Part of what I do with The Agile Marketer is to evaluate products and services that help you extend your options so that you can learn how to make money online. Over the summer I was very intrigued by many reports about the service, Build My Rank (or BMR for short), that from others seems to be an excellent page rank building option.
Build My Rank is bascially a network of content blogs designed to give you increased page rank as their blogs naturally improve their own page ranking by subscribers posting content within their system. To use it you must first subscribe to their montly plan that then allows you to write and post articles within their network.
I knew that the only way to really test this service was to truly devote an extended period of time to testing the waters with some different sites of my own to see just how much my sites would improve in page rank. Knowing that Google takes weeks to alter rankings this test would have to span at least two months.
My hope going in was that I would gain enough back in revenue from passive income (such as ads and affiliate products) that the monthly fee ($59/month at time of this writing) would be easily offset.
I decided to use three specific test cases that would represent different levels of site age, varying traffic levels and specific keyword strategies (note - all rankings are from Google search results):
Site 1: Seattle Guitar Lessons - This was a fairly new site at the time of testing (less than a year old) that I had setup as a test for localized marketing. I hadn't done any rank building on this site so this was an excellent choice for a new domain right out of the gate.
Main keyword rankings as of Oct 15th were: #19 for the open keyword phrase Seattle guitar lessons (1.2M results) and #15 for the quoted "Seattle guitar lessons" (71K results). Note that the competition for this phrase was very low with only three Wordpress posts - that is why the ranking was pretty good to start.
Open question: could BMR boost a small niche site quickly to the top?
Site 2: The Diet Solution Program - If you've read my previous posts, this was one of my affiliate site examples from four years ago that made me a few thousand dollars in affiliate revenue. I had actively marketed it for a while but let it drop off the last year or two. I thought that since my test with BMR started in November, the effort might push the site back up just in time for New Year's which always is a good time for weight loss products.
Main keyword rankings fro the open keyword phrase The Diet Solution Program was at #57 (7M results) and the quoted phrase "The Diet Solution Program" (17M results) was at #52.
Open question: could BMR revive an old site that had been ignored?
Site 3: The Agile Marketer - Of course, my own site is in a very highly competitive market especially for the keyword phrase 'how to make money online'. This site is now 5 1/2 years old and has been heavily marketed. However, getting into the top levels of that keyword phrase has been espeically difficult.
For the unquoted phrase the inital rank didn't even show up in the Google results (>#700 at 1.7B results - that's right, 1.7 billion!). The quoted phrase 'how to make money online' started at #63 (8M results).
Open question: could BMR push up existing site rank within an extremely competitive keyword market?
The next part of the Build My Rank test was to determine the frequency of posting articles. What I really like about BMR is the ability to choose how many posts a day you want to publish and if they're scheduled. Part of the rationale here is to make sure you're not just blasting too many backlinks to your sites which may cause Google to penalize your site ranking.
I decided that for my newest site (Site 1) that I would be very cautious and only post occassionally so as not to disrupt my current rank and not get penalized by Google for a newer domain. For Site 2, I really had nothing to lose and didn't care if it failed so decided I woud write as many article posts as I possibly could. And finally for this site, I decided that about an article a day would suffice - I was not going to risk my core site.
I ran my testing for three months from November 1st, 2011 to Jan 31st, 2012.
What's interesting about BMR's strategy is that through their own research, articles with just over 150 words seem to have just as much bearing on their blog network ranking (which pays as backlinks to you) as do long articles. This was a relief for me since writing a ton of articles can be painstaking. But, writing a 150 word article is pretty simple.
Also, they allow you to have multiple keyword phrases with different backlinks to your site (as shown here):
Next up, the Build My Rank results!
I knew that the only way to really test this service was to truly devote an extended period of time to testing the waters with some different sites of my own to see just how much my sites would improve in page rank. Knowing that Google takes weeks to alter rankings this test would have to span at least two months.
My hope going in was that I would gain enough back in revenue from passive income (such as ads and affiliate products) that the monthly fee ($59/month at time of this writing) would be easily offset.
Build My Rank Test Cases
I decided to use three specific test cases that would represent different levels of site age, varying traffic levels and specific keyword strategies (note - all rankings are from Google search results):
Site 1: Seattle Guitar Lessons - This was a fairly new site at the time of testing (less than a year old) that I had setup as a test for localized marketing. I hadn't done any rank building on this site so this was an excellent choice for a new domain right out of the gate.
Main keyword rankings as of Oct 15th were: #19 for the open keyword phrase Seattle guitar lessons (1.2M results) and #15 for the quoted "Seattle guitar lessons" (71K results). Note that the competition for this phrase was very low with only three Wordpress posts - that is why the ranking was pretty good to start.
Open question: could BMR boost a small niche site quickly to the top?
Site 2: The Diet Solution Program - If you've read my previous posts, this was one of my affiliate site examples from four years ago that made me a few thousand dollars in affiliate revenue. I had actively marketed it for a while but let it drop off the last year or two. I thought that since my test with BMR started in November, the effort might push the site back up just in time for New Year's which always is a good time for weight loss products.
Main keyword rankings fro the open keyword phrase The Diet Solution Program was at #57 (7M results) and the quoted phrase "The Diet Solution Program" (17M results) was at #52.
Open question: could BMR revive an old site that had been ignored?
Site 3: The Agile Marketer - Of course, my own site is in a very highly competitive market especially for the keyword phrase 'how to make money online'. This site is now 5 1/2 years old and has been heavily marketed. However, getting into the top levels of that keyword phrase has been espeically difficult.
For the unquoted phrase the inital rank didn't even show up in the Google results (>#700 at 1.7B results - that's right, 1.7 billion!). The quoted phrase 'how to make money online' started at #63 (8M results).
Open question: could BMR push up existing site rank within an extremely competitive keyword market?
The Test
The next part of the Build My Rank test was to determine the frequency of posting articles. What I really like about BMR is the ability to choose how many posts a day you want to publish and if they're scheduled. Part of the rationale here is to make sure you're not just blasting too many backlinks to your sites which may cause Google to penalize your site ranking.
I decided that for my newest site (Site 1) that I would be very cautious and only post occassionally so as not to disrupt my current rank and not get penalized by Google for a newer domain. For Site 2, I really had nothing to lose and didn't care if it failed so decided I woud write as many article posts as I possibly could. And finally for this site, I decided that about an article a day would suffice - I was not going to risk my core site.
I ran my testing for three months from November 1st, 2011 to Jan 31st, 2012.
What's interesting about BMR's strategy is that through their own research, articles with just over 150 words seem to have just as much bearing on their blog network ranking (which pays as backlinks to you) as do long articles. This was a relief for me since writing a ton of articles can be painstaking. But, writing a 150 word article is pretty simple.
Also, they allow you to have multiple keyword phrases with different backlinks to your site (as shown here):
Next up, the Build My Rank results!
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