Google Panda 2.5 Update – Link Building Service Sites Went Up!

by on October 20, 2011

FYI, just a quick update on the sites in the Great Link Building Service Experiment that I started back in February this year.

The official experiment is over, and other than tossing some Adsense on one of the sites and putting some backlinks on the lower sites back to some of my other sites, I haven’t really done much in the way of link building or optimizing.

And then the infamous “minor” update from Google called Panda 2.5 hit on October 14th and stirred up the pot.  Where did these sites land?

For my main 3 word keyword:

Note that all of these are Exact Match Domains (EMDs) or this keyword, just with a .net or .com or .org or a “-” in between the words.  The one “rumor” that pretty much everyone agrees on about this latest Google update is that EMDs received a big boost for their exact keyword.

For the higher volume two word keyword:

The Build My Rank site had been naturally ranking for that two word keyword at around #30 before, so that is a little disappointing that it disappeared completely.

My guess is that the other sites are still slightly ranking for that two word since those networks received way more actual links vs the BMR one.  For example, the BMR site had about 90 links total to it, with maybe 5% being that higher 2 word keyword, so like 4 links.  For UAW it was ~2000 links, so 5% of that is 100 links.

What does that mean for the latest Google update?  That one hundred PR-0 links beat four PR-2/3 links?  Maybe.  I think it’s more likely that they trimmed down the spill over link love from link text.  Maybe they used to count “best seo experiment” in the link text as both “best seo experiment” and a little “seo experiment” and a little “best seo” as well and now maybe not so much.

Only time will tell.  Update as they happen!

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Hans October 24, 2011 at 9:31 pm

They need to quit with those panda updates! Grrrr :(

Oscar January 5, 2012 at 9:41 am

Thanks for this experiment. I’m new to the IM world and been trying to figure out which of these services to use. I tried the manual link building and that is a pain, specially when you’re new to this stuff. The BMR makes sense once I have a couple more sites, but definitely it looks like a service to use. My question is, As of Jan 2012—are the sites still holding up? Or have they dropped? thanks!

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