Are Wiki links still working? – CASESTUDY

Published by Oidram on Saturday, October 20th, 2012

What’s up everybody? Hope you’re enjoying the summer and had some time off from your computers. Not like us in the seoFriik, instead of spending time at the beach we’re doing experiments with SEO. So whats cooking? We decided to give a closer look at the notorious wiki links. As you may already know, those links have been very popular in the SEO community for nearly a year now. Especially in the Blackhat Market section, those links are now being part of most of the link building packages. With the demand, a lot of software has been coded for this specific purpose, software which allows you to submit to thousands of Wiki directories within hours. Unfortunately, most of the content which is published there is auto-spun copy-paste from the Ezine articles and from other relevant article directories. Nevertheless, we decided to see if those links work, how well they work and actually try to see for how long. One more interesting factor is that the Wiki links are mostly no-follow, so that will spice it up a bit. As we are thinking of having another case study based on that.

Details of the Wiki links Case study

We took a list of 10000 Wiki directories (pretty massive eh?) PR0-PR7
3 Articles – Content manually spun by writers on the sentence, phrase and word level (readable, decent quality content)
Post to 330 Wiki directories per day for 30 days
Use Linklicious to signal the Google about the links
Software – Clyde’s Wiki Bomber

Website to be ranked – SpeedyWP.com

Registred on 13.07.2012
PageRank n/a
0 backlinks
~10-20 pages on content
On-site optimized
Speed optimized

Measuring Period/Reporting

We will make updates on this post in every 5 days.
Period on rank measuring 45 days
Software – Advanced Web Rankings

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Start – 17th August – click here to download the ranking report

Report file attached. As you can see, we started from scratch. The weren’t any ranks previously established. Good luck to us!

Report 1 – 22nd August – click here to download the ranking report

So 5 days later, first results are in. It is a bit early to tell if the wiki links actually contributed to the ranks or they are mainly based on the on-site optimization what has been done on the website. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that indexing took place thanks to Wiki links.

Report 2 – 27th August - click here to download the ranking report

Now 5 days have passed. It seems that the first bump has passed and we have a slight decrease, which is quite obvious. Quick growth is often followed by a slowdown. However, now we are soon going to see if the wiki links actually work or not.

Report 3 – 1st of September – click here to download the ranking report

This time we see a lot of improvement in the rankings. Looking quite good already. However, when we consider the traffic, there is still nothing really going on on the website yet.

Report 4 – 6th of September - click here to download the ranking report

We are seeing a slow but steady growth for most of the keywords. Some are still jumping up and down to find their place. Now we will make a small change in the tactics and start linking also to subpages.

Report 5 – 11th of September - click here to download the ranking report

Time for the next update. Now we are seeing a slight decrease in the rankings. Perhaps over delivery in links? Perhaps a Google update? Perhaps something else? We’ll check the reports in the coming days too, to get more information on the causes. We are seeing a small drop in some of our other sites as well, so it could very well be an update. It is hardly unlikely that the fluctuation is cause by another Google update, neither we do believe that we built way too many way too fast. I would really like to use term “Google Dance” here and believe that this is a temporary drop, but only thing here is left to wait and see.

Report 6 - Scheduled on 16th of September – click here to download the ranking report

Compared with the previous rank check we see mainly a quite decent incline. From the total of 15 keywords which we are targeting with this campaign, we see that 7 of them have jumped quite a bit and 5 of them had had a slight drop. Those two keywords which are showing off the charts are the fault of the AWR. Even though, the jump has been positive, we are not seeing any visitors from Search Engines. What we also noticed is that the jumps are getting smaller and smaller, so we might be near the platue. We have still couple of rounds to go to wrap up this case study and we would like to believe that we end up in top 10 with at least 5 keywords.

Report 7 – Scheduled on 21th of September – click here to download the ranking report

When we saw the previous report coming in, I was honestly assuming that we ran out of juice and from this point onward we will be seeing either few minor increases or a smooth downfall. As we see from this report, I was wrong, a nice jump for Report 7. That means that the previous keywords which dropped were dancing a little bit but improved their positions. My plan of landing at least 4-5 keywords on top1 is yet achievable. Which I’m curious about is that the some of the keyword haven’t yet had the jumped not even to top 50 – wordpress speed optimization, speed up wordpress, speed up wordpress. Now we’re going to add a twist to the case study, I’ll include 500 words of content to the first page and SEO it a little bit. Perhaps, get some content for the subpages as well. This might be needed to get the other keywords rocking as well.

Report 8 – Scheduled on 26th of September - click here to download the ranking report

This rank check comes with some unpleasant surprises. We are seeing many drops, fortunately very minor. This leads me to believe that those rank drops are a small scale Google dance. Nevertheless we were expecting a lot more from this one. We decided to extend the case study a while longer because this project hasn’t yet reached its full potential and we’re seeing it can rank much higher that it is right now.

Report 9 – Scheduled on 1st of October - click here to download the ranking report

Wowii, seems like we had a big kick this week. Now, we’re fairly confident that this bump didn’t come from the wiki links, but rather the content which we added to the front. It was in that sense a very tiny tweak to the on-site optimization but ranks improved significantly. We can conclude from this event that with a good on-site and just linking from wikis you can get quite a good bump.

Report 10 – Scheduled on 7nth of October - click here to download the ranking report

Seems like our growth somewhat continues and we see some dancing. “Fast WordPress” wins the best dance award this week. There are tiny drops on some of the keywords but we also see significant jumps. Indication that the game is far from over and wiki links are bringing it. For next week I’m going to order an additional article and start from very beginning with fresh stuff, increasing the velocity a little.

Report 10 – Scheduled on 14nth of October - click here to download the ranking report

Codename: Downfall. That unfortunately folks look very bad. A bit too much to be a Google dance, a bit less to be a penalty. My thoery is that we’ve reached the end of the line with effectivness of the Wiki links. My obvious problem is also now the diversity. I’ve been through the list already so having a second run with the same urls. I burn it through the list and give it few more weeks, but I guess its better to start wrapping up this study and call it a day with wiki links.

Report 11 – Scheduled on 20th of October - click here to download the ranking report

Codename: Resurrection. Wow, seems like the game is still on. We had some come backs, some rises and few keywords entered into Google dance. Does that mean that the top of these links power haven’t yet been met? I’d really interested to know where is the limit. That’s the second time when it seems that now its only direction is down from this point but I’ve been wrong two times. We’ll keep it up and I’m not going to jump to conclusions when the next drop will happen.

Report 12 – Scheduled on 20th of October - click here to download the ranking report

Compared with the last update we have mostly drops. As it seems this is becoming normal, one week you will get a boost and the other week you will drop slightly. The interesting two are the main keywords “wp speed optimization” and “fast wp” which are Google dancing heavily all the time, while the others are very stable. Both of the keywords have been ranking in Top 20. Best for “fast wp” was 19 and best for “wp speed optmization” was 11. I’m really hoping that the fast wp will come around since it has the most traffic.

Stay tuned!

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Oidram

SEO Strategist at seoFriik

I am a small town kid who started his internet marketing career with his first affiliate website at the age of 12. At 2009 the hobby became a profession and 2010 seoFriik was born. Testing, tweaking and measuring is something what I absolutely love. In my spare time I love traveling, cooking, house music and having an intense workout session. Trying out new things is something which is hard-coded. Wise man once said - "Do not limit your challenges, challenge your limits!"