BlackHat360

In case you missed it, this is a multi part series about Link Exchange. You can get caught up to speed on the details and setup here: Link Exchange

For the rest of you, lets dive into the numbers. This is now the 4th day of use. I am still running without a link throttle and averaging 16-18,000 link views per hour. Let’s take a look at the screenshot:

 I have of course removed the link ur’s and the keywords i’m targeting. We can see a tremendous number of google link views which really seems to be translating into increased 

indexing and higher rankings. The domain is now pretty much 100 percent indexed, and as the following image will show, the traffic has really increased. Rankings for nearly all of my target keywords are now showing up on the first page of Google with several in the number 1 position. Now, we all know Google is important, but hardly the only  game in town. Lets take a look at Yahoo and MSN/Live. Yahoo at the start of this was showing 0 pages indexed. We simply didn’t show up. As of today, we have 71 pages indexed and  show 506 incoming links. Quite impressive, and even more impressive is the fact that we now rank in Yahoo for two of our most important target keyword phrases. In fact, today we received our first human traffic from yahoo for our main target phrase.  I expected Yahoo to take several weeks, but the sheer linking power of LE seems to be reducing that expected lag. As for msn, the same starting scenario with us having 0 pages indexed just last week. Today, we see 29 indexed pages. Definitely an impressive start for only being 4 days in. 

Next we will take a look at the most important data. The analytics:

As we can see from the graph, it’s quite the increase over our starting point. Recall that we were averaging 0-2 searches per day. Yesterday we had 98 incoming hits from search engines, and in fact we had several new members register as a result. 

That’s about all for today. Expect another update on Monday as we follow the progress

I’m starting a new series here with some case studies related to software I use on a regular basis. While the majority will be Black Hat software, i’m starting off with one that can be used by both Black Hat site builders and White Hat site owners. The software in question is Link Exchange which is part of the Simplified Search Engine Suite. As of today I am told that there are about 200 servers participating in the Link Exchange and close to 100 million links.

With that out of the way lets get started with a little bit of background and the setup.

I’m going to be using the software on this blog. I figure this is a fantastic starting place because the site is fairly new, and I have done absolutley nothing for link building or SEO. So, to get going I did some basic keyword research, checked out the competition for my main phrases and ended up with a list of 70 or so keywords as a starting place. Now, before we jump into the rest, lets take a look at the search engine traffic for the month of April for this blog. I’m going to focus only on search engine traffic rather than overall traffic so referring sites, subscribers, and direct traffic don’t taint the stats and throw the graphs off. 

  As you can clearly see, we’re starting off with a clean slate. The search engine traffic for this place is basically zero. I checked the serps for all 72 of my targeted keywords/key phrases and we didn’t rank in the top 100 for any of them. I’m also keeping tabs on the total number of indexed pages for the domain which as of the start date was 316 pages.

So, lets fire up Link Exchange and see what we can do. The software is web based, so you do need your own dedicated server to run it. I happen to have several including the one that hosts this blog, so I installed it here. The system is points based, so you need to display links somewhere in order to receive points which in turn can be spent on incoming links. The cool part is that the sites that display the links and the ones you receive links with are completely independent. In my case i’m using some forums I run to gain link points, then spending those points on this blog. Make sense? The interface is very easy to use as you will be able to see in my screen captures. I started by logging in and clicking the import links button. As you can see in the picture, you are presented with an easy to use form where you simply insert your anchor text and url. There is also an option to flag the link as a white hat link or a black hat link. Even though the blog is a black hat blog, the blog itself is white hat in nature, so I selected that as the option. The developers run through the links every few hours to make sure no one is trying to sneak a black hat link into the white hat links and so forth. You also have the option of uploading a csv with all of your links. This comes in handy when you have a large number of links to submit at one time. I didn’t, so the quick import works fine.

Now that we have some links in the system, we need to configure our sharing options. You can turn linking on and off at any time through the interface, but the real power comes from the advanced options. Here you chose which search engines are actually allowed to view the links. Did I mention that these links are cloaked and only viewable by search engines? Very handy for keeping people from being able to simply use the system to find other users of teh system. So, in my case I want all search engines to view the links, so I leave the boxes unchecked. Next up are the link throttle options. This allows you to determine how often your pages or domains receive links. This can be especially handy for black hat sites where slower link building may be more desirable. In my case i’m going to go with unlimited links for now to see what this system can actually deliver volume wise. The last set of options are all related to the anchor text. This one is interesting. You can actually have the system vary your anchor text based on several criteria so your incoming links are more varied and natural looking. Say you have a 5 word phrase you are targeting for example. This allows you to randomly drop words from the beginning of the phrase, the end of the phrase or both. You can also manually set how often this should take place based on a percentage of the overall link views. 

I took care of all of this Monday morning. Now, nearly 48 hours later, how has it done? I must say I didn’t expect results this quickly. 48 hours in, my indexed pages have risen from 316 to 415 as of this writing. I also noticed that all of my pages have been recrawled and recached which is nice because I made some changes to the page titles a couple weeks ago for better SEO. So, that right there accounts for a 24 percent increase in the number of indexed pages. More important than that however is the results of the keyword ranking. I am now in the top 100 for nearly all of my keywords with the majority o nthe first or second page of Google. My main key phrase that i’m targeting is now actually sitting at number 1. It was number 5 yesterday, so it moved up another 4 spots. Now, due to an error on my part, I don’t have full analytics traffic data for yesterday, so the following image accounts for yesterday evening and part of today. Remember that just a couple days ago, this site was hovering around 0-2 search engine hits a day.

Not bad, 15 hits in less than 24 hours.  That’s quite the increase over the past days. It’s exciting to see results so quickly. The coming days/weeks should be quite interesting. 

Earlier I talked about the link throttle a bit. I wanted to see what sort of volume the system could deliver. Lets take a look at that graph in the built in Link Exchange Analytics system:

I blanked out the keywords i’m targeting. I have to keep some info to myself ;). As we can see, google saw my links 166,000 times in a 24 hour period. That’s very impressive and shows that the system can clearly deliver on volume if the link throttle is turned off. The graph shows the number of link views per hour, we can see in the keyword table which anchor text was shown and how often, we can also see for which domains the majority of the links were shown. 

That’s about it for today. Follow me again tomorrow for a followup as I continue to use the system.