We have an update to the SocialAdr test because we were able to monitor the results a little bit more. Is SocialAdr going to work? Is this worth it? Does it move the needle?
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Does The Use of SocialAdr Affect the Rankings on Google?
We have an update to this test and I thought about switching it up and showing everybody the results in this webinar because time goes by and we were able to monitor the results a little bit more. The point of this is that, there are a lot of programs out there. Is this going to work? If I am going to buy links or velocity or something and SocialAdr is one of the places that do it, is this worth anything? Does it move the needle?
What SocialAdr does is that it does a lot of social bookmarking like Delicious, Tumblr, Stumbleupon. It also does Pinterest and Facebook and other regular social media. I think they also do some microblogger too. The idea is that you pay them money and real people who have real accounts go and post your links with a blurb and link back to where you want to go.
If you do a search for if social bookmarking is good for SEO, you get the whole gag of opinions. Yet, it is fine, marginally, no it is going to harm you, no it is nothing. Then, you see something in 2007 that says go do it. Does SocialAdr affect rank? That is what we are testing.
In the first test, SocialAdr with duplicate content, we put in a lorem ipsum. There is a place in the platform where you can put the link that you want and then you can put a little description on what that post is about. They have a spintax feature which we didn’t use.
After all the links were built, we sent them to a link indexer and, in this case, we used Linklicious. I use Linklicious only because I have had an account with them for forever and they seem to be fine. There are a bunch of link indexers out there.
We chose page two for the links. Within 2 days, the test page dropped to the #4 position indicating transitional rank. That means there is a factor in play when we see those kinds of results as we know when we are running our own test and you put something in place. Especially with links, you see transitional rank. But within a week, after the link indexing was finished, it moved up to the number one spot and that is where it stayed. That was a pretty good result there.
We did it again in Test #2 – SocialAdr with Real English. The reason we did English was to use the spintax feature. What was interesting in copying and pasting some English in, we’ve got some html code – the and turned into and & and a little bit of code. I left those in with the thought that we are novice users and are super lazy and just want to go with it. I ran that and a few days later, it completely dropped from rankings.
Again, that was transitional rank and that is the kind of thing that scares the crap out of you. That happens a lot whenever you fire links and you see a 20, 30 spot dropper or you completely drop of rankings, that is a part of the dance.
Two days later, the test page reappeared in the #2 spot and it stayed there for a couple of weeks. Then, after about three weeks or so, boom, it went to the number one spot. What was interesting in this one was there was no link indexer was used and it was just naturally done, and it took 3-4 weeks in the environment and then it took to the number one spot.
You can see the number two spot. It was Stumbleupon. That is actually one of the links that was done. There was a Twitter. All those links were indexing on their own. It took about 3-4 weeks.
Then we ran it again – Test 3: SocialAdr Spun with Time. We used English and spintax. We corrected any errors and cleaned it up. It was really good and readable and no indexer was used. The idea here was that, we wanted to test that time. At this point, we were picking up the idea that the issue was the time, that these pass juice. But we know that links take a while to take effect and we were looking at the time issue. We went to the third spot as test page.
The next day, it moved to the #2 spot and then immediately dropped down back to #3 where it stayed for a couple of weeks. Then, bingo, it took 3-4 weeks, it moved to the number 1 spot. You can also see the Stumbleupon, ttlink.com, Delicious. Those are all indexing links and they are showing in the results.
With all the tests, by the end of the week, we ended up with 4-5 pages of Google results that were just the links that were built for the test. The only way that they were indexing was that they had the fake target keyword in the URL which was placed in the site. That was actually enough to get them indexed.
The big takeaways on it is that, you probably want 275 links. I would use spun, unique descriptions that had no errors. You could spin at the sentence level to which end up as completely unique content. If you need to speed up results, you can use a link indexer but I would just wait the 3-4 weeks, to be honest, because I think it would look more natural.
But if you are really behind and need some movement, you can do that. Otherwise, keep in mind that when you use these programs you would need 3-4 weeks. Also keep in mind that this is a test environment. There are no other factors in play aside from these links. If you are going to do it in a live environment, I can see it taking longer because there is more for the algorithm to crunch. Last thing to keep in mind is that this is not the be-all-and-end-all.
This isn’t the silver bullet. We just do this and you are going to rank for everything. This is a positive ranking factor. This is something that you could use. I would personally use it, on the 3rd spot in a stack where I am looking for link velocity.
It would make sense if you had a nice little blogpost and you put it on a wordpress.com and it has solid content and it would make sense that it would take off and go viral. That is what this would emulate. That is how I would use this thing but overall what was really fun about the SocialAdr test was that there are positive ranking signals.
If you look at what experts are saying that there is no value to them, or minimal value, or secondary value because it is driving traffic, no it is an actual factor – these links index, they pass juice, and it is something that you could use. Again, I use it to point as link velocity to my stacks. I am not pointing it directly to my site and the reason for that is, I don’t like to point links that I could not completely control to my money site.
If I wanted to stop these links, for example, there is no way to do that. But, I could take down that wordpress.com link and that would effectively kill them, if for some reason, I felt like it was having an adverse effect. That is how I would do it.
Dori: Also we have Akir say that he/she uses it with press releases in local markets. That is another great idea.
I 100% like that. It makes a lot of sense. A press release, it is news. It makes so much sense that it gets picked up and gets posted on a bookmark site or pinned in Pinterest or posted on Facebook. That is a very believable thing that could be done in that situation.
Dori: Not only can you rank your site, that press release itself can also take another spot in page one which is what I am all about – dominating page 1. We do that a lot in launchjacking. Getting into that, all those other types of parasites, you can use this with to rank multiple spots on page 1 for your keywords.