My 4 Hour Workweek

I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving and were able to spend some quality time with family and/or friends.

Now, it’s time to get back to business. As you may remember, I recently wrote about how to get real backlinks for free, and I just wanted to share another strategy with you.

Like the strategy I linked to above, this isn’t some new and fancy link-building method that’s never been used before.  It’s a strategy that’s probably been around forever, and it still works.

The reason I’m writing about it today is because I’ve used it effectively for my authority site, and you can too. I’ll show you exactly how.

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It’s no secret that I’ve had some trouble with my authority sites so far.  I’ve crafted an attractive design (in my opinion), I’ve written a lot of high quality, original content, and I’ve done a fair amount of work to attract real backlinks.

Nevertheless, Google doesn’t seem to like my site.  At least, not yet.

Maybe you’re in the same boat as me, with your site.  A lot of work, not a lot of results.  I think it’s the most common scenario, despite all the success stories you read online (simply because the people who fail usually don’t write about it).

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with this awesome tool lately that has given me a lot of great insight, and the good news is, you can use it almost to its full potential without ever paying anything.  I’ll explain…

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Sometimes SEO works in mysterious ways.  With all of Google’s algorithm changes, and the basic fact that no one really understands all the components of Google’s algorithm, strange things can happen.

People tend to focus on the negative observations, but sure enough, positive ones occur probably just as frequently.

I was faced with one of these positive occurrences, something I came back to after my 8 day vacation overseas (which is why I haven’t been able to respond to your comment or e-mail lately, in case you’re wondering).

This actually blew my mind when I saw it - one of the most competitive keyword phrases, and I’m ranking on page 1 (without even trying to).  I decided to turn this startling observation into a case study to see if there’s something we can learn.

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If you’ve read about and learned the basics of SEO, you know that backlinks are important for the ranking of your site. More important, however, is the fact that backlinks can range widely in quality.

Generally, the easier it is to obtain a backlink, the lower quality it is (there are exceptions, of course). I don’t ever claim to be an expert on SEO, but I wanted to share with you a very simple strategy that I tried recently, that helped me get a real backlink without having to spend any money.

When I say “real”, I mean that it isn’t a backlink I manually built for myself with content on an article directory or Web 2.0 site, and it isn’t something auto-generated by software.  Also, I didn’t have to write any content (i.e. it wasn’t a guest post).

This is an old, simple, and proven tactic, but I just wanted to show that it still works. Read more…

As promised, I’m going to periodically update the progress of my case study as I attempt to bring a few of my niche sites “back to life” (you can read part 1 where I explain everything here). [Warning: This is a very short post!]

So far, it looks as if things are going well.  It’s always difficult to tell if changes are a result of efforts that I’m making, or some external forces (like Google algorithm changes).  Here’s a quick look at the improvements over the past couple of weeks.

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Given all of Google’s recent changes, I thought it would be interesting to take a few of my good sites that lost rankings, and see if I can recover them.  I’m a big fan of case studies, so whenever possible, I like to document these types of experiments and make them public for all of you to read.

This experiment could ultimately fail, but I think it’ll be a good learning experience for both you and me.  Keep reading, and I’ll dig into the details.

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