Today you are going to get a sneak peak of how someone ranked a site with nothing but Blackhat SEO spam and is earning over $1,000 a month with it.
Not only that, but the site has defeated the latest Google Algorithm updates including Penguin & Panda 4.1 which was released a couple of days ago.
Lots of people are going crazy in forums right now claiming that duplicate content & link spam doesn’t work anymore – this case study proves them wrong.
What You Will Learn
- How to beat Panda 4.0 & the latest Penguin update
- How to build a website with spam
- How to rank a website with Blackhat SEO spam
- How to earn over $1,000 per month
- The exact method & Blackhat SEO strategies used
Introducing Nick Joleson
My name is Nick Joleson & I run NoobWarrior.com I’ve spent a bit of time ranking blackhat SEO spam websites & wanted to share my experience with you.
Matthew asked me to do this post a couple of weeks back. While I agreed to do it, I was a little hesitant due to the predicted May Penguin update.
I wasn’t sure when/if it arrived my pure spam site would survive. So it felt strange to write a case study on a site that may no longer rank by the time the post was published.
Well today is the 22nd May and amidst the chaos of the current Google updates, including Panda 4, I am happy to say my test site is still ranking well.
I did take a small hit on the rank progress for the main term, but that is so minor it hasn’t actually affected the sites income.
In fact the site is earning more now because lots of competitors got slapped with the recent update.
The Results Of Blackhat SEO
The site has been making $1000+ a month in commissions since mid-February, which is 3 weeks after I began building links to it. The site was dormant 2 months prior to that so it had time to be indexed.
Here is a screen grab from GWT showing some the search queries my site now appears on.
Current Site Rankings – After Panda 4.0
These are the current rankings of the site AFTER the release of Panda 4.0 on Google.com (USA).
- 100 1st page terms
- 32 are in 1st place
Below you can see some additional graphs from RankTracker for a selection of the long tail terms I was targeting with the site.
You can see everything from the moment I started to build links to the site-
Here is the tracking of the root term of the site. You can see it had made it up to page two than began its dive back down after the last updates.
Fortunately the site drove very little traffic from this term so the revenue impact in minimal.
Website Traffic
So let’s take a quick look at traffic behind the scenes. You can see a slight dip around the time of the Penguin update but then it picks back up.
How I Did It – Step By Step
In this case study I will show you how I ranked a 10 page niche site using GSA Search Engine Ranker and just one page of unique content.
It will assume you have basic knowledge of SEO, you know how to start a blog, using GSA Search Engine Ranker & Kontent Machine 3.
None of these are tools are hard to get started with and Matthew has produced a neat guide to GSA SER and a kontent machine review if you need help.
Just to be clear, the case study below was the first time I used these tools so no previous link building experience is necessary.
For this case study I used:
- A product niche with high value commissions – $20/$30+
- A fresh copy of GSA SER and Captcha Breaker
- Kontent Machine 3
- A VPS
- Private Proxies
- PLR content
Choosing A Niche
First you need to find your niche and some products to target. I made sure my niche had at least 3 products offering good commissions.
Don’t waste your time with anything under $20 a pop. For this case study I used a sub-niche of skincare.
Finding The Target Keywords
First I headed over to Google keyword planner to find some key high traffic buying terms for my niche.
I was looking for things like:
{Best|Buy|Top} niche {treatment|Product|Solution}
That had high monthly exact match searches. In this case of around 8000 – 12000.
Now these are obviously going to be competitive, so ranking a pure spam site using GSA SER and blackhat SEO for these terms while not impossible may not be a realistic goal.
What we want are long tails based on these core terms. Things like:
{Best|Buy|Top} niche product {treatment|Product|Solution} + {For Men|For Teens|Sensitive Skin}
Use the Google LPI to assist you with this part, perform a load of manual searches pulling up all the LSI and making a note of them on a spreadsheet.
Perform further searches using each relevant LSI to build up your list. We will need these later to use as GSA SER anchor texts.
By now I had a key search term (with variants) along with lots of long tail versions to target.
I did not worry if the traffic to these LSI or long tail terms were low or showed a “-“ in the keyword planner.
Choosing a Domain Name
I always use an exact or partial match domain name. It’s highly likely that the exact match domain you want will be gone so use “search term” + “Extra”.
Make sure it’s relevant and not too spammy looking. I always use a fresh domain name to avoid problems.
Get a .com unless you are targeting a specific country and avoid hyphens.
Building The Website
The first task was to build a simple website that compared 3/4 products and promotes one as the clear a winner.
The main thing is to use a clean template that adds authority. I always look for what is ranking in my niche and emulate the best looking template to build my own site.
