There is no doubt about it that both Yahoo and Bing fell in love with my low hanging fruit domains but Google fell out of love with them to a large extent. After nearly 5 months, 3 out of the 5 main keywords for these domains are ranking between 3 and 10 in both Bing and Yahoo but languishing between page 2 and 5 on Google.

As far as traffic goes, my best low hanging fruit domain gets around 60 unique visitors a day with Bing providing most of that, followed by Yahoo and Google comes in with some obscure long tail keywords. The worst performing low hanging fruit domain gets just 8 uniques a day.

The results for the more competitive domains are not encouraging. The main keywords for each domain are indexed in all the main search engines but so low in the rankings that I am not seeing any traffic from those keywords. However, the long tail keywords are providing me with some reasonable traffic for the domains and the best performing one get around 50 uniques a day, split equally between Google, Yahoo and Bing. The worst performing domain is seeing just 5 uniques a day..

So, after nearly 5 months of this challenge there is no doubt about it that UAW does work in isolation but I am sure that if I used it in conjunction with some other good backlinking methods then it would be a strong weapon in my overall armory. Questions still remain over whether Google are onto the UAW backlinks and whether it is a good tool to use in the long term then I am not yet convinced. Maybe a year from now I will be able to give you a better idea on that.

It’s a really good question and quite difficult to answer for certain. In Google’s world they would like to believe that all backlinks from site to site are there because those links add something to what the visitor is reading, listening to or watching.

A backlink is seen by Google as one website publisher giving a vote of confidence to another web publisher’s site, or page on that site at least. Obviously the higher the page rank of the site giving the backlink the more Google will trust that backlink because they believe in their puritanical world that any site with pages that have high page rank has a high page rank because of the trust Google has in them… Pheww… I hope that makes sense!

Anyway, as we all know as marketers, the temptation to find loopholes and manipulate Google’s algorithm is very tempting and the truth is, any link building scheme could be seen as trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm from Angela’s backlinks, 3 way links, paid for links, 2 way link schemes, linkwheels etc.. linkwheels are nothing new by the way they have been around for years. I used to know them as mininets. Many marketers would shoot me down in flames for daring to say that. There is a flip side to this though and that is that these techniques undoubtably do work. The real question is, will your site last in the indexes if you use these techniques? They might last forever but of course as we have all seen, they might not.

Does that mean therefore that we shouldn’t be involved in these sort of link building techniques? If you wanted to play it completely safe and go for the slow build by getting backlinks the natural way (other sites recommending yours) then it might take 10 years to get anywhere. The reality is that a little bit of everything is fine with the exception of 3 way links in my opinion. The problem I have with 3 way links is that they are so blatantly trying to deceive and are getting easier for Google to spot that I wouldn’t take the risk. Linkwheels do work and are more difficult for Google to spot. Angelas links do work also but I wouldn’t solely rely on them.

I still believe the best way of building links are to do good article marketing, non-spammy blog commenting, submissions to good directories DMOZ etc.., Genuine link exchanges, press releases, persuading trusted sites to post your content on their sites. The bottom line is, that there has to be a reason for the backlink to exist to be transparent in Google’s eyes. Social bookmarking is also fine, so long as you don’t overdo it and mix it up with other people’s sites as well.

A backlink from an article placed in article directories is transparent because you wrote that article and the backlink from that article to your site is there for further reading. Blog commenting is transparent because you have added something to that discussion on that blog and to confirm your interest in that subject you can show them your site in return as a backlink. DMOZ and other quality directories is there as a simple directory to show relevant sites on various subjects. Press releases are there for easy access to newsworthy stories and the backlinks are there for people to read about the source of the news story.

I hope you understand my point, the link has to have a reason to exist to be transparent and valid in Google’s eyes. This opinion of mine is not popular among many people and the are many who can say the have been doing 3 way linking and various other link schemes over the years and have seen great success from doing it. I don’t doubt that, but for every person who has success you will find someone else that sees their site disapear from the SERPS overnight. It is a risk, and one that you should make your own decision over.

This was quite a suprise for me and demonstrates that perhaps bing are a bit more receptive to the backlinks given by UAW.. The traffic isn’t as much as I could expect from Google in fact it probably half the amount of traffic that I would expect from a page on page 1 of Google. However it is all good stuff really and sort of an unexpected bonus!

Out of the 5 “low hanging fruit” domains they are all ranked on either page 1 or 2 of bing and are still not doing anything in Google. The 5 more competitive domains are still languishing in both Google and Bing not getting any traffic except from a few obscure long tail keywords.

For all 5 of the low hanging fruit domains only 1 of them is still in Google top 10 for their target keywords and the rest have dropped to nowhere or so deep that it doesn’t really matter. For the 5 domains that targeted the more competitive keyword phrases, well they are nowhere to be seen in Google at all! All domains are still indexed however and I am wondering whether they are all sandboxed for getting to many links to quickly.

I am disapointed overall and was hoping for a lot better results from using UAW. Maybe, I used it all wrong and should have slowed the rate of posts and that might have kept the sites under the radar a bit. However my gut instinct is that the quality of the backlinks are not up to scratch with very little PR. I also wonder whether Google are onto the sites that UAW use for backlinks.

I will keep these domains going but have stopped all Unique article wizard projects and I will report of any progress both good and bad over the coming months!

Of the 5 more competitive domains that I have used UAW projects on, all 5 got indexed within 3 days of starting the projects. However, none of them have yet to break into the top 100 positions on Google yet for their target keyword phrases. I did start these projects later however and they are competitive keyword phrases that I am going for so I guess it could be early days.

One worry that I have about UAW is the quality of the sites and directories that the articles get published on. Not many of them have any decent PR (above 2) and I wonder if Google may be aware of the places that UAW post to. This is all speculation on my part and overall I guess the results are mildly encouraging so far.

