Journey to get here & GSA Plan moving forward
Hey everyone,
It has been one hell of a journey to get to this point. 3 years ago I started an adult e-commerce site. Great design, onsite SEO is perfect and all the other essentials that we are made to believe are required to rank a website. Up until this point I tried to do everything "white hat". Spent $20,000+ on guest block post, building quality PBNS, niche edits, etc. 3 years in, and metrics look like below.
Referring domains without GSA are 400/500.
I have put everything, and I mean everything into this project. Blood, sweat, tears. I truly believe in it as a business and have built it into a brand on social media. The only thing keeping us afloat is paid traffic at the moment (google ads). SEO has always been the goal, the holy grail traffic source. My background is 10+ years of affiliate/internet marketing (email and SMS). You would think with my background and ability, SEO would be "easy" but that is far from the case.
A few weeks ago I started to dig into my competitors backlink profile deeper in ahrefs. Noticed almost all of them had these contextual spammy-looking links and was lost for words on what could be generating them. Did some research on what program was generating this, and I stumbled across the magnificent GSA SER. I always thought GSA was a "scam" and didn't work, on public forums such as BHW most people talk down about it or how it was so "2010". Should have known this was a diversion/sabotage tactic for the most part, as there are plenty of people ranking sites SOELY with GSA SER and have been for years.
Ever since purchasing GSA SER 2 weeks ago I have been obsessed and love the program. I "think" I know how the program works in and out, just waiting to see ranking results at the moment. Since my site has some authority already, I am using GSA as tier one links directly to my money site with branded and naked URL anchors. The first few days I sent them to my PBNs, but figured if my competitors are doing it then why can't I?
Currently, I am confused about what I should do for my anchor text. Should I continue to go the branded / naked URL route, or can I start to target money keywords? Since my niche is adult, do I really need to worry about anchor text ratio etc? Hoping to get some information from veteran members here such as @sickseo , as everything he posts here is gold and one of the reasons I joined the forum.
I am at my wit's end. Exhausted, 3 years on a project with failure after failure when it comes to SEO and traffic, but I know I have to keep pushing forward. Being in internet marketing for so long has taught me to be resilient. I truly believe GSA SER is going to be my answer to link building, as I can clearly see the top sites in my niche are using it and I am determined for that to be me.
Any advice you guys can give is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
*Using GSA for 2 weeks
*Sent to Tier 1 PBNs up until 4 days ago
* Now sending directly to money site for the last 3 days
*Attempting to post contextual links only (article, blog comment, forum, social network, wiki, video-adult)
*OBL MAX set to 60
* Using two list providers
*Xevil for captcha
*cold proxy for captcha IPS
It has been one hell of a journey to get to this point. 3 years ago I started an adult e-commerce site. Great design, onsite SEO is perfect and all the other essentials that we are made to believe are required to rank a website. Up until this point I tried to do everything "white hat". Spent $20,000+ on guest block post, building quality PBNS, niche edits, etc. 3 years in, and metrics look like below.
Referring domains without GSA are 400/500.
I have put everything, and I mean everything into this project. Blood, sweat, tears. I truly believe in it as a business and have built it into a brand on social media. The only thing keeping us afloat is paid traffic at the moment (google ads). SEO has always been the goal, the holy grail traffic source. My background is 10+ years of affiliate/internet marketing (email and SMS). You would think with my background and ability, SEO would be "easy" but that is far from the case.
A few weeks ago I started to dig into my competitors backlink profile deeper in ahrefs. Noticed almost all of them had these contextual spammy-looking links and was lost for words on what could be generating them. Did some research on what program was generating this, and I stumbled across the magnificent GSA SER. I always thought GSA was a "scam" and didn't work, on public forums such as BHW most people talk down about it or how it was so "2010". Should have known this was a diversion/sabotage tactic for the most part, as there are plenty of people ranking sites SOELY with GSA SER and have been for years.
Ever since purchasing GSA SER 2 weeks ago I have been obsessed and love the program. I "think" I know how the program works in and out, just waiting to see ranking results at the moment. Since my site has some authority already, I am using GSA as tier one links directly to my money site with branded and naked URL anchors. The first few days I sent them to my PBNs, but figured if my competitors are doing it then why can't I?
Currently, I am confused about what I should do for my anchor text. Should I continue to go the branded / naked URL route, or can I start to target money keywords? Since my niche is adult, do I really need to worry about anchor text ratio etc? Hoping to get some information from veteran members here such as @sickseo , as everything he posts here is gold and one of the reasons I joined the forum.
I am at my wit's end. Exhausted, 3 years on a project with failure after failure when it comes to SEO and traffic, but I know I have to keep pushing forward. Being in internet marketing for so long has taught me to be resilient. I truly believe GSA SER is going to be my answer to link building, as I can clearly see the top sites in my niche are using it and I am determined for that to be me.
