My little seo experiment

This was just a little game between me and a few friends over on DP. Right now people there have bidding web directories where you can start with a buck and get a permanent backlink. You can also bid yourself onto the top of the homepage by outbidding others who are listed. Basically, I like the concept, but needless to say, this is being overdone now and way spammy.

Many of the contestants registered keyword domains for it or bought expired domains with high PR. My point was to use frogengine.net which has PR2 and prove to everyone that PR is not that important when it comes to outrankings someone.

OK, I made it to number 1. Right now I might be on number 2, because the dude bought some more backlinks when that happened. But I spent very little. 80% of the reason why I outranked them all was

1) Contextual links. I blogged about it and had the link to frogengine.net embedded in the blog posts with anchor "Bidding Web Directory" and some of my friends blogged about it as a favor to me as well. When you look at the thread on Digitalpoint, you will see that everyone was posting their links with the same anchor. I then quoted them replacing their url with mine in the quote. Forum signatures IMO are NOT that effective anymore and as a matter of fact I actually started shooting up in my rankings when I took the link out of my signature. What Google is looking for is REFERENCES and having real unique content, naturally written with your link embedded with the right anchor is IMO considered a major reference by Google. So as far as I'm concerned, those links work a lot better than the ones which are often paid links, such as sitewides on the bottom of a blog or even links in the blogroll.

2) I targeted other bidding directories showing up on the first 2 pages of the results, not the ones with $1k bids, but the ones with maybe $25.00 as their top bid. I bid myself on top of those and my link with the anchor showed up on top of their pages. When you have a website ranked for a term you want, and the first major link goes to your url, that is a major reference as well. Try it with one of your sites, pick the keyterm you rank for and add an h1 link on top to a subdomain of yours. You will see that you're going to shoot up for that subdomain name as well.

In 1999 I started out with a limited budget, had a new wife and a new daughter and outranked people spending $10k and wasting most of it. I spent maybe $200.00 and outranked them by taking the road less travelled on. The point I am trying to make and have made is that you should not focus on PR too much. Look for sites which are recognized by Google for keyterms similar to the ones you yourself are after. Get contextual links from pages on domain names Google recognizes for competitive terms. It's like a transfer of trust. A trusted source recommends you, and you yourself become trusted. Most of all develop naturally.

Another thing I recommend is publishing articles on some of the sites that let you publish them for free, and allow you to embed your links in them. If you are interested in a list of them, hit me up on the forum or visit my new directory where I put a list together.

Here is a good one for starters: http://www.e-neighborhoodguide.com

If the link to my forum on the bottom under related links is not working, I apologize. Installing a few new mods into my new directory and forum and need to upgrade my server to be able to handle it.

Good to be back on REW, feel free to leave questions and/or comments.

Mike Dammann

• My Bidding Web Directory
• The thread on DP
• The thread on my new forum

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