I will update as and when I see any progress on indexing and ultimately traffic.

The first 2 blogs I created are now indexed on page 1 of google for my main target phrases which is really cool. The first blog is pulling around 150 unique visitors a day and the second blog is pulling slightly less than that. The other 3 blogs are all indexed and getting traffic for some long tail keywords but the main target keywords are still buried deep in the Google indexes for now.

Not bad results so far and now I am moving onto the next phase also of testing some more difficult competitive but ultimately more lucrative niches.

Today I will be finishing both blogs before moving onto the next three.

The domains I bought were all .com’s and had the keyword phrase within it. If i couldn’t get the exact keyword as a .com I just added a word to it.

I then created a wordpress blog with 10 posts and made the first post a static post and also my home page. The home page was optimised for the main keyword phrase. All other posts were articles based on related keywords and subthemes of the main keyword phrase. The WP theme is very basic and simple and has just 1 category. All on page SEO is good (titles, keywords, META stuff, permalinks etc..)

I then created an article and 2 rewrites which I then fired up UAW and entered these articles into it’s interface. The whole Unique Article Wizard system was very intuitive to use and I submitted them within 10 minutes and the articles took me just over an hour to write and rewrite. They were put into the pending review queue and they say it should get approved within the day. i also set the UAW interface to submit to 50 sites a day.

So far so good.. I found UAW very easy to use and I didn’t even look at the tutorials as the contextual help and wizard were very clear. I will now repeat this whole process for my other 4 low hanging fruit domains and report any news as and when it happens! Watch this space…

For those people not aware of what unique article wizard does, it basically takes 3 variations of the same article written by yourself plus resource boxes and creates unique articles from each of them and then posts these articles to various directories, blogs, networks etc for you over a period of time you specify.

Here is the list of steps that I will be taking to test this system to destruction.

1. Choosing 5 domains based on “low hanging fruit” keywords that get reasonable searches but low competition in Google.
2. Creating a 10 page wordpress blog on each of those domains. Each post will be based on a keyword related top the main topic.
3. I will create 1 UAW project per blog.
4. I will not actively go after any backlinks from any other sources.

I will then try for more competitive niches and here are the list of steps I will take…

1. Choose 5 domains based on competitive phrases. In other words phrases that get a good number of searches, have a very healthy competition and plenty of advertizers on adwords.
2. Create a 10 page wordpress blog on each of these domains. Each post will be based on competitive keywords related to the main niche keyword.
3. I will create 1 UAW project per blog again.
4. Once again I will not go after backlinks from anywhere else.

I will run this challenge and keep you all informed about how my sites get on but I will not be revealing any URLs in this case or give any clues to the niche as it does seriously skew the results. Once the challenge is over I will be revealing 1 URL from each test just so that people can see for themeselves. The challenge will be over once the Unique Article Wizard projects have completed and Google has indexed the blogs.

I will be doing the normal on page SEO like keywords in titles, urls etc…

You will need:

• SeoQuake firefox plugin
• firefox (obviously)
• 10 keyword optimised articles with 2 backlinks to 1 page on your site.

The process I am about to outline is about persuading sites that are already indexed on Google that are indexed already for keywords you are targeting to post an article on their site written by you. It is a very powerful technique but does involve a small amount of effort on your behalf in both the power of persuasion and also article writing skill. The objective is to get the SEO benefit of backlinks from authority sites plus some good direct targeted traffic to your site. Okay here goes..

1. Choose just 1 page on your site that you would like to get traffic to and determine 1 keyword phrase that you would like that page to rank in Google’s top 10 for.
2. Write 10 articles optimised for the keyword in step 1 and with two backlinks to the page on your site you chose in step 1. Also, enure your anchor text is the keyword phrase you chose.
3. Open up firefox with SeoQuake enabled and showing you the toolbar with PR enabled also.
4. Go to Google and set preferences on google to show 100 positions rather than 10.
5. Type in your target keyword phrase into Google and click search.
6. On the SeoQuake toolbar click on the down arrow for PR which will sort the top 100 pages on Google in order of page rank from highest to lowest.
7. On the Google results page go from the top down and look for around 30 sites that look like they might be interested in articles. (See notes below)
8. Open each of those 30 sites in it’s own tab.
9. Look at each of those 30 sites and try to locate their contact details either from the site itself or through whois.
10. Contact each site’s webmaster in turn and offer them either..

• Preferably one of the articles that you wrote earlier to be posted on the page you found from the search or failing that a new page on their site.
• Change some text on an article on their page to include anchor text back to your page.
• A link exchange.

Now the hard part you are probably thinking is trying to persuade a webmaster to do this for you.. What is in it for them? Well, they will probably be more open to a link exchange but when you start offering money under their noses then it becomes a lot more attractive for them. You can expect to pay around $100 if you are persuasive enough to get your article on their site. Also, some webmasters are hungry for new content so before you offer the money they might be open to any new original content. Use money as your last resort… The important part is to try and build a rappore with the webmaster, they probably get hundreds of spammy link requests and your email needs to be personal, friendly and above all emphasize what is in it for them.. fresh content, keyword optimised content, money?? You can even offer them regular fresh content obviously with a link back to your sites.

So what are the type of sites that would be open to this? It might be easier to describe the sites that wouldn’t. Shopping type sites like Amazon, ebay, target would not be open to this and neither would big established names. The type of sites are the ones that have a lot of content, obviously run by enthusiasts and probably just 1 person outfits.

The secret sauce as to why this technique is powerful is because you are getting backlinks from sites that Google already hold in high esteem (page rank) using your target keyword phrase as anchor text back to a page on your site that is optimised for that keyword phrase already. Aim to get 10 of these per page that you want to rank for and it will shoot your page up the rankings..