Totally Unscientific Link Building Experiment: 30 Days Later

I wrote last month about my attempt to pay closer attention to the effect building links has on my website rankings. My idea was to stick with one link building company (in this case, Linkvana – 14 day trial for $5 affiliate link / 50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link), aim for a competitive search term (‘international volunteering’) and see how far a few links would boost me over the course of the month. You can read the original post here.

Well, the results are in. Sort of. I outsourced 30 short posts with one link in them and four articles with several links. Of those, all four articles have been posted and 22 out of the 30 shorter posts are live. In that time my international volunteering ebook page has gone from page seven on Google to page two where it’s been as high as number 13 and currently sits at around number 17… at least according to my Google search results from Rwanda.

I still have 8 posts floating around out there too which will be posted one per day so I guess the final results won’t really be in until a week or so from now. But the message is clear, at least to me. This works. It’s pricey at $147 a month (plus another $2 to outsource each article… although you could certainly write the articles yourself if you have more patience than me) but if you’re someone who knows that your site will make money and just needs to climb the rankings, it’d be totally worth it. If you have lots of sites, even more so.

I’m also about to start targeting the keyword ‘Kigali‘ for my newest site which I think is a bit ambitious. True, it’s not exactly a popular world city with a lot of websites aimed at it, but it’s still a single word keyword and could be tough. My original plan was to be content with the keywords ‘living in Kigali‘ (which I’m currently ranking #1 for) but now, based on what I’ve seen with this experiment, I’m aiming for the number one spot with Google for ‘Kigali’. Yay, another experiment in the works!

As for my ‘international volunteering’ keyword ambitions, I’m going to switch to Build My Rank and see if I can use that site to push me to the front page. It’ll be another 30 links over 30-ish days and I’ll report back at the end!

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