Any advice you guys can give is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
*Using GSA for 2 weeks
*Sent to Tier 1 PBNs up until 4 days ago
* Now sending directly to money site for the last 3 days
*Attempting to post contextual links only (article, blog comment, forum, social network, wiki, video-adult)
*OBL MAX set to 60
* Using two list providers
*Xevil for captcha
*cold proxy for captcha IPS
Tagged:
Comments
spending that much you should rank Top on google.
i am using word Ai and work great for me. others are same as me , only reason i am not getting much Unique Domain now with GSA .
Domain Stats
Your domain stats are impressive. 1.95 million backlinks is nuts, even though it's from less than 1k referring domains. You can boost the referring domains significantly by using GSA SER and making new T1 links. Site lists can easily run into the hundreds and thousands of sites, but they don't all show up in ahrefs, so be ready for that. Most of my big site numbers are from url shorteners, blog comments and exploits. Blog comments are great one for boosting ip diversity, but difficult to find them with low obls and do follow. Most are the opposite of this.
Referring domains/ip diversity is a significant ranking factor and one of the major indicators of popularity. 777 referring domains in a competitive niche is incredibly low.
Organic Keywords
Your organic keywords is also incredibly low at 2.7K, considering the number of T1 links you have showing. It shows a massive opportunity for deep keyword research, especially long tail keywords. Different keyword tools will give different results, but if your seed keyword has 100k searches, then you should be able to find thousands of related keywords for just that single seed keyword.
These new keywords get put into new campaigns for link building which will increase your organic keywords that you rank for. Using google search console to identify these keywords would be the best approach as they give real data for impressions, so you can focus on chasing keywords with actual traffic. Also depends on how big your site is.
More pages of content means more opportunities for targetting a wider range of keywords, but requires keyword research and lots of new link building campaigns for the new keywords.
PPC Keywords
If you're already doing PPC then you should have a list of keywords that deliver traffic. This would be a priority for ranking so that you can replace your PPC cost with organic rankings and traffic through SEO. Am sure that is the plan anyway, but if you are not seeing ranking results for these same keywords, then your SEO strategy has some serious flaws in it and definitely needs an overhaul.
Live links Vs Dead Links
I'd also suggest downloading all 1.95 million urls and doing a live link check to see which of those links are actually still live. Just because they show 1.95 million backlinks, you may find many of them are dead links. Backlink monitor by Inspyder Software is very good for this and it also checks links across multiple tiers. Although for that many links, you'd need a powerful PC to link check them all.
Ahrefs is pretty poop for data, as are most of these 3rd party data services. The data is not to be trusted and it certainly is not representative of the actual data that google have. It's only a fraction of the data that google have. Most SEOs use these services as there is nothing better, but it's still poop data.
Power Up Existing Links VS Creating New Links
Simply powering up the live dofollow T1 links containing your target keywords in them will give your rankings a boost for the very same keywords in the anchor text. You may not need to create new T1 links. Just depends on how many are live and contain your target keywords in them. If you've primarily used generics and branding anchors, powering up these T1 links will have minimal impact to your rankings. They will pass link juice if they are do follow, but in terms of boosting DA, this comes only from unique domains. Your referring domains are showing at 777, and it won't go up any higher until you create new links from new domains. 1.95 million backlinks is meaningless to DA.
Keyword Anchors Vs Generics/Branding/Domain Anchors
Keyword anchors move rankings up. Generics and branding anchors don't.
This is just some spiel that white hat SEO's spout out because of google penguin and the over optimisation penalty that google sent out to webmasters years ago for unnatural link building. This is why white hat SEO's focus on generics, naked urls, citations and branding anchors. They are too scared to use keyword anchors in case they get penalised by google.
Does this strategy help you rank for your target keywords? In short no, it doesn't. It just helps with maintaining your anchor ratios and preventing your rankings from being penalised algorithmically from over optimisation of keyword anchors.
Waste of time if you ask me. Anchor text diversity is important, but you can still achieve anchor text diversity by using combos of your keyword with brand name, or keyword with generic, keyword with domain name, or even your meta title from every page on your site. All of these examples will boost keyword rankings and still keep you under the radar and avoid over optimisation penalties.
What's The Best Anchor Text Ratio?
There is no ideal number here. It's different for each site in every niche. As a guide though, I'd look at the top 10 competing sites in your niche and take a look at their anchor clouds. If they're on page 1 then you can be confident that the anchor ratios your competitors use will also be fine for your site.
Personally I run my GSA campaigns at 80% keyword anchors and 20% branding, generics, domain anchors. Bear in mind though that percentages can be quite meaningless as it also depends on how many keywords you've used on your site.
For example, If you build 2 links with 1 branding anchor and 1 keyword anchor, then you will have 50% keyword anchors which as a percentage is crazy high. It's also perfectly natural for a site that has only 2 backlinks. As you build links, use new keywords. This will keep your keyword anchor ratios low.
As a general rule, I try to keep any keyword anchor below 1%. Very easy to do if your site uses thousands of keywords in the T1 links. The anchor ratio decreases as you use new unique anchor texts. It actually becomes easier to run pure keyword anchor campaigns when you're working with thousands of keywords.
