matthewwoodward.co.uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/build-rank-spam-site-beat-google-updates/

[UPDATE 4] How To Earn $1,000 With Nothing But Pure Spam

UPDATE #1: 5th June rankings, traffic & income updateUPDATE #2: 16th July rankings, traffic & income updateUPDATE #3: 8th October Panda 4.1 rankings, traffic & income updateUPDATE #4: 20th November Rankings & Earnings Update (After Penguin 3.0)

Today you are going to get a sneak peak of how someone ranked a site with nothing but 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 4.1which 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 workanymore – 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 spam

How to earn over $1,000 per month

The exact method & strategies used

Introducing Nick Joleson

My name is Nick Joleson & I run NoobWarrior.com I’ve spent a bit of time ranking spam websites & wanted toshare 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 thepredicted 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 sitethat 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 tosay 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 sitesincome.

In fact the site is earning more now because lots of competitors got slapped with the recent update.

Kicking Off With The Results

Before I go into more detail about what I did & more specifically how I did it, I wanted to show you the results after4 months spam link building using nothing but GSA Search Engine Ranker .

The site has been making $1000+ a month in commissions since mid-February, which is 3 weeks after I beganbuilding 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 targettingwith 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 backdown 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 Penguinupdate 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 justone page of unique content.

It will assume you have basic knowledge of SEO, building a WordPress site, 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 andKM3 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 I chose a niche and some products to target. I made sure my niche had at least 3 products offering goodcommissions.

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 for these termswhile 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 andmaking 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 GSASER 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 begone 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 andemulate 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 oryou could create a graphic one.

Remember a HTML table will provide better SEO opportunities as Google can’t read images the same as a HTMLtable.

Over 75% of the click through traffic will go to the “winning” product, so I made sure it is based on the bestcommissions, 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 ofthis was added after the comparison table.

You should end up with something like this:

The main thing to remember is that we are onlyattempting to rank the homepage.

That means the homepage content needs to beunique. It doesn’t mean you have to write it fromscratch.

I look at the other sites in my niche that wereranking, steal the bits I like and rewrite thecontent.

The reality is the comparison table is going to domost of the leg work, you just need some unique,keyword rich content to assist with the rankingand add some authority.

I made sure the key search term + long tail was inthe Page Title <H1> and <H2> title tags.

Don’t keyword stuff. Just write naturally and usesome key terms we identified in step one. GSASER will do the rest…

Building The Remaining Pages

The rest of the site comprises of either PLR orcontent copied from the web. I create a productreview page for each product, then bulk out thesite with the PLR content.

We are only interested in ranking the homepage.In this case study, no other pages are originalcontent. 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. Check out that video forthe theory if you don’t know what that is.

This is where GSA SER, a VPS and some proxies come into play, alongside a content generator like KontentMachine.

Using Kontent Machine 3 to generate all of the tiered content I aimed to build out a tiered link structure as quicklyas 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 forContextual 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 “UncheckNo Contextual”. That removes most unwanted link types.

I then manually deselect video types, social network andbookmarks.

I set GSA to begin building links to the newly forming Tier 1as soon as they were verified. This was the same for theTiers 2 and 3.

Keyword Anchor Text

GSA SER has an excellent anchor text generator. I targetedmy main keywords then used a percentage of LSI, partial,generic and naked url anchors pointing to the moneysite.

There was no hard rule I followed, I just made sure there was a good range of terms pointing to the money site. Iwould 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 alot 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 thisthat’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 GSASER 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 theGSA SER template output.

I used relevant keywords to scrape content against and changed the tierquality for each output.

To be honest I did not pay too much attention to the output and changed it upevery 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 aroundyou do it.

The only thing it seems to effect is how sticky the tier one content is andwhether it survives a manual review, which is unlikely either way. We aregoing for quantity over quality.

WARNING: Steal Your Competitors Search Rankings, Traffic & Income

Wrapping It Up

All of this took roughly a day’s work, although there was an ongoing learningcurve with GSA SER and its plugins over the past few months.

The site has survived the latest round of Google updates including Panda4.0 & continues to drive a modest yet regular source of income. Around $3000to date.

I have used this exact model from this site to create more in other nicheswhich are also now starting to rank.

