I suggest you pump out fat pieces of content for your target keywords. Guide type. These rank easier and for tons of long-tails (ones you didn't even dream about)

You can find "guides" on BHW as well for example.

Either write them yourself or run a contest and create fat threads.

Pumping these out regularly while being consistent with more authoritative link-buildning will surely increase your traffic consistently.