The Information:

Site: Codename: Gryphon
Domain: Exact Match Domain + two letters dot com

Keyword: Three Word Long-Tail
Exact Monthly Search Volume: 3600 Global | 1900 Local
Google Contextual Targeting Suggested Bid: $0.95

Adwords Competition: ~0.95
Keyword in Quotes: 201,000
Allintitle: 12,700
Allinurl: 10,700

Experiment:

Come out of the box back linking a new domain like crazy!  Tons of backlinks from several sources immediately without mercy.  I expect to bounce around the SERPs like a mofo, or be sandboxed into oblivion.  I’ll continue the experiment until it comes out, if it ever does.

Expected Revenue:

Considering the homepage and the additional phrases I’ll pick up on the inner pages directly related, we can simplify this to 4500 exact monthly searches global.  Let’s be conservative and use the following equations:

• 4500 exact monthly searches x 40% of the searches in the top spot / 30 days per month = 60 visitors per day
• 60 visitors per day x 2% click through rating = 1.2 clicks per day
• 1.2 clicks per day @ $0.93 x 68% revenue share = $0.76 per day or $22.77 per month

I’m not scoffing at $20.10 a month because four more of those guarantees a payout at my favorite net-30 CPC company… And with the competition, I’m thinking this will be a piece of cake.  More about the competition incoming.

The Competition:

There are domains that are 13, 11, 9, and 8 years old in the top ten, but luckily most of those are ranking pages, not the homepage, so I’m not worried.  That’s a good sign here.  The other top level domains that are ranking are some coms and nets with hyphens and crap in them and are a year old or under, with one being two years old.  The number one spot is a Blogspot with good on-page SEO.  The Page Rank of these sites varies from a 3, a 2, and a bunch of 1′s and 0′s.  No problem there.  The backlinks to the URL’s feature one that has 300, another at 150, and the rest hovering at 50 and below.  Many below 10.  Super easy cheesy… Cheddar cheesy.  Everyone’s on-page SEO is pretty out of whack, even those who are obviously manipulating rank for ad clicks.  I’m not tagging a time frame here, but I see this being mine pretty quickly.  There is one Exact Match Domain at #4 with the dot net, and others are like mine, with words, letters, or hyphens added.

(For those interested, the above information was gathered with Market Samurai and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool)  Actually, I’ve returned on Day #87 to add some screen shots from a couple of tools.  The first is from Market Samurai showing the competition and the second is from SpyFu.

On this one, you’ll see how I’ve anchored my own domain at the top, then the list starts from 1-10.  You’ll notice that my domain is currently #6 on the list and that the figures match up.  This shows all kinds of information about the competition.  Market Samurai is the shizz!  I’ll leave you to figure out what all the acronyms stand for.  If you can’t figure it out, ask me in the comments and I may bestow my grace upon thee.

This next image is from SpyFu.  There is a freebie version and a paid version.  Just depends on the depth of info you want.  This is from the free version.

You can see above what the CPC ranges at and how it’s been moving, much like a stock quote.  The number of advertisers and daily search volume are important figures to helping you determine your possible revenue.  The more advertisers, the higher the bids for clicks usually are.

The Journal:

Day #0

The domain was purchased and the nameservers are pointed at the right place, but I haven’t even made a folder or add-on domain or anything yet, as I’m chillin at the beach, boyeeee.  This won’t affect the case study as no indexing will occur until I slap something up there and ping it.  If a Godaddy parking page gets indexed, whatever.  I’m not concerned.  I’ll start day 1 once the site gets built and pinged.

• Completed: Domain Purchased for $7.50, Name Servers Set
• Expenses: $7.50

Day#1

Today I returned from the beach and spent some time choosing a theme.  I ended up just grabbing one out of a folder of themes on my computer, and used the Adsense 100k Blueprint theme, which was a knock of the ProSense “BlueSense” theme by Dosh Dosh.  I decided to try for one of those simple, ugly, but high CTR themes on this one.  So I built the theme, made a lot of changes to move ad units, etc, because quite frankly there was some risky stuff built into this theme.  Another thing to look for is it already had some Google Analytics code in the footer… dunno what that was about.  But I changed it up quite a bit and wrote up ~900 words for the home page.  I covered all the On-Page SEO.  I’m running a trial of SerpIQ and it’s giving me a 94/100 for on-page.  I just need to add images tomorrow and get some alt text in there.  Otherwise I’m just lacking the EMD (exact match domain).  Off page I get an 8/100.  That will be rectified tomorrow.  The site is built, but not indexed.  I suspect I’ll wake up and see it indexed.  I’ll be shooting off a ton of backlinks tomorrow anyways, so we’ll see how it goes.  I’m not going to ping anything this time either.

