Experiments Update: Pat Flynn Experiment, PBN Footprints, Viral Content, Foreign SEO & More

Our experiment machine keeps rolling along and we have some updates from 5 of the experiments + a two new additions to the experiments list.

Turning SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.Com into a Real Business (Team Effort)

We’ve teamed up with THE man himself, Mr. Pat Flynn with a goal to triple the income made from SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com within 6 months. The site is currently generating around $2500 per month and we’re aiming to build it out, optimize it as per what we teach in our monthly Internships and Private Training Courses and ultimately turn it into a real business. It’s going to be fun! Read about it here.

Turning a Niche Site into a Real Business (Greg)

Whilst on the subject of turning sites into real businesses, we’ll also be doing the same with one of our niche sites. We did a podcast episode outlining our plan of attack, have a listen!

Link Quality Patterns:  Leave No Footprint Behind (Lynn)

Please note that although PBNs still work, Google has started to target them. Meaning they are likely not the safest option moving forward. Which is why we currently focus on creating online businesses that don’t only depend on SEO traffic.

The goal of this experiment is to see if the link quality of money sites using a PBN are different from those which are naturally link built.

The difficulty here, however, is determining whether a site has natural links or is using a PBN. Since the reason for this study is not to see if we can detect PBN’s, we made a key assumption as we identified a comparison set of sites.

The assumption made was that some of the comparison sites may have links from a PBN. This means the results of our study may be skewed because we are including sites in the naturally linked group which may actually have pbn links.

After making the above assumption, the next step was to test our methodology by choosing one money site. This money site ranks for a number of keywords so we chose one keyword and then scraped Google for the top 100 sites ranking for this term. This seemed like a good way to identify at least some sites which are naturally linked built, especially those found lower in the serps.

The backlinks for these 100 sites were generated from ahrefs and then run through moz to get the DA of the backlinks.

The results showed the site using a PBN had almost 50% fewer links from sites DA 20 or below. Conversely it had 42% more links from sites DA60+. The latter result isn’t too troublesome since it’s likely none of the DA 60+ backlinks are from a PBN.

What is surprising is the PBN site doesn’t have a different backlink profile in the DA 30 to 39 range. This is where you would expect many PBN links to be built but there was virtually no difference. You would also expect the money site using a PBN would have a higher percentage of links in the DA 20-29 range. But the opposite is actually true with the naturally linked sites having 33% in this range as compared to the money site with 24%.

Overall, the above results are very surprising. Granted only one money site is being compared to 100 naturally link built sites. The next step will be to analyze a much larger set of money sites and they may be a better comparative set since the one chosen for this phase of the study was a very strong site ranking for many competitive keywords. It looks like the backlinks in the DA 60+ range are coming because you have other authority sites linking to it. Hence, part of the reason why it ranks so well.

ROI on Content Added to New Sites (Greg)

Things are moving along well and earnings on the new content added to our two case study sites are increasing week on week. We’ll provide a more detailed update in the coming weeks, but you can see the earnings over the last 14 days for some of the pages we’re tracking. One page in particular will probably break $1k in earnings in the upcoming 30 days. Here is the most recent update where we covered quite a bit of detail on ROI.

Le French Experiment (Max)

We’ve started link building on Hayden’s site, and we’re getting close to the top of the second page for this LMS 5500/$10CPC keyword. We’ve also started to rank on the first page for some minor keywords.

A few days ago, we actually ranked in the top 5 for a few main keywords during half a day or so, which probably was what we call a “Google audition”. Google basically tried out our website in the top positions to see how users reacted to it.

Unfortunately we failed the audition since we got back to our initial position pretty quickly.

This isn’t a surprise since the content on our site isn’t of amazing quality, neither exactly what users are looking for. Users who type the kind of keywords we are targeting generally look for not only text but also for a simple way to compare the different options they have.

The (very helpful) French intern I am currently training is working on rewriting the money pages and on adding some more. The pages will be longer, have better content and will be better optimized. Just doing that should help us improve our rankings.

And of course, we’re still link building (about 5 links/week).

We’ve started to talk about how to turn the website into a real business, but haven’t decided anything about that yet.

As for the larger authority site, we’ve identified the first keywords we want to target and are currently getting the content done.

Find out the full details on the experiment here.

Mexican Experiment (Max & Jorge)

One of the sites we’re currently building targets keywords with low CPC but related to expensive services. We’re quite confident that we could make a good revenue on lead generation if we manage to rank them (which we will if we don’t f*** it up). At the moment, we are targeting 5 different keywords. Two Spanish speaking interns are working on this, and they’ve been a great help so far (thanks guys!).

The other website we are working on targets 600k+ LMS keywords (some of them go over 1million) that Hayden has already ranked for in the past.

These keywords have very low CPC, but the insane volume makes up for it, and there’s definitely a business to build around it if you can have that kind of audience.

We’ll get into more details about the business idea we have pretty soon.

Find out the full details on the experiment here.

Viral Content Experiment (Nate)

After the first two weeks of the viral content experiment, there are both positive and negative takeways.

Articles that got submitted to Reddit and given a handful of upvotes did decently well, but nothing truly took off.  For the week that interns were promoting the content through social media, the traffic was steadily rising, from 226 pageviews up to nearly 2,000 a day at its peak.

However, despite some of the initial exposure, nothing really took off like we would have hoped. We had little success on twitter trying to gain retweets from influencers, and our Facebook strategy was a bit too simplistic. Earnings were also negligible.

Going Forward

We will tweak some on-page items  to increase shares and focus on Reddit as an organic traffic source since that’s where we had the most success. Part of the issue was that although a lot of the headlines were good and could generate click-throughs, some of the content wasn’t up to snuff, thus the initial traction often died off. Going forward one of the goals will be better quality control for the content.

We will also be looking to run some paid traffic to the best pieces of content and seeing if we can generate enough additional shares from that traffic to achieve a positive ROI.

Stay tuned next week for more updates on these experiments, and others we’re working on!

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