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I had seen this consistently happening with the clients availing my SEO consultancy services – the ones who were steady in link building appeared to always come out as winners. So over the past few months, after Google Penguin happened, I decided to test out whether that still holds true or whether something had changed.
The Setup
The experiment is as such simple. Without revealing the site identities for sake of privacy, I took six websites with approximately equal search competition, as determined by number of total results, title tag searches, URL tag searches and search volumes (though most argue that the last parameter is not a real indicator of actual search competition and I personally agree, but just wanted to keep it fair to all schools of thoughts). These domains were EMDs and I was trying to rank for the main keywords.
The Process
I divided the sites into two control groups. The theme used was the same in all the cases. The content had similar keyword densities and had a similar LSI coverage. In the first phase, I built diversified links from similar sources to all the six websites. This continued for slightly more than a month, when all the six sites, for each of their respective keywords, started appearing between the 3rd to 6th ranks on the first page of Google USA, as viewed over a proxy – I had used the PageWash.com public proxy for the purpose. And then, I continued building links at a slow but steady pace towards one control group by running my own SEO submission service pack, but didn’t touch the second control group at all.
The Results
Over a period of two months, I saw the first control group, to which I didn’t build links, gradually fall to somewhere between the low third and high fifth pages – different amounts of slides for different domains. But the slides were too significant to ignore – the third page would make me no money for any real commercial site. On the other hand, the second control group – to which I kept building links at a slow and steady pace, have all the three sites ranked in the top-2. In fact, they are earning me considerable revenue also. In effect, the second group of sites was receiving my regular monthly SEO services while the first one was simply left with their high ranks.
Conclusions
SEO service pricings with monthly submissions for maintenance are worth in gold if you have a money-making site – so I would advise any webmaster and SEO professional to keep building links steadily towards their websites in order to retain high rankings.
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