• Completed: Theme Customized, Plugins Installed, On-Page SEO Done, Homepage Content Complete
• Indexed: No
• Backlinks: 0

Day#2

Today I added images to the homepage.  With the addition of the img alt text, SerpIQ now gives the homepage an On-Page SEO score of 100/100.  Perfectomundo.  So while waiting on this beast to get indexed, I started slinging backlinks directly at it, no tiers or buffers.  Just right to the money site.  This culminated with ~10,000 blog comments.  In the meantime, I set up Market Samurai for the 16 keywords I’m going for initially.  These will be the ones I watch in this case study.  I’ll report income on them all, but I’m only going to report rankings on the main term, as it’s the only one with substantial traffic.  With the back links being shot out, I was finally indexed.  I decided I’d collect about six of the keywords on additional pages as I beef up the site a little bit.

Now I’m going to admit my folly I just realized.  I totally sent out 10,000 blog comments unanchored.  Not a damn one of them.  They are all randomly generated names like “Gerald Williams.”  That sucks.  But it got them indexed and will still flow some link juice.  I’m not going to worry about anchor text variations now.  I’m going to hit it with the exact keywords from here out.  To summarize todays events:

• Indexed: Yes!
• Backlinks: ~10,000 randomly anchored blog comments.
• Rankings:  252 (+∞)

Day#3

Today I blasted out another ~4,000 blog comments, this time anchored with the 10 or so keywords I want the homepage to rank for.  I let them anchor in an equal spread.  Tomorrow I may hit only the main keyword.  In the meantime, I manually commented to two PR5, one PR4, and two PR3 pages.  After this, I checked the PR of the list of ~10,000 I used yesterday and came up with probably ten PR5′s, twenty PR4′s, thirty PR3′s, even more PR2′s, and probably one hundred PR1′s.  The rest were PR0 or N/A.  But that’s awesome.  I have put together such a good list of comments.  I make my daddy proud.  I created an “About” page today with some more fluff and more occurences of the main keyword.  I’m going to contact a fellow about writing some more content for me, and dripping that in throughout the case study.

• Backlinks: ~4,000 evenly anchored across 10 keywords + 5 manual High PR comments
• Rankings:  247 (+5)

Day#4

Today kicks off phase 2, which really began yesterday with the addition of the “About” page.  I outsourced some content writing to a kind gentleman who has been writing for me in the past.  I locked in a deal with him at $3 per 500 words, which is a very good deal for the quality.  It’s hard to find anything below $1 per 100 words that doesn’t completely suck.  This guy understands SEO so it’s less of a pain for me.  I ordered 15 articles for $45.  Four of these target key phrases, and the others are just fluff to fill the site out.  I’m going to order another batch of 10 or so from him after this and call the site done.  I think that’ll make it less likely to be seen as a “thin” site and dodge the banhammer later.  I’m all about longevity.  I’ll pay it up front.  I’m also going to shoot out another large batch of blog comments tonight.  I’m going to aim for 10,000, but I’ll update the actual amount in the bullet below later after it’s done.  I found four more keywords the homepage should rank for without any additional content or changes.  I added those in the rotation.  Once these articles start dripping it it should help with the “freshness factor” boost I’ve been seeing.

• Outsourced: 15 articles
• Backlinks: ~7,000 blog comments evenly anchored across 14 keywords
• Rankings: 252 (-5)
• Expenses: $52.50

Day#5

Quick and dirty – I blasted off another 7,000 blog comments, and I’m seeing the results I expected to see.  I’m currently blasting a quadrazillion blog comments directly to the money site.  This sucker is going to bounce or hit the sandbox for a minute.  I wanted to explore this route of not diversifying your link profile and also hitting it with tons of backlinks immediately upon indexing.  Well, I’m finding out, because it’s no longer ranked today.  I expect it to pop back in.  I’m going to keep hitting it with blog comments for another five or six days until I get the content that was ordered.  Then I will schedule it to drip in and I’ll blast those much more slowly.  If that doesn’t bring it back, I’ll start hitting it with social bookmarks.  I may not update this every day until it starts getting exciting again.  Now, I’ve kept a constant link velocity.  I’ve heard touted off a hundred times that if you start out of the gates sprinting and keep the momentum its not a problem.  We’ll see if this is a bounce or a sandbox…

