SEO Case Studies – Exposing Top SEO Companies & Secret Methods

The following SEO case study will examine another top ranking SEO company. This company ranks number two in the world for the highly competitive keyword: seo company.  Like greencowseo.com in the first case study, ExplodeSEO.com has recently shot up to the top of the SERPS in a niche that many people are closely watching. Explodeseo.com is already enjoying an Alexa Rank of around 100,000 and it’s based, 85% on the keyword in question: seo company.

The “seo company” niche is a great one to study because we know that the Matt Cutts team at Google keeps a very close eye on this niche. In fact, one would maybe even go so far as to say that the web spam team at Google may have backward engineered the SEO experts who regularly rank for SEO related keywords. After all, there are some very clever SEO consultants and companies out there and everyone can learn from everyone else. It’s not just the geeks at Google who know about SEO. They learn things from their “enemies” too. Yes, SEO companies are the enemy of Google from Google’s perspective. SEO companies are simply people who can manipulate search engine results. No need to talk about silly labels like black hat and white hat.  All SEO companies and consultants have the same goal in mind: manipulate search results in their (or their clients) favor.  Isn’t it strange then that Google does nothing about ExplodeSEO.com?

One of the main ranking factors is the link profile. Which websites link to explodeseo.com? What anchor text do they use? How many “seo company” anchors are there?  How differentiated are the range of IP addresses linking to explodeseo.com?  How many outbound links are on the pages linking to them? What is the PageRank of the sites linking in? Of all the pages that link to explodeseo.com how many have relevant titles?

These are critical questions indeed. Find out the answer to all of these questions by downloading the following spreadsheet.

explodeseo link profile 11-20-12

That spreadsheet contains all of the answers to the questions above, and these are questions we must ask when doing an SEO case study analysis. If you have not already downloaded the “explodeseo link profile” above, which was generated on November 20th, 2012, I highly recommend doing so. This spreadsheet demands serious study as it provides empirical data upon which we can base our inferences and conclusions about SEO methods that actually work in competitive niches. Keep in mind that this link profile is not complete. Open Site Explorer (OSE) doesn’t find every existing link to one’s site.  Just compare the link profile you can download (of your site) at Google Webmaster Tools to the link profile generated by Open Site Explorer. It’s easy to see that Webmaster Tools is finding a much higher percentage of live links than OSE. None the less, the profiles generated by OSE are inclusive enough to be more than sufficient in analyzing and developing SEO campaigns; they’re just not perfect.

Let’s move away from talking about link profiles and start thinking about on-page SEO and how explodeseo.com tended to theirs.

1. The tags are good and include their main keyword, SEO company, right at the beginning. This is a regular pattern to be observed among many top ranking sites across a wide variety of niches.

Title: SEO Company Providing Risk Free SEO Services

Meta keywords: SEO Company, SEO Services, Risk Free SEO

Meta description: We are a SEO Company that offers risk free SEO Services to our clients who would like to increase the traffic to their website Call 1 888 9 Explode

2. Keyword Density: 624 total words with two-word keyword density under 3%. SEO services is at 2.56% and SEO company is at 1.92%. However, the single keyword “seo” is at 3.85% which is a little high these days. People are becoming very careful of not over-optimizing their onpage SEO factors due to harsher penalties since Panda.

3. No H1 tags.  There are many aspiring SEO’s out there worrying about every little on-page SEO factor one can think of. The truth is on-page SEO is not a critical component when it comes to ranking for really competitive keywords like SEO company. Everybody in this niche knows how to setup on-page SEO just as well as everyone else. So how does Google really decide who ends up at the top of the SERPS?  The link profile.

ExplodeSEO.com has a typical link profile for a top ranking site.  They’ve acquired at least 500 links that are good enough to show up on OSE. Most of these links come from pages that are either directly or tangentially related to search engine optimization.  Some of you might wonder how much the relevancy factor actually weighs when it comes to determining the value of a link. Greencowseo.com had lots of links from sites that weren’t relevant and they are ahead of explodeseo.com, but, their links came from high pagerank, high trust sites (because they were apparently hacked). However, with explodeseo.com the majority of their links come from medium and low pagerank sites and pages. Therefore, in order to maximize every last bit of their efforts they make sure that the pages linking to them are relevant, including titles.

It appears that explodeseo.com is using a strategy of buying expiring/expired domains that still have some pagerank, and wiping off the original content which is then replaced by cheaply written SEO related content. This is an efficient way to run an SEO campaign because by buying all of those expired domains, some with pagerank 5, 4, 3 or 2, the SEO company is able to secure lots of unique links. While everyone else is out getting links from the same old directories, web2.0 properties, profile links and so on, explodeseo.com is finding a unique set of links to make up a significant portion of their link profile. Google is going to look at those links and realize that they are different than everyone else’ links. Competitors won’t be able to easily duplicate their process either. There is no software like SENuke or Ultimate Demon or Xrumer or Scrapebox that is going to be able to automate this process.

Let’s have a look at some of these sites. Remember, this is how a top ranking site managed to outrank all (except greencow) of the experts in the world.  First, have a look at http://www.aspma.com/ and you’ll see the SEO company link in the article titled The Basics of Pay Per Click Advertising. This article has been left on the homepage with another one because the homepage is a PR4. This content is just plain old boring content that offeres nothing new. In fact, information like this can be found on thousands of SEO websites and blogs. But explodeseo.com doesn’t care about that at all. They don’t care if ANY of their network sites (the sites linking to them in their link profile) get any traffic whatsoever. They don’t have to put good content on these sites because they have no intention of doing any business there. These pages and websites are created for one purpose only: to push the domain explodeseo.com higher in the SERPS.  In the old days we could use software to generate content that was barely readable but contained relevant keywords for this same purpose. The problem is that Google got better at identifying sites filled with such content and devalued links coming from such sites. Also, if one’s competitors hires an SEO expert to analyze his site’s link profile, the competition could start notifying Google about these semi-spammy sites (the network that makes up the link profile). A Google employee would then, sooner or later, look at some of the offending sites they received the reports on. Immediately they would see that the content was machine generated and deindex or penalize all links coming from that site.

