Am I out of the Ituloy AngSulong SEO Contest?
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Sun Feb 11, 2007Late last year in 2006, I was initially concentrating on isulongseoph.com.ph and not news.ituloy-angsulong.info but MSN/Live would not really notice what I was doing and only Google and Yahoo was giving notice to isulongseoph.com.ph. I then decided to move on to news.ituloy-angsulong.info. This post is in reply to Jason Torres post when he tagged me to reveal what I did in the same way he revealed what he did in his post. In his post he said:
Update: I’m tagging Benj of news.ituloy-angsulong.info, GIO of Isulongseophil.com and
Dennis of SEOBunker.com to disclose their experience.
Benj - said he will at his blog at February 7
Gio - said right after the contest
Dennis - said “…â€
So here is what I have been doing, but sorry to dissapoint others since it is not as detailed as Jasons post in the technical, code specific sense and giving out the specific methods of link building. But it is more of my strategy on how I brought balance to the 3 search engines. Please also note that I have already dropped in Yahoo and MSN as of today, February 11, 2007 which was really what I expected, but what I am not sure of is, is my site coming back? Now here’s the story of my SEO Contest Experience.
Trying to catch up in MSN - Playing with Keyword Density
MSN was like a new beast to me. After reading several threads on MSN about Live Search’s spam filter probably putting websites down, and I started to look at the over all keyword density of the top 10 sites on MSN/Live, I noticed most had a keyword density less than 3%. This is when I started posting topics that did not have the text ituloy angsulong” and just started to concentrate on topics that would be of interest to SEO people and hopefully try to get whatever link bait I can get, along with social bookmarking, it I was able to come up with some good balance in the 3 search engines and was playing in the 2nd and 3rd spot exchanging places with Gio Castro’s isulongseophil.com in the end of January.
The Yahoo Drop and Recovery - The 301 redirect
Thanks to Dennis Agulo’s SEOBunker.com results, excellent work on this site. Good ranking reports. In a screenshot of the ranking of this site, on January 30, 2007, my site jumps from 1 to 44. I have seen sites move up and down a few places, but 1 to 44 was really big, from page 1 to page 5. It looks like I may have trip flag that decided to put my website way down. The truth is I still have no answer why this happened. So I waited a while and was thinking maybe it will come back and it’s just some minor glitch or update going on. But I was seeing a downward trend while isulongseoph.com.ph was still on page 1.
On February 1, 2007, I decide to do a 301 redirect on isulongseoph.com.ph to news.ituloy-angsulong.info and just forget about it and not even hope to get back and just get any small individual search engine prize I can get. Then I noticed the search engine descriptions started changing and February 5, 2007, Yahoo brings back my site to the 1st page along with isulongseoph.com.ph with exchanging titles and descriptions because of the 301. Unfortunately, this also caused the MSN drop.
And this 301 redirect may have helped Yahoo, but it hurt MSN badly. Aside from that, isulongseoph.com.ph was not ranking high in MSN, so it might really pull it down.
Bringing Back MSN - The fresh content trigger
February 9, 2007, MSN decides to put back my site on the first page right after a fresh content posting. Other people have better telling me about this also that both Yahoo and MSN seem to like new post about a certain topic. My website went back to the first page of MSN right afte the new post. Was that the cause of it going back to the first page? Or maybe the 301 redirect was just starting to take effect on MSN? Or mabe both, the new post triggered the re-crawling and reevaluating the site now with the 301 redirect in place?
The drastic changes - massive 301 redirects
Aside from getting back on track, Marhgil Macula (Not Marc Hil Macalua although they look similar, they are really 2 different people) suddently springs back into the leader board making me, him an Gio switch in the overall 2nd, 3rd and 4th spot on every page load. And I got a notice from a company for my sponsored post on isulongseoph.com.ph that it no longer appears and forwards to some place else. Aside from that I have some paid link ads as well so I needed to remove the 301 redirect on isulongseoph.com.ph.
Alfredo Palconit seems to be untouchable in his overall first place position. I could probably come up with more link baiting post, and do some social networking, but I’m too lazy to do that. I can do link development, do forum post and all those other stuff, but, I’m too lazy to do that. What did I do as a real quick fix? I choose 3 domains I have that have a significant amount of links, regardless of the link text they are targeted for. For all 3 domains I do 301 redirects yesterday, and what happens next?
Here is the bad news, Yahoo and MSN drops we way down, real way down. Both search engines drop my rankings from page 1 to page 4. The change was too drastic I guess, since all backlinks from the existing domains will be considered as links to where it forwards to. The addition of links then was way too fast. But surprisingly, Google doesn’t seem to care about it right now. But this drop can be due to a recalculation, or it can be a ranking penalty. And in the past history above, it took 6 to 7 days to get back on track after fixing some problems. And the first day of my ranking dip is today, February 11, 2007. Thus who knows by February 18, 2007, the ranking might go back to the high spot as recalculations are done. But if this is a ranking penalty, then I might as well remove the 301 redirects. But how do I find out if this is a ranking recalculation or a ranking penalty? Actually I really don’t know. *LOL*
But since based on the past history, I got about 6 to 7 days before I see changes the Ituloy AngSulong contest ends on February 23, 2007. So If the site is still at the low end by February 16 to 17, 2007, then I guess it is safer to just remove the 301 redirects from my sites.
Attack on me - Does it have an effect?
My site went down twice. Mostly due to some files deleted in the wp-contents folder. I do not know how you guys do it. And I also don’t know if they are competitors in the contest or some random hacker. And most of the occurence, someone sends me an IM right away and I am able to remedy it in a few minutes so I guess that will not really affect my ranking. But the links from bad neighborhoods, I do not know who you are and I do not even want to figure out and investigate. Did it affect my rankings? Hmmm I am not sure. But I also have no control over it so I just try to overpower it.
This is how not to do SEO - Do not follow what I am doing for your own SEO clients
I am just doing this because this website is not mine and is not my SEO client. Most of the optimizing I have been doing here is:
- To increase the content and lessen the code, I actually hide the code, you can try to figure that out. Even some outbound links are hidden too. I will not elaborate this.
- To get more links, I just pull a few switches, that suddenly gives me a burst of links. Maybe not a good idea since they are obtained too fast. how is this done, I will also not elaborate on this.
It is also not worth knowing what I am doing since these techniques are not nice to use on SEO clients anyway. They are quick shortcuts, but they are also quick drops in the SERPs as well. And for some crazy reason, it seems Yahoo and MSN seem to drop my site down the SERPs than Google does. If my sites don’t come back in Yahoo and MSN, then I actually get no prize.
I am also tagging Alfredo Palconit of palconit.com and Gio of isulongseophil.com to share their experience of what they did and why. Jason’s post was a good one, very detailed, but it pretty much did not work on Yahoo and MSN. But still a good post.
I won’t be surprised if some come-from-behind overall wins come just before February 23, 2007.
- If isulong-seophil.com gets a boost in Google, you can be very competitive for the overall win.
- blueseo.com and pinkseo.com are just having problems in MSN, if they get a boost from MSN just before the contest ends, they can be in the top 3 overall too.
- And never under estimate the power of Whin Clores now running pinoyseo.com. He has barely worked on his site because of the major storm that hit the Bicol region and they had no electrical power for a long period. He just got back online in January and is currently ranking low in Yahoo only. If Yahoo suddenly increases his rank, we might see a come from behind win again just like how he did in Isulong SEOph where he was 2nd place and came out of nowhere.
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