A Website Reaches PR3 In 8 Months

I know, PR3 isn’t much and PR should not be a focus… But for Google to give any website some weight that early in the life of a domain, it makes you wonder.
How does a person in 8 short months go from an idea and a domain name and a simple wordpress blog to a completely optimized site getting 1200 hits per month and a PR3 domain?

It’s not as hard as you might think! What’s also interesting is how much optimization would be left to get this to a $250+ per month ads revenue. Mind you I know that’s not much, but automated cash is just that – free money, right? Beats breaking your back with a shovel anyhow.

Here’s some stats from the auctioning of the site itself:

Since it’s not my website, and it’s just some random website for sale on the Warrior forum, I don’t know how I could get in trouble discussing it, so here’s what I found!

Domain age…

Usually, with most sites even especially in competitive markets like weight, diet, quit smoking, Viagra, any legal term, real estate and other competitive industries, a domain name as young as this would not have early success of any kind… Maybe 30-50 uniques a day, so as you can see, with the registration info from whois.sc to the right here, this is pretty amazing early success…

Website Content

I wasn’t impressed with the content, but I would give it a 6 out of 10. It’s not the content you’d get hiring former New York Times employees, but it’s also not $5 articles from Indian outsourcers either. It’s mid-grade researched material that can be had from any starving college student for $10-15 each. Nothing earth shattering here.

Link Juice…

Yeah, come on buddy, you knew we were all going to look there… And I was at first incredibly impressed! I was thinking, I gotta study this (and this is probably where most of the inspiration to blog about it came from!) Then, I sorta got sad, that this is *WHY* He’s a PR3 with ONLY 1200 uniques a month and not 3,000.

But they’re impressive backlinks none-the-less and done correctly, it could have been a monster strategy instead of a ho-hum strategy.

What he did to get 1600 links from sites that Google trusts

• Blog Comments
  Some with keywords, some with usernames like ‘philly’ and some where there’s a blatant link just copied and pasted right into the body of the blog comment. (a bit spammy, yes but in some social circles this is like a signature line)
• Commenting on Reviews
  One of the smarter things he did was comment on reviews that were related to products in the weight, workout type markets. Quite neat.
• Being added to lists on powerful sites…
  http://sportsvl.com/bodybuilding/
  Links like this one are just amazing…
• Fast Company Magazine?
  Apparently all their comment links are DO-FOLLOW!
  Holly shmoley!

I won’t dig in any deeper as many of you have the tools to do that already (Yahoo site explorer and the domain name I mentioned). The thing is, 99% of the links this guy is getting aren’t REALLY folks voting for the site but just him influencing the search engine.

A link was designed to be a ‘vote’ saying “I like this website”. But if the owner of the site votes for himself 1160 times, and it COUNTS… how does that work? It doesn’t.

How to monster this strategy

Yes, it’s important to comment and be a member of your particular niche’s community, and i wouldn’t entirely fault the blog comment links like on fastcompany in general topics either, but there are ways of tightening the screws.

#1. Stay on Topic as much as you can.

Seeing links from search engine optimization website comments and such and other non-specific sites even if there WAS a great link opportunity makes me think this guy was spreading too thin. That audience on that page would not be likely to even WANT to look at his site anyway… Getting in front of the right audience of people who DO want your info helps quite ab it.

#2. Having juicy content on the site.

Once you do get the odd click from all those links you have out there, having stuff so amazing, so graphically enticing, so well wordsmithed that it jumps off the page like a mexican jumping bean.. I mean it doesn’t have to be poetic literature but a hint less textbook like… and those few who did click down to his website to see what he had would have probably linked back… If it were easy to…

#3. Making it easier to get links to you naturally

Adding the social sharing buttons at the bottom of your page helps dramatically to allow people to naturally tweet, email, send to a friend, digg, stumbleupon, linked in or other ways of viralling out your post, or web page. It’s so much easier to share content when it does have those buttons. Heck, I even LOOK for those buttons when I really REALLY like a post.

#4. Don’t forget to use competition spying tools!

Did you know SEO for Firefox works on Yahoo Site Explorer, imagine finding out which articles caught fire and got a ton of link juice and traffic and spin-off and using those to get your comments?

?

You know, a couple days ago I was reading an RSS feed on my Blackberry from SEOMoz. One of their writers had mentioned that he often watches auctions on Flippa from guys with young domains and HUGE traffic. He’s always using the comp intel tools to find out HOW they did it and how so quickly.

I dismissed it and thought that was something i’d look at one day if i had time, in the far off future. Of course, I won’t have time. But this was really cool and I just had to share it. Totally advanced SEO.
Until Next Time,
Daniel J Deyette

P.S. Hey!!!!! – Share this with the share buttons or tweet it, would ya! If you like it, someone else will. Helping others always comes back to you.

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