Sep 14 2009
The StuckinSydney.com Links Experiment - 10 Days In
On September 4th I posted about an attempt to build links like crazy and keep track of the effects in the Google rankings for my moving to Sydney site. My plan was to build a variety of different types of links on quality websites and monitor the effect these new links had on my search engine results for the keywords ‘living in Sydney’. On September 4th, my site was ranked 18th and my goal was to attempt to bump the site to the first page.
Well 10 days in and it’s already there! Stuck in Sydney is currently sitting pretty at number nine on page one of Google’s search results. I’m not convinced it will stay there, but it’s a step in the right direction after being relegated to page three shortly after my links building campaign began. That was a bit confusing but I stuck with my plan and I’m seeing the results now.
So far the main type of links I’ve gone for have been three-way exchanges. I have offered up links to people on this site or Travoholic.com in exchange for links back to my Sydney site. So since September 4th when I started this little experiment I have added 13 inbound links pointing to the site’s main page. While 13 doesn’t seem like that many, they’re all what I would consider to be pretty high quality and half have been from sites about Australia or Sydney so hopefully those links will bring some visitors.
In addition to link swaps, I have also added 3 articles so far on Info Barrel about various Sydney suburbs. In those I have included a link into the suburb-related content and also a link to my site’s main page. I’m going to keep these coming because I think that linking to your internal pages is key to bringing in targeted traffic.
There have been two things that have really helped me in getting one-way, high-quality inbound links reasonably easily. The first is the fact that I have lots of quality sites of my own to offer links from in return and enough of them to be able to offer people options. The second is that I have been making websites for eight years and have built relationships with other webmasters along the way which means I have lots of internet buddies with old, quality sites who will actually read my link exchange requests rather than just deleting the emails straight away. It’s been great reconnecting with people I’ve lost touch with and seeing how their sites are going and the link building process for me has actually been really fun.
Since I’ve done pretty well with the ‘living in Sydney’ angle, I am going to switch gears and start to target ‘moving to Sydney’ and the more popular and competetive ‘Sydney life’. For the former I am currently on page three of the results and for the latter I am nowhere to be seen so it will be interesting to see if and where I appear in Google’s search results for that term.
This has all been pretty eye-opening for me. Links certainly seem to be the ticket to Google’s front page and I’m going to keep at it with this little experiment to try to get some traffic finally flowing into my Sydney site.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Congratulations, I’m still trying to point my site in firsts ranks before startint to rank my english website, So it’s good to see that it’s possible to achieve the firsts places for some of us.
Congrats on getting to page 1 already. I rather doubt your rankings will drop, especially if you keep up your current strategies. Just keep at it and your efforts will snowball. As you build up PR & trust, you should keep climbing the rankings for many keywords. I find it works well to keep varying link building strategies and get links from many different sources. I recommend you try to get a bunch of Sydney related articles outsourced. A big batch of articles can add up to a substantial number of links.
Very interesting experiment. I’m looking forward to seeing what impact it makes on your monthly earnings. Best of luck.
Good work on the link building. I like the idea of linking directly to internal pages for more targeted traffic. I’ve been considering doing that as well for a couple of my sites, just haven’t found the time to work on any articles for ezine or info hub or anything. Best of luck infiltrating those higher searched keywords, I’ve got a few of them locked in my cross-hair, have yet to start making a shot at them.
Just curious, with all of your sites and ideas, do you find it tough keeping those pages updated with fresh content? Any tips you can share?
Thanks again for posting all ur ideas and such, they’re great for brainstorming!
your page on accommodation options in sydney reads “Couchsurfing, short term apartment rental, sharehouse, hostel, lease a place to yourself”. and about the tax number, simply “The bad news is that you can’t legally work in Australia or open a bank account until you have a Tax File Number. The good news is that it’s easy to get.”
that’s it?!
i like a few of the things you do, but i really think you’re going the wrong direction here. you should be producing content worth linking, not wasting time “building links”.
(
sorry to be the negative commenter)
This is interesting stuff but you should be a little careful building links too fast and unnaturally because I have read time after time on webmasterworld etc how people have built links like crazy in this way and then seen their site penalised and drop to position 500+.
Sorry, negative comment #2.
