Day 5

So, it’s been 5 days officially now. And I haven’t done anymore work, (been working pretty hard at work and preparing for my vacation). But I have been watching and tweaking very small tweaks with adding search terms to the sites, checking link backs, etc. etc. And for Day 5 we really just get a status report on the two different projects.

Main Project ( area + niche )
On the Movies, Pictures microsite of the larger target site I’ve noticed has slowly starting to get indexed. It literally has hundreds of thousands of pages to it, (which if you read Day1 I don’t hardly store anything on my server), but currently as stands here is how yahoo & google index it:

1. Google - Indexed Pages: 18 pages / In-Links: 0
2. Yahoo - Indexed Pages: 1 page. (index) / In-Links: 6 ( from the 3 wp blogs

Page Rank: N/A

The goal of this site was to generate several thousands of pages in the index. So let’s say my goal from here on out is 5,000 pages. That means:

Current Goal Status: .03%

However, I have noticed something. If you remember from Day 1, I pointed all the links to an old - non-related established site of mine ( 5+ years, page rank 2) and watched it within the past couple days jump up from mid page 2, to mid page 1 for the phrase in the links from this site. So, I added the same stuff to my affiliate site. Links to the old established site to see how it effects it. If it does have the same effect and I jump up in rankings again, then wow.. this really works, a LOT easier than I thought. I would just have to identify all the variables (e.g. Did it jump up only because of age in domain? Number of pages new site has? Competition? etc. etc.) But, it would still be very promising. Also another really cool thing is starting to happen, I am seeing some consistent, low competition long tail keyword terms because I am pulling latest/top stories from Digg, Flickr for the homepage, and hottest/newest videos/pictures from YouTube & Flickr. So this will be good to have when I go back to SEO marketing for the main site.

Affiliate Project
Little recap, used 40 templates, 600+ seo terms, and am generating content from term + template on each page request. There is somewhere in the ballpark of 650 unique pages you can generate from the page and after 3 days of being live and having only 1 wordpress linking to it, with 1 post on it (testing the bare minimum) here are my current stats:

1. Google - 15 Pages Indexed - #3 For Targeted Phrase
2. Yahoo - Nothing

So I will watch and see if I stay at #3, and how if I get any traffic. Will post my stats on here

So What Now?
Well, from a milestones stand point it wasn’t a very productive past 3 days. As I said, been swamped. However I have gotten some planning and domain accumulation out of the way. Over vacation, next to the beach, I may scribble down some notes on paper. But I have two totally different “case studies” in effect now, so I don’t feel as bad with taking a step back and getting my feed underneath me while these do their thing. That way, when I get a solid game plan I’ll already have two different use-cases using two different methodologies & tactics with SEO strategies to know if they both work, don’t work, or one is superior. All in all, not a bad start in my oppinion.

Recap
It’s been 5 days and here is where we stand:

• Area + Keyword Case Study

1. Built One Large (Media) Microsite of Goal Site, Pointing to Old Established SIte. Has 18 pages Indexed.

• Affiliate Marketing Case Study

1. Built One Large Keyword Centric Site, #3 on Target Phrase, 15 pages indexed.

Day 2

Alright, it’s been around 18 hours and only my index page has been indexed. I’ve added a 24 hour cache layer so the content doesn’t change/nor links for 24 hours so google doesn’t think I am changing my content all the time on the same pages. I’ve also gone to a few of the pages from a couple different IPs & Proxies and generated a couple dozen page request trying to use the AdWords SEO tactic calling out to Google’s bot. So far it hasn’t yielded any results.

In the meantime
So, I stated before that I am not doing affiliate marketing; however the point of this exercise is to learn. And after a conversation with a couple of people in #rainbowseo, pretty active group on SEO, I decided to try my hand. So I took a recommendation from a guy on a product, found a decently searched term that had the available domain (it was a long tail search) and set up an affiliate site. This is my first attempt, and here were my steps:

