My URL Blasting Experience: How It All Started and Ended
I’ve done a significant amount of research mostly though forums that focus on SEO and backlinking strategies. There are many people asking for URL blasting service. A URL blasting service is a service, software or simply a list of forums, profiles, and articles sites to blast the URL to, typically numbering in the thousands, though some in the hundreds of thousands. So does blasting your website's URL to thousands or even hundreds of thousands websites really help your website?
From My Experience of Doing Blasts Myself:
The reason why I started doing URL blasts at the beginning of my SEO career is because I researched my competitors’ websites and found that many of them that rank well in Google had 30,000 to over 1,000,000 backlinks. I thought to myself that if I want to get above my competition I had to get more backlinks than them. Listening to the likes of Matt Cutts, I was led to believe that external links pointing to your site can not hurt your site's rankings, even if I have many low quality backlinks going to my site. I could only be rewarded by having my web site rank higher in Google rankings, especially if I had some quality backlinks pointing to various pages of my website, so I though that I had nothing to lose, only gain! I was also excited, thinking that I have a good chance and of getting very high Google Page Rank (PR) to my site because some of the URLs that I was getting backlinks from had very good PR.
So there I was, URL blasting! In the beginning I blasted my website’s URL to 70,000 forums. Then, on a regular basis, I was spinning and blasting articles to 800 articles directories three times a week. Posting my URL to 3,000 new profiles once a week. I had registered, set up, and maintained 1,000 blogs where I was refreshing content three times per week by scraping new articles from articles directories and posting them to my 1,000 blogs. I would only insert my website’s URL once a week, or once in two weeks, into the scraped articles that I was posting on my 1,000 blogs. Many times I was not inserting any URL at all or inserting a random URL related to the scraped article’s topic in order to make it look more natural, just in case the domain’s owner, where the blog was hosted, will catch the spam, he or she would have a hard time finding which URL to report the spam services! I was doing this for a year!
At the beginning of blasting, within the first 6 months, I was on the first and second pages of Google’s search results for 4 of my targeted keywords which had from 30,000-80,000 global searches (use Google’s Keyword Tool to get this kind of data.) For one of those keywords, that had 35,000 global monthly searches, my website was number 1 in Google.
Then, approximately on the eighth month, all of