Ana and Working Nomad. She’s definitely on the right track. I think she’ll continue to see some good results with this strategy. Ana, I hate to break it to you, but great content does not necessarily attract links. In fact it doesn’t in most cases. And these days, when it does, they are worthless nofollow links from social media. That puts quality content producers in a terrible position. I’ve seen some pretty high profile content producers managed by old school media bite the dust because they didn’t understand the link economy. Top of the line content didn’t help them in SERPs and they were slaughtered by sites with inferior content and poor user experience. Years ago I put trust in that method of great content attracting links as extolled on WMW (BTW Working Nomad, I’ve known you from there for years now). It failed me, time and time again for years. You can’t expect to win that way when all your competitors aren’t playing by those rules. This is the reality. Sorry to dispel any illusions.
Working Nomad, if she builds links from a wide variety of sources, she should be fine. Diversity is key with links.
@Language Dude totally agree with you. Ana - I have now twice had authoritive sites link to quality content of mine - do you know why they did it - becasue I was already on page 1 because of the links I had built! How did they find me - they googled - and very few people go past pasge 1!
Kirsty if the site is just registered - keep the links slow but steady - once they are a few months old they are good to go!
Lissie
@corbin It’s really hard to keep the sites up to date with content but it’s not something I worry about too much. I am currently working on a massive update for http://www.workingholidayinfo.com for all of the visa info as that’s the sort of thing that changes. But general advice stuff like how to use the London Underground or hostel etiquette doesn’t really change. My goal is to add new content on all of my sites from time to time but it’s not something I’ve been able to do much of. For most of the sites I do, updates aren’t demanding in the same was as they are with blogs.
@ana Ya, I know! It’s terrible. I have been planning on writing those articles and more for the Sydney site for ages and I know it’s something that is holding it back. I don’t plan on leaving it like that, I just need to find the time to finish those pages off.
@workingnomad Ya I had been concerned about that but I would expect I would need a lot more links at one time to get onto Google’s radar. And if that did happen, well, lesson learned. Lissie and Language Dude’s comments have reassured me a bit more about this.
@languagedude Lots of great advice, as always!
@lissie Like the new site! Is this you stepping into the MMO ring officially?
Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m pretty shocked that after eight years of doing this, you only realize that links are the ticket onto google. I would have figured you knew that already.
Your site will bounce since google sees that it is all of a sudden getting new links and wants to make sure its not spam. after a bit, it will iron out and stop bouncing around the SERPs
Matt, Matt, Matt… we’ve been over this a million times. I’ve always had a ‘ticket onto Google’ with no link building required up until recently so I’ve never focused much on link building campaigns, article submissions or any of that stuff. I know links are important, they’re just not something I’ve bothered with much until now and this experiment is less about whether links will help my rankings and more about how many I will need and how long it will take to see results. What I’m surprised about is how few links and little time it’s actually taken, at least for these keywords.
@Kirsty yeah careful I am going to build a list and spam everyone *evil MMO laugh* I saw a little micro-niche which might make a good plan B!
@Matt I think what Kirsty is demonstrating is just how powerful the right link is - ie a contextural link from an authority site in the same niche
Well I think your strategy is fine. Unless you are getting hundreds of irrelevant links, I don’t think you will have trouble with the big G.
I would still be wary of getting too many links too quickly. That was my point, nothing to do with variety of links. It’s obvious a variety of links will be good.
I’ve only had a couple of sites that have been penalised by google and both times it was aggressive link building.
I also think that if you want a site to be good long term then focusing more on content than gaining links is still the way to go and I cannot see that changing because there has to be more value in great content than someone’s ability to gain links unnaturally.
Big players (e.g. national level media) will pick up on great content and usually link to it, and a link from the Washington Post is worth a 1000 links from any three way link campaign.
I also think that if you want a site to be good long term then focusing more on content than gaining links is still the way to go and I cannot see that changing because there has to be more value in great content than someone’s ability to gain links unnaturally.
Big players (e.g. national level media) will pick up on great content and usually link to it, and a link from the Washington Post is worth a 1000 links from any three way link campaign.
Good stuff. Finally you getting top 10 ranking in Google. Congrats. Thanks for share links experiment.