Case Study: Do Web 2.0 Links Work for Niche Sites? [Episode 2]

Daamn, it’s been a while since I did something about the Web 2.0 case study.

In fact, it’s been nearly half a year. This is not good.

Anyway, this weekend I was checking some of the projects I’ve shelved and came across the website that I’m using for the web 2.0 case study. I thought I should update it and see how the experiment pans out. And this is the update.

From the content I’ve posted on the site, the last time any update was made on the website was September 26th, 2016. That’s nearly 6 months ago. Some of the content I posted was half-baked. For example, I hadn’t proofread them, did not put any images, no interlinking, etc.

Since last year September, the only thing I’ve done on the website, which I actually did at the end of January, is build some blog comments.

So, this week I’ll try to update the website and even build some links to it and see how everything will go.

The major thing I will be doing will be proofreading the content and optimizing it with the specific keywords I will be targeting. Apart from this, I will add the images, put affiliate links and basically make the site “market ready”.

Needless to say, since I hadn’t worked on the site for the last months, nothing has really changed on it. The site does not have any traffic nor and only ranks No. 75 for a keyword with very small number of searches. So, apart from aging, nothing else has happened on the site.

For the metric focused guys, here is the SEMRush stats:

If you love Moz, the domain’s DA is 7

Finally, here’s what Ahrefs shows for the domain:

Where you see the graph going up is as a result of the blog comments I built getting approved.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to reduce some of the writing work I have been doing for clients and concentrate more on building my online businesses. Just last week, I ended a contract with one of a long-running client.

We’ll, it’s been a scary move. There is always some doubts in me regarding the move.”I’m I really making the right decision? What if times get hard?” These are some of the questions that sometimes pop up in my mind.

Nevertheless, I’ve resolved to dedicate more time to my affiliate businesses. So, I guess only time will tell whether I made the right move reducing the client work I’d been taking.

For this week, I plan to concentrate on completely finishing this site that is the candidate of the Web 2.0 case study. In particular, I will do the following:

i) Proofread all content on the site

ii) Optimize the content with the keywords I am targeting

iii) Add images and affiliate links on the content

iv) Build at least 20 backlinks on the site

By the way, about building backlinks, I really don’t fear building many at once. This is because I’ve found out that Google doesn’t find and index all the backlinks at once. Moreover, depending on the type of backlink you are building, it may take some time before they actually show up. For example, if you are building blog comments, it will be up to the owner of the site where you have commented to decide when or whether to approve your comment with the link.

Google Updates and Stuff

Since the last update, a couple of things have happened in the SEO world. For example, Google stopped showing the actual number of searches for keywords on Keyword Planner for free users. Only paid Adwords customers can get the data.

As a result, the keyword tracking tool I’m using, SERPLab, also stopped showing the number of searches to free users. This being the case, I signed up for a paid account but will now have to start tracking the keywords for this project afresh. I will do the keyword research during the week and start tracking.

Another recent happening is the Google “Fred” Update that seems to have been continuously rolled out since late January. I have seen the websites that I am competing with in this experiment lose significant traffic. For example, one of the websites was getting 9K visitors in September 2016 but is today getting 3.5K visitors according to SEMrush.