This is the site structure I used-
- Homepage
- 3/4x Product review pages
- 10x PLR Articles for posts grouped into related niche categories
Homepage
The homepage is what most of the work goes into. I used a HTML table to create a product comparison matrix or you could create a graphic one.
Remember a HTML table will provide better SEO opportunities as Google can’t read images the same as a HTML table.
Over 75% of the click through traffic will go to the “winning” product, so I made sure it is based on the best commissions, best conversion and the one that was the easiest sell.
Looking at competitor sites will help determine this.
I then created a further 1500 words of unique content to add flesh and authority to the homepage. The bulk of this was added after the comparison table.
You should end up with something like this:
The main thing to remember is that we are only attempting to rank the homepage.
That means the homepage content needs to be unique.
It doesn’t mean you have to write it from scratch.
I look at the other sites in my niche that were ranking, steal the bits I like and rewrite the content.
The reality is the comparison table is going to do most of the leg work, you just need some unique, keyword rich content to assist with the ranking and add some authority.
I made sure the key search term + long tail was in the Page Title <H1> and <H2> title tags.
Don’t keyword stuff. Just write naturally and use some key terms we identified in step one. GSA SER will do the rest…
Building The Remaining Pages
The rest of the site comprises of either PLR or content copied from the web. I create a product review page for each product, then bulk out the site with the PLR content.
We are only interested in ranking the homepage. In this case study, no other pages are original content. Just add images and link out to authority sites where appropriate in the PLR posts.
We are building a pure spam site so we want to cut as many corners as possible but still have the ability to rank.
Link Building
With the link building side of things we are going to use the tiered link building approach.
This is where GSA SER, a VPS and some proxies come into play, alongside a content generator like Kontent Machine.
Using Kontent Machine 3 to generate all of the tiered content I aimed to build out a tiered link structure as quickly as possible using spam content.
Setting Up GSA Search Engine Ranker
GSA SER was set up on a VPS using about 20 shared proxies. Check out Matthew’s tutorial if you need help.
There was no fixed rule to its setup and as I learned more about the program I started to change things around.
Here you see the tier structure I used with the number of links built after a few weeks-
The target sites for the tiers were as follows:
Tier One CDF + Two CDF and Three CDF
I wanted the links that make up the actual tiers to be able to pass link juice down to the money site so I set for Contextual Do Follow links only.
The easy way to do this is right click on the target sites:
Check All” then select “Uncheck No follow” and “Uncheck No Contextual”. That removes most unwanted link types.
I then manually deselect video types, social network and bookmarks.
I set GSA to begin building links to the newly forming Tier 1 as soon as they were verified. This was the same for the Tiers 2 and 3.
Keyword Anchor Text
GSA SER has an excellent anchor text generator. I targeted my main keywords then used a percentage of LSI, partial, generic and naked url anchors pointing to the money site.
There was no hard rule I followed, I just made sure there was a good range of terms pointing to the money site. I would play around with this every time I uploaded fresh content to the tier.
Every so often I would check in Ahrefs what the anchor cloud looked like and tweak accordingly.
For the lower tiers I just used “search terms” and naked urls.
To build links to your links, use this option:
Also, it is important to re-verfiy the links each day. Because we are building the tiered structure on the fly, using a lot of spam content, a lot of links get removed.
Therefore in the options for each tier, set the following:
This keeps the links in the tier structure up to date and prevents building links to dead ones.
Tier One, Tier 2 & Tier 3 Secondary
These are the lower quality links used to help power up the tiered structure. You can throw any link types at this that’s not used in the main tiers.
I hold back on volume to the money site, with just one or two links a day, but on the tiers themselves I just let GSA SER rip and build what it can.
Start building these links as soon as your tier structure becomes verified. It helps index them as well.
Just copy my choices above if you want!
Generating Spam Content
Here I used pure spam generated by Kontent Machine 3 working with the GSA SER template output.
I used relevant keywords to scrape content against and changed the tier quality for each output.
To be honest I did not pay too much attention to the output and changed it up every time I generated a fresh batch to refresh each tier.
GSA can add authority links and images, so it’s up to you which way around you do it.
The only thing it seems to effect is how sticky the tier one content is and whether it survives a manual review, which is unlikely either way. We are going for quantity over quality.
Wrapping It Up
All of this took roughly a day’s work, although there was an ongoing learning curve with GSA SER and its plugins over the past few months.
The site has survived the latest round of Google updates including Panda 4.0 & continues to drive a modest yet regular source of income. Around $3000 to date.
I have used this exact model from this site to create more in other niches which are also now starting to rank.
Does basic spam filled tiered link building work in a post Penguin & Panda world?