• Backlinks: ~7,000 blog comments equally anchored among keywords
• Rankings: -∞

Days#6-18

I’ve done nothing to this site since the rankings dropped.  I turned my attention to another set of sites until I saw some return movement.  Today Gryphon began ranking for one of it’s 10 home page keywords at #577.  So hopefully that’s a sign of things to come.  I think I’ll have someone sling some social bookmarks at it while I’m having issues with my VPS.  I need to diversify the link portfolio.

Day#19

And we are back in business.  The social bookmarking helped out.  Today I popped back in seven terms on the homepage, but not the main term.  That’s okay though.  The highest is ranking 57 while the lowest is 309.  I’m going to let this age while I keep pounding away at another case study.  I should be getting some articles in soon to drip in, which I’m sure will help.

Day#20

I ran the link checker again and the main term is now ranking again at #144, which is the new high!.  It appears that I needed to diversify my link profile instead of only blog comments.  Lesson learned!  Can’t blast away with only one type.  Can we still blast away with a lot of types from the get go?  We’ll try it on another case study.  But let this be a confirmation of what everyone says to everyone who freaks out.  The sandbox is okay.  You will come out of it, and if you stay in the game you will come out way ahead of where you were.  In this case, over 100 positions ahead!

• Rankings: 144 (+∞) *highest bounce*

Day#21-30

Back in the sandbox!  Nowhere to be found.

Day#31

Today I received a report where I traded a review for a guy’s service.  He hooked me up with two PR5′s, two PR4′s, and two PR3′s.  Already this has me now ranking on nine of the ten phrases I was shooting for on the homepage.  I realize that one of them is probably not going to happen on the homepage, so I might write another page for that term.  That’d make the site less thin as well.  I checked rankings twice today.  Once I was not on the map for the top term.  Now I’m at 233.  It’s bouncing like a mofo.  But I’ll log the rank at this 233.

• Backlinks: Two PR5, two PR4, and two PR3 blog comments.
• Rankings: #233 (+∞)

Nothing new done.  Still waiting on the content I ordered.  The guy hasn’t responded to any contact, but has come through for me several times before.  We shall see.  Rankings moved up a bit.

• Rankings: #229 (+4)

I have done nothing new but let this site age.  The sandbox in combination with my article guy going AWOL for a minute has screwed any kind of consistency over for this site.  I’ll keep logging and we’ll see what happens.  I did receive the articles and will drip them in every two days.  I’ll be writing more myself and adding them to the schedule list.  I’ll probably just do some easy social bookmarking on all of these pages in order to start getting some IP diversity and small amounts of PR juice flowing.

• Rankings: #189 (+30)

Since the last entry I have trickled in six articles every other day.  That’s it.  None of the social bookmarking I mentioned or anything.  Just adding some of the content.  In the time frame of being #189 last time until now, I have popped in and out of the SERPs over and over.  It was some kind of dance/sandbox mixture.  But today I check the rankings and find myself at… #24!  Schweet.  I’m going to continue dripping pages in, as I still have a good 9 or so articles left from the outsourcing.  I’m also going to order  a “Top 20″ Social Bookmarking package to throw at the homepage tonight.

• Content: 6 articles every two days
• Backlinks: Top 20 Social Bookmarking sites to homepage
• Profits: $54
• Rankings: #24 (+165!)