SEO consultants and companies just can’t get away with that anymore. Instead they need to actually pay someone to write “throw away” content which they use to populate the network sites. This “throw away” content is unique, passes copyscape, and generally reads well enough. However, it’s just lousy content that is written at a pace of about 500 words per 20 minutes. They just pay someone to rewrite some articles that are already pretty boring and unremarkable – but they insist that the article be truly unique. This matters as the shelf life of the articles is increased significantly. An article that is discovered to be duplicate content, in part or in full, is usually added to the supplemental index before too long. At that point all links coming from the article to your website would be devalued. This is why SEO companies must now pay for unique content. This cost is passed on to the consumer, naturally.

Here’s an example of a domain that was probably purchased with existing pagerank: http://postpartumdadsproject.org/

The Post Partum Dads Project…what do you think this site is about? Certainly not SEO but in fact it is about SEO. I recommend visiting that URL and reading the content. Explodeseo.com is linking to their site from this postpartumdadsproject website. Here’s a bit of content from the site,

“Both in the link building with SEO services and on site SEO, it is true that the rule that has been created for today, not necessarily it will be to future as well. ” (postpartumdadsproject.org, 2012).

You can see from the above excerpt the kind of content I was describing when I was talking about, “throw away” content. I wonder what kind of content they use to promote their clients sites?

To make a long case study short, we can say that most of the pages found in their link profile are similar to this one. Same level of content i.e. low quality, all the pages are about search engine optimization and all the anchored links are focused on just a few keywords. There is nothing “natural” about the way this link profile looks.

Blog Comments have been found in their link profile as well. Just look at this comment found on bluehatseo.com. Scroll down to the bottom of the comments on that post and you’ll see this one:

Comment by New York SEO Company

– 2012-08-27 05:01:21

Hello Everyone,
I understand the SEO is the method of enhancing a presence of the site or even a webpage within search engines like Google.

In this example, the link going back to explodeseo.com is found in the “name” field on the blog. That is, “New York SEO Company”.  Does the language used in this comment sound like it came from someone in New York or New Delhi?

Regardless of what the SEO experts say at places like search engine land, seomoz and others, people are ranking sites in tough niches using tried and true SEO methods that aren’t supposed to work anymore.  Some will say that this is just a short term strategy and that such strategies are inherently weak. However, Greencowseo.com has maintained it’s number one position for most of this year now. That’s a lot of very valuable traffic and a lot of money to be sure! I won’t make any judgements here at seospoiler.com about such tactics not working. That’s not how it’s done here. At seospoiler.com we look at sites that are already ranking and backward engineer the methods. Then we record those methods and reflect on what we’ve learned. No preconceived notions – no biases!

I’d like to offer one way that this SEO campaign could have been improved. Their IP addresses are not sufficiently covered up. Look at the screenshot below as I’ve sorted a portion of their link profile by IP address. You can do this too with the spreadsheet I made available for download.

They could have used some Class C SEO Hosting to spread out their IP addresses a little more.  Instead they probably just got some reseller hosting somewhere and put all these sites on it. Then they populated them all with cheap content. Finally, they linked them to explodeseo.com and their rankings exploded indeed.

This is short term though, usually. Even Greencowseo who has begun to encroach on the one year mark (a few more months I think) is in the short term. This kind of SEO might not be a good investment for a company that is trying to reflect an established brand online. for instance, we can all imagine that Starbucks would be a little embarrassed to have to explain, every 11 months or so, why their website suddenly disappeared.

In summary

In a post Panda and post Penguin SEO world the top SEO companies are still ranking themselves and, presumably, their clients with the same old tactics. The difference between SEO in 2012 and SEO in 2008 (for example) is that real content must now be used to make these kinds of cheap easy links. Again, I want to emphasize that greencowseo’s link profile was loaded, packed full, overflowing with really high trust links from pages and sites that would never normally link to them, which is why they were  most likely hacked.  With those kinds of super-high-trust links the content doesn’t even need to be related. But with these rather ordinary links everything counts: the titles of the pages linking to you having the keywords in them (like SEO or SEO Company or SEO services etc…), the content on those pages being relevant and few outbound links.

At $5 per article at the cheapest, and 500 sites that’s at least $2500 in content. Some of these sites have a number of articles. This could really be around $8000 in content. That would give us 3 or 4 articles on lots of sites and just two articles on a number of sites. Maybe we can push it to $10,000 for content and a few thousand for domain purchases. Probably around $15,000 could easily be justified in terms of cost here. That doesn’t include the cost of actually doing the link and content placement and everything else. There are ways to cut costs though and using interns is one of them. Many companies use interns to write this kind of content and pay them nothing at all.  Sometimes the interns are supplemented with an employee or two. Using interns could save an SEO company $10,000 in content costs while still meeting the minimum quality requirements for content used to produce on an effective link profile in 2012.

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About the Author

Christopher Lees has been a full time SEO professional since 2006. He has written on the secrets of black hat SEO and has had his independent work referenced at universities and leading authoritative sites like researchgate.net. He has been providing white label SEO services for hundreds of clients through many well known web design and marketing companies in Massachusetts and beyond.

If you are with the press, Christopher Lees can be contacted for an interview by emailing hamptonlees@gmail.com. Chris is occasionally available for guest posts on other blogs.