I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Please feel free to check out my blog at noobwarrior.com & ask any questions in the comments below!
June 5th Rankings & Earnings Update
Thanks everyone for the great feedback on the post. It was very interesting to write given all the Google activity that took place last month.
While I understand that this style of Internet Marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea, it is effective and deserves its place.
Almost 2 weeks have passed, plus what was rumoured to be another update or tweak was made by Google last week.
From the traffic stats, you can see very little has changed in real terms. There was a dip over last weekend where I thought the site was finally crashing, but then it picked up straight after.
Here are the highlights of the sites performance:
The Bad News:
- GWT is still reporting a lower set of impressions, but that doesn’t seem to affect traffic
- 5 terms have moved into #2 where larger authority sites have appeared at the top
- After reaching 12th, the root term dropped out of top 100 (US) or on page 9 (UK)
The Good News:
- Despite all the updates, May was best month with over $1100 in commissions
- Site still takes 24 #1 slots
- Traffic remains stable
- Commissions still coming in
- One product review page (that is all duplicate content) is in #4 for main review term
I think that the penalty that affected the site the most came from the Payday loans 2.0 update, not Panda 4.0.
This is due to the change in ranking/Impressions of the key terms happening a few days before Panda was released.
I am continuing to build links to the site to see if the main terms can recover ground or not. The next point of interest will be the release of Penguin!
July 16th Rankings & Earnings Update
Well another month has passed and I continue to get a lot of feedback on the original post which is great. Many people still ask whether the site ranks, which I am happy to say it does.
It is approaching the $5k mark in total affiliate sales since I started building links. The main product is almost at $4k and the other products make up the rest.
It’s a shame the exchange rate to UK sterling sucks right now! Still it’s a good haul, plus I have gained so much invaluable knowledge.
I stopped building links for around a month at the end of June/beginning July as wanted to take some time to tweak GSA SER and clean up the bloated site lists. Plus I went on holiday with my family and detox my brain from computers.
This timeout from link building saw a decline in some of the number 1 spot rankings plus affiliate sales dropped by 30%.
I started hitting it hard again last week with my newly cleaned GSA SER setup with shiny lists and have already seen a boost in rankings and sales.
Progress So Far
- Traffic although not as high as pre-Panda update is still between 50-80 visits a day
- With 5-15 clickthrough’s a day to product sites
- Traffic shows day on day increase since restarting link building
- The site has 14 #1 ranks (with 9 jumping back after new link building campaign)
- A total of 9 #2 ranks
- Then 22 other 1st page results
- That’s a total of 44 page one terms (google.com)
- Still no top 100 ranking for the main term
All Time Traffic
There has been a small decline in traffic but it is still stable…
A Closer Look At Traffic
If we take a closer look at traffic the past week you can see an uplift since link building was restarted last week…
Rank Tracking
One of my primary terms has remained stable in the #1 position, here are the rankings from day 1 to now…
One of the other primary terms I was tracking has remained strong, dropping the #1 spot but reclaiming it shortly after…
Below you can see the current rankings for all of the terms I’m tracking. There is a large drop for some of the secondary terms but they will recover once the new wave of link building kicks in…
Thanks again for all the positive feedback. Let me know if you have more questions.
October 8th Rankings & Earnings Update
It’s been few months since I last checked in on Mathew’s blog and summer is well and truly over. During which we’ve seen yet another Panda update (4.1) as well as a full frontal manual attack by Google on PBN’s. There are also rumours of Penguin just around the corner.
With regards to the case study site I am pleased to say it’s still sticking. July saw its best month ever making over $1300 although it quietened down in August and September to closer to the $600 mark. This month is looking good so far so we’ll see how it pans out.
Looking at the stats, traffic has started to drop a little but overall has remained fairly stable.
Here we can see the last 30 days and the Panda 4.1 roll out. It had little effect. As you can see there was an all time low a few days ago and I thought the site was about to die, but then it bounced back.
With regards to ranking, little has changed.
- 15 #1 spots
- 10 #2 and #3 spots
- 18 rest of first page spots
That makes 43 different tracked terms on page 1.
Obviously these are long-tail, low volume terms. The big money term I got to position 12 with got hit back in May and now ranks in a lowly 88th place.
However the point is the site still ranks, generates traffic and sales. The site has made over $7000 to date, with over $5300 coming from one product alone.
Not bad for the work I put in. In fact I have spent more time blogging about it than it took to build it!
I still continue to build links to the site and have started a new push in anticipation of the next Penguin release. It will be interesting to see what happens.
If it is hit, I will duplicate the site onto a brand new domain, 301’ing the old one to it to see what happens.
Either way, I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, good luck and stay focussed.