I’ve done no backlinking to this site still after it returned to the SERPs since I wanted it to settle.  However, I have added another three pages of content to it.  I hope that keeps the panda well fed, because I was just offered a review copy for blog posts on 50 different PR3 blogs.  I’ve never used a network like this and I’m hoping it really pushes things forward.  I split it between this site and another site with four keywords each.  So the main keyword should get anchored around 8 times but it is featured in the other three keywords as well.  As for the previous week or so, I’ve seen the site move up two spots on the main term, which puts us at…

• Content: 3 articles across 5 days
• Rankings: #22 (+2)

• Content: 1 article
• Rankings: #9 (+13)

In the past four days, I submitted on Article Marketing Robot to a list I scraped together.  After checking all the results, it boiled down to about ~300 sites with probably 100 articles found for that blast.  I also then blasted those with some blog comments… probably about 10 each.  I suspected this would bounce me a bit and it did.  Putting me at…

• Content: 2 articles
• Backlinks: ~100 articles + 10 blog comments each
• Rankings: #18 (-9)

Day #92

Got in the report for the Top 20 Bookmarks and slung about 250 comments total at them.  Still waiting on the 120+ bookmarks report.  We’ll see what happens.

• Backlinks: Top 20 Social Bookmark sites + ~250 comments to those.
• Rankings: #6
• Expenses: $55.30

Day #93

Wrote an article and posted it.  If this beast doesn’t move soon, I’m going to pull out some big guns.

• Content: 1 article
• Rankings: #6

• Content: 2 articles
• Rankings: #6
• Expenses: $70.30

Day #98

I’m guessing that some of the 130+ High PR Blogs are being posted or some of the previous linkbuilding is kicking in because rankings have dropped drastically.  Now, I’m seeing this is as a good thing because I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar it’s a dance before it settles higher than #6.  We’ll see.

• Rankings: #41 (-35)

Day #100

Added two pages of content.  Saw a little movement in rankings.

• Content: 2 articles
• Rankings: #39 (+2)

Day #106

Yesterday I had sixteen High PR comments sent to the site ranging from PR2 to PR5.  I also added two new pieces of content yesterday.  I won’t be adding any more content to this site.  It is finito on the on-page and on-site end of things.  All backlinks and ranking from here out!  These new links pushed it back to where it was since that last algorithm tweak.

Today is “sling a bunch of backlinks” day and this site wasn’t forgotten.  Here is what went down:

• Backlinks: ~500 specifically anchored comments to all pages, ~200 article submissions, ~800 wiki links
• Rankings: #5 (+1)

Day #122

Tossed a grip of high pr backlinks at the site.  It’s chillin midway down the front page.  I gotta make this beast move.  I have some tricks up my sleeve.  I can’t believe this is day #122 and it’s still not first place.  I’m going to try some different things this week unrelated to on-page and off-page SEO.

• Backlinks: ~30 High PR blog comments
• Rankings: #6
• Expenses: $75.30

Day #126

I slapped about 2000 comments at the home page across the past four days.  Rankings are stable.  Pissing me off!

• Backlinks: 2000 comments
• Rankings: #6

Day #136

This is funny.  I feel like this site is taking forever to rank and it’s not really going to make the income I was hoping for.  However, I will persevere and continue to push it.  Tonight I ordered a 105 blog posts package on domains ranging from PR 0-6.  We’ll see what that does.

• Backlinks: 105 PR 0-6 blog posts
• Expenses: $79.96

Day #142

I got another 30 blog posts (for free!) to sling at this site, but the mother stil won’t budge!  Next, I’m going to sacrifice a pigeon to Cthulu and see if that helps it out, because I’m about out of ideas.  I can’t justfiy busting out too big of guns… dunno.  I’ve been concentrating on other sites recently.  I’m not real excited about this one.  It’s not motivating to watch a site sit at the same ranking for a long time.

• Backlinks: 30 assorted blog posts
• Rankings: #6

Day #152

Finally something interesting!  This is the most ad layout aggressive site I have, because I tried a certain theme meant to increase CTR.  Well, it got a minor knock back during the newest algorithm tweak based on content above the fold.  It lost two spots, but gained one back.  I’ve also done quite  a bit of linkbuilding to this sucker in hopes to get some positive movement.  This one has just been stuck for a while now.  It’s got enough age and enough links already to sustain some heavy hitting.  So I made a tier 2 of about 800 wiki’s and 100 articles, and smashed those with about 10,000 comments.  They all funnel to this one site.  Plus I got 261 blog posts all from unique domains.  That should do something very soon.  I expect to have something nice to report back in about a week or so.

• Backlinks: 800 wikis, 100 articles, all blasted with 10k comments.  261 blog posts
• Rankings: #8 (-2)
• Expenses: $92.46

The Results:

Incoming after a month or so of #1 rankings.