1. Browsed over to TemplateMonster and found a nice, clean template I think I could use.
2. Designed my own version of the Template with changes I liked (saved me $70, and I had more control)
3. Cut up the layout into xHTML / CSS
4. Set up rewrite mod to push everything besides index.php to viewarticle.php
5. Wrote logic to take /whatever+this+term+is/ as the keyword term and stored it as a variable, then the page picks out of a list of templates (so far 40), and replaces %term% with whatever the keyword term is. So for instance a template might look like “…cool information on %term%, but act now!….” and it would then be “…cool information on whatever this term is, but act now!..”. Then I have a list, of about 700 terms for this product in an array. I pull about 25 random links, shuffle the array, and put them on the site. So let’s say one of the random link terms is “cool stuff” it would generate /cool+stuff/ which would invoke the logic state above. That’s it.
   (All terms, content, images were provided by my affiliate marketing, took about 30 minutes of effort from me to take it from their page into my system) 
6. Pushed it to my server, set up the apache vhost for the domain.
7. Then I set up adsense & analytics for it, went and generated about 20 page request.
8. Created a wordpress blog about the product, and linked to it on the blogroll & made one post in the blog. Will add a post every other day.

That’s it. Now I just have to wait and see, there are a few things I haven’t done here that I, and you, should note. There is no caching layer, meaning every page request even on the same uri would generate different links, different content, but the same keywords. I am going to wait and watch how Google handles this and compare it to my other site I made on Day 1 where I have a 24 hour cache.

Back To The Main Project
So, today isn’t complete just yet. I need to make sure I stay active on the main project at hand so I went back to 2 of my 3 blogs that I created on Day1 targeting area + term, wrote a new post on each one about the area + term and submitted it. All the blogs, of course, are already indexed with Google. Hopefully in the next couple days, a few more pages will get indexed from the site I made on Day 1. Only time will tell Been a long day, I’m taking off.

Day 1

First Things First
So the first day, planning. I’ve been reading all over the world about blue hat seo, blogs, forums, irc, etc. etc. Now it’s time to start envisioning. Where do I start? Well as most of my projects I started at my desired goal and tried to work backwards.

The Goal
Unlike a lot of SEO gurus, my goal isn’t affiliate marketing. I actually have a site that I have been working on for a few months that is not only niche but is localized. There is a lot of secrecy in the “underground” of seo world for obvious reasons (google, competitors, etc) so I wont tell the niche nor the area instead, I will refer to them as “keyword niche” and “area“. So, back to the goal, I want my site to rank very high for keyword niche area. My site doesn’t sell anything, but if I can generate traffic I can leverage local establishments to pay for advertising and services. So that’s the goal! Since I know my goal I have to decide on a strategy. And, I like Eli’s Empire tactic so that’s the one I am going to use.

The Land
As Eli refers to it, you have to have land. So I purchased a server ( Debian for those who care ) which puts my current accumulated land at:

1. Dedicated Server
2. 2 Shared Hosting Accounts from a Provider
3. 2 Shared Hosting Account from a Provider

Now I need to set up & configure my newly acquired dedicated server with:

• php
• apache
• mysql
• dns

Alright, done. Now I can use my new server. Well what should I put on it? That’s a good question…

The First Black Hat? Gray Hat? Who the hell knows Site
So I have this nice beefy server and nothing on it. I don’t want to build anything too black hat, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time developing because this is my first attempt, and I’m never that good

So I am taking the SERP domination tactic ( again explained by Eli ) and breaking down my area niche site into a smaller subsection. The Movies & Pictures from YouTube and Flickr using their APIs querying on the niche keyword area that my main site is targeting. It took me around 5 hours to write this, so that I can redeploy it with a different area if so desired in the future. The sites works like this, it shows default videos/pictures with the query and paginates through them (thousands of pages already). Then, each picture/video is it’s own url.. even more pages. Now here is the part which expotentiolly grows the site, each video and picture returns a tag from the API and each tag is it’s own link so /videos/tag/ which starts the whole process again but with the query now “Area + Tag”.

I don’t want to link straight from this site to my target site, because I don’t know what’s going to happen. It might get banned, penalized, etc. No need to risk, instead I have an unrelated site that is a 6yr old domain with only a pr2 - never done much with it. So I will point to that site, and I will watch to see how this site affects it.

Alright now, I am going to throw a couple of adsense ads on it. Put some tracking on it, and bam. It’s on the new server.

Now I rush over to wordpress and register 3 blogs under 3 different accounts all area+keyword.wordpress.com and write a legit blog about the area + keyword. Then in the links category I link to the other blogs, and to the new site I just created.

All in all this took me about 10 hours. Been a busy day, tomorrow I am going to take a step back and put a bigger plan into action.