Does basic spam filled tiered link building work in a post Penguin & Pandaworld?

I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Please feel free to check out my blog & 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 activitythat 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 itsplace.

Almost 2 weeks have passed, plus what was rumoured to be another update or tweak was made by Google lastweek.

From the traffic stats, you can see very little has changed in real terms. There was a dip over last weekend whereI 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 wasreleased.

I am continuing to build links to the site to see if the main terms can recover ground or not. The next point ofinterest 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. Manypeople 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 muchinvaluable knowledge.

I stopped building links for around a month at the end of June/beginning July as wanted to take some time totweak GSA SER and clean up the bloated site lists. Plus I went on holiday with my family and detox my brain fromcomputers.

This timeout from link building saw a decline in some of the number 1 spot rankings plus affiliate sales dropped by30%.

I started hitting it hard again last week with my newly cleaned GSA SER setup with shiny lists and have alreadyseen 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 shortlyafter-

Below you can see the current rankings for all of the terms I’m tracking. There is a large drop for some of thesecondary 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 whichwe’ve seen yet another Panda update (4.1) as well as a full frontal manual attack by Google on PBN’s. There arealso 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 lookinggood so far so we’ll see how it pans out.

WARNING: Steal Your Competitors Search Rankings, Traffic & Income

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 alltime 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 Mayand 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, withover $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. Itwill 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.

November 20th Rankings & Earnings Update (After Penguin 3.0)

First off, sorry for the late update, there is a good reason for this I promise. I became a father again just days afterGoogle released their last update, so I have been up to my eyeballs in new born duties and sleepless nights. Infact as I write, I have a baby asleep on my chest!

To answer everyone’s question, yes the site got hit with the last Penguin update. It got hit hard. This came as nosurprise and I had been anticipating it for a while.

You can see when it hit traffic just disappeared, all but a bit of Bing and Yahoo. RIP.

Recovering The Site Was Easy

Once I realised the site was over, I set about with the next phase. This was to take a fresh domain that I hadprepared a few months back and clone the old site on to it. For this I used a WordPress plugin called Duplicator.

It’s the best plugin I have found so far and makes site cloning a breeze. Prior to the cloning, I did a freshWordPress install and used some highly unique spun copy in a related niche. This allowed the site to becomeindexed. This is not necessary but will speed up the process that follows.

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Once this was done, I set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one. There are a number of ways to dothis, the simplest being to set it up using the Cpanel redirect function or to edit the .htaccess script for the old site.

Make sure it’s a 301 and nothing else. Don’t forget to redirect both www and non-www versions. You will findplenty of guides online showing how to do this so don’t panic if you don’t get it.

Once the site was cloned and the redirect was in place, it was just a waiting game.

Luckily it was not too long…

You can see that Google picked up the power of the redirect very quickly and began to send traffic to the sitewithin days.

It caught me off guard when I received a sale alert just 48 hours after the switch over.

As you can see the traffic started off quickly at about a 3rd of what it was. Since then I began to build links usingGSA to the new domain, but at a slower rate of a handful a day.

I had been talking to a friend about the sites progress and I sent him some links to see. At this point I had not builtmany links, but he was like hey man, there are 1000’s of links pointing to the site. Confused, I fired up Ahrefsagain to discover this on the non-www version:

At the time it was about 1200 domains but they have started to decay now. At first I thought it was a negative SEOattack but upon closer inspection it was lots of links with Chinese anchors built to non-existent pages.

It did not have the signs of an attack and just seems like a random event. The site wasn’t even ranking at the time.

I am not sure what effect these links are having, but the reality is I am building links like this anyway so it doesn’treally matter.

Results So Far

The site is starting to do a lot better, you can see from the traffic chart that there has been uplift in visits and in thelast 2 days about 4 sales have dropped in. This is due to a recent uplift in ranking.

So far the site has:

41 page one terms

29 Position 5 or above

Its still not where it was but it is certainly getting there. The new site has made $200 since launch and is gatheringmomentum as it gains rank.

I will step up the link building over the next few days to try and take some number one slots and get the traffic backto its former levels and hopefully the sales as well… I have an extra mouth to feed after all!

I’ll keep you updated as always.