Ecommerce Strategy
As your site is an e-commerce site, I'd suggest you also use the %meta_title% macro as this will pull your meta title and use it as an anchor text for each page on your site. Very natural anchor text and it contains all your target keywords if your on page seo is spot on. Impossible to get penalsied for using meta title anchors but still focus on mixing it up. If 1.95 million people in the world linked to your site, would they all use the same anchor text, or would they all be different?
I have no idea the size of your site. But for one client I have who has 360,000 urls, i've applied the exact same strategy and am working my way through the urls. Just using meta title anchor text, thousands of pages are ranking in google for keywords used on the page. I do the same for my ecommerce sites and it pushes my rankings to page 1 for the product/brand name. I actually outrank amazon and ebay for the same products they have on their site lol
In google search console, I also get data for other related keywords that my pages rank for. These get put into new gsa campaigns to make them rank.
But 2.7k organic keywords is incredibly low, considering the number of backlinks you have. Your anchor text diversity needs some work, which is just researching more related keywords and building links for them.
Link Building Strategies
If you have PBN links, keep powering them up with tiers of do follow links. 2 tiers should be enough as that would complete a 3 tier structure, with your PBN as T1. At the very least, your focus should be creating new links to the homepage from unique domains in order to boost the DA of the homepage on all your PBNs. This will make them more powerful and boost rankings of anything they point at. Also depends on how you've set them up. Homepage links would be the best set up and most powerful. But if you're using inner pages, then you'd need to also power up these inner pages to boost the PA.
As for your money site and inner pages, I'd recommend extracting all your urls and running all the urls with 3 tier pyramids, or at the very least 2 tier campaigns. This would be the most effective and quickest way to raise rankings for all urls on your site.
Alternatively, setting up individual campaigns for each url separately with it's own set of keywords specific to that page would be far more powerful. But to do it this way for every url on your site may take some time, depending on how many urls you are targetting. Also depends on how many installs you have at your disposal. Targetting homepage, category pages and sub-category pages will be the ones to focus on. From these pages, link juice passes through to all your other pages.
In terms of results, the quickest I've seen ranking results is 3 weeks after running campaigns. They were very aggressive campaigns. Normally for me it's 4-6 weeks for page 1. But this depends on the site list numbers, how fast you can create the new links and how many GSA installs I have deployed on that campaign. This is for established sites, not brand new domains.
Your GSA set up sounds good and your engine selection also good. I have no idea if you're running single tier campaigns or not. Tiers is what I would recommend. Ranking power comes from the link juice you can push through the tiers.
Single tiers with zero inbound links and zero referring domains are just weak links. Worthless and unlikely to remain indexed in google for more than 2 months. Hence why I say 2 tiers minimum.
Hope that helps and sets you on the right path! Without analysing the money site url with my own tools, it's difficult to pin point an ideal strategy for you. But if you follow the above, you will see results in rankings.
Thank you bro!
What I do:
1. Get online pr releases (all no follows)
Just build another 2 tiers of gsa links to them non stop
2. Build book markets, social network, articles links (ai spun) with images directly to money sites
Initially I just use generic + domain anchors (my website internal links are done really really detailedly)
After 1 month, I created more campaigns to build hundreds of thousands of long tail keywords directly to money sites
A lot of sites delete the links after 1 to 3 months, so I just keep GSA SER running non stop.
After the site hits page 1, number 1. I stopped GSA SER altogether on the site. Been 5 months but site is still up there.
Now we are working on onpage stuff like page speed, proper onpage and updating the products and content to improve bounce, time spent on sites and all.
Site is sitting up there on number 1 position for many competitive like a king - so far
PS: Sometimes i spray gsa ser links on my competitors, if the google algo sees the spammy links and wanna penalise my site, they will have to penalise my competitors too.
This is why I think manual penalty is bs
thanks for sharing this valuable info.
What AI service are you using for your content?
Ranking result for strategie
My way of working is somewhat different from yours, so don't worry, I'm just expressing my gratitude to sickseo
Like you, my business partner and I have been hitting the Google wall with our country-specific niche dating websites for the last 6 years. Hence now learning more on GSA etc. You words hit home due to the similarities with what you've been going through.
Can I ask you for an update?
[1] Are you still using GSA SER and the other tools?
[2] Any change in the toolset?
[3] Any insightful GSA SER tips you've discovered along the way?
[4] How is the rankings and traffic since February?
[5] Are you still sending directly to your money site/s?
It would be great for me and, I'm sure, others to hear back from you
Cheers and thank you
the result of five years
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PNB (wordpress and google blogger and medium) + GSA 2~3 Tier project ( 2 VPS SERVER )
Other Programs
GSA-only good link build (my experience) tip
01) Purchase 1 domain.
02) Creating a simple homepage.
03) Build a direct link through google search.
04) Mix the dofollow and nofollow links of the collected links properly (e.g., dofollow 60% / nofollow 40%).
05) Fixed the mixed link at 1 Tier (money site from here).
06) Build a new Google serarch link from 2 Tier.
07) 1 Tier built Contextual (only Article)
09) From Tier 3 to whatever you want.
10) All indexing is required.
# For ease of indexing, it is good to select a comment engine as the last tier. (Comment pages are often indexed)
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SEO is a long time and effort.
It can never be achieved in the short term.