This is not a breakthrough SEO discovery BUT with an ever changing Google search algorithm, it is important to remember the simple things that simply work.
Is content really still king? You bet it is!
At the beginning of this year I put up about a dozen brand new “sniper blogs” (as outlined in Google Sniper 2.0). Every one of the domain names consisted of a longtail keyword and each one of those keywords were (more or less) equally as hard to rank for.
I put the exact same wordpress theme on each of the blogs and optimized them all the same way. I also did the exact same backlinking for each of the sites.
The only thing I did differently was: I put no new content on some of the blogs, put one post on a couple of them, and put 3 posts on some of the other ones (all unique posts – just to be clear).
I really did not do a whole lot with those blogs for MONTHS. All of a sudden a couple of those sites started generating me sales for an affiliate product I was promoting.
Of course I was super excited. Few things in life excite me more than making affiliate sales.
A long story short, I started to analyze the stats on each of the sites and here is what I found: the blogs with the most posts were getting the most traffic and as a result were also generating me the most sales.
This reconfirmed a philosophy I had adopted to my “best SEO” practices over a year ago which basically says: One should always post at least 5 articles on a sniper site.
In this example I only had up to 3 posts but 5 would have been even better.
Generally speaking, when I commit to making a successful sniper site, I usually have a link in the first 4 posts pointing to the main page where I have the “sales” post. The idea here is to push as much linkjuice to the sales post as possible.
Anyways, I could go on and on about the importance of having a handful of quality posts on each site but I think it is common sense – at least for the most part. I just wanted to share my quick case study to let you know that – despite many theories – content is still king!
I would love to hear your experiences in this regard,
Konrad
PS: – I keep getting asked where I get my content from. I write all content on this blog myself and for the most part also write all “sales posts” on my sniper blogs myself. All other content I almost always get done at GLA.
Hello Konrad,
I am building new sites over the last month and was struggling with the same question; what does influence SERPS at most? I did some kind of survey, nothing academic, and learned that sniper sites can still doing well with a relatively low amount of content. However it seems that Google doesn’t like that at all and is trying to take influence on that. I found a very interesting article under http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors and I highly recommend it to read it. If you don’t have time to read look at the graphic in this article; it says everything without so many words.
All the Best
Gabriel
Konrad as always your the man. The information you just gave is worth
thousands. The only thing anyone has to do is just do it. This just goes to show how much you really want to help. PS thanks for the links you gave me earlier for putting a link on my site. Traffic has increased 55.8 percent in about a month. Your right content is king.
Very good analysis.
@Gabriel – you are right, SEOmoz is very good. I also suggest everyone watching their Whiteboard Fridays video. Specially the one about “Phrase match anchor text” in backlinks. Quality of backlinks is also important, same as the content. And diversity of backlinks also counts.
I even read that having “strong” NO-follow backlinks also helps.
But I’m a little bit off the topic here 🙂 Sorry for that.
ps. Konrad, on Opera browser comment section is a little bit messed up, all the text is centered.
Cheers
Kris Pashek
Great stuff Konrad, I need to work more on my affiliate sites
Nice to know my new thousand page site is not in vain..