November 9, 2009

Anchored Backlinks Update

It’s been approximately three weeks since I posted my goals to redefine my longevity blog in the SERPs. My recent post on residual income with anchored backlinks I showed that my main longevity blog was languishing on page three for the only term directly taken from my URL that has any advertising value. I ranked on page 1 for my blog title “how to live a longer life” (2nd) and for the shorter version “a longer life” (8th), but only 22nd for “longer life”, the only derivative of the title which carried an Adsense CPC above $0.05. I noted that in my five months of blogging every backlink that I had control of I sent back to my main page with my entire blog’s title and not the shorter moneymaking keyword.  I didn't use optimized anchored backlinks like I should have.

Residual Income With SEO & Anchored Backlinks
At that point I decided to go back through older posts and optimize the blog better for this shorter keyword and then throw some articles up with anchored backlinks to my site with the more focused keyword which had more traffic and dollars attached to it. What’s happened since then? It’s been about three weeks and since then I have moved up in the SERPs for the search term “longer life” from rank 22 to rank number 11. That’s right; in three weeks I cut my rank in half and I’m now one spot away from page one. I also improved my term “a longer life” from rank 8 to rank 5 in the same amount of time. Not to shabby if you ask me. You might be wondering what I did to accomplish this and you might be surprised to learn how little it took.


As I said in my previous post I simply wrote a handful of articles which anchored backlinks to my main blog site with my desired anchor text and I posted them on a variety of article directories. Specifically I used GoArticles, Article Blast, Self Growth, and Squidoo. And not only did I backlink in from those sources but I made a 2-3 articles per source to link into the main blog giving me a total of roughly 10 inbound anchored backlinks links. These are all estimates BTW.

Each of the articles also linked into 1-2 of the other articles to make them more important in the eyes of Google and to aid in their general indexing. After three weeks the final result is this: I have about 15 articles total on four different directory sites which all build up the authority of each other.  Then ten of those articles link into my main blog passing all that accumulated link juice onto it focused on the my desired anchor text and search term “longer life”.

Submitting To Article Directories In Less Time
For those who are a little squeamish about writing so many articles that don’t even go onto your money-making website let me remind you that ranking on page three for a term earns you nothing whereas page one gives you exponentially higher earnings potential. In my case I estimated a top five placement for this keyword is about $35/month. I’m still not at rank 1 so I’ve got more work to do still but let’s say 25 total articles for approximately $35/month indefinitely is a pretty good deal in my opinion.

Not only that, but all those articles (15 so far – 10 to go) are all derivatives of only a few original articles. I pretty much just write 3-4 long articles 600-700 words and then split them up into shorter chunks and edit them slightly for the directories effectively quadrupling my total articles and shrinking them to around 400-500 words each. This means that if I want 10 more inbound links all I have to do is write about 2-3 more long articles and then split them into smaller chunks for the submissions. Since they’re all on the same topic and are all related, they should all help each other out in the SERPs.

Indexing Article Directory Submissions
It’s funny; it doesn’t really take long to churn out the articles but it takes a bit for the SERPs to index the new pages and include the new terms in the query results pages. Some of my articles are still bouncing in and out of indexed status so that elads me to believe that if I sit on my hands for another three weeks eventually the articles will stabilize in Google and my “longer life" term will eventually crawl onto page one without me having to do anything more.

Of course I’m not going to do this; I think the bulk of the $35/month is in the top five results for my term so I will continue to add a few more articles to the cause and will submit further posts to Blog Carnivals with my new site name as “Longer Life”.

Blog Carnivals: This is another topic I haven’t touched on so I will have to do a post on this in the near future. Not now but soon. For now I just wanted to post an update on this SERP rank campaign as an illustration as to how the process works and how quick it takes. Surely, one could do this faster than me with more effort but I’m still heavily devoted to spending time with the missus at home when I can so I’ll take slow and steady any day.

A New Anchored Backlink Goal
I also wanted to point out one more positive from this challenge I placed for myself. I few of the backlinks I sent back to my site over the past few weeks have been for the anchor text: “live longer”. Three weeks ago I couldn’t find my site in the SERPs for this term. Now I’m sitting comfortably at rank 98. This is not good but at least I’m there compared to before. Once I get into the lower to mid first page for “longer life” I’ll have to start emphasizing “live longer” as my anchor and get closer to page one for that term as well.


There’s more competition for it however so it may take some time but the money might well be worth it. Over 60k people search for this monthly. The CPC isn’t that great but I do already make the top 100 so it may be worth my while for all the traffic.

Stay tuned!

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1 comment:

  1. Yes, good anchored text for backlinks is important, but you also write great content. That will continue to be increasingly important to SEO as Google learns to tell the difference. Just thought someone should point that out, since you're not likely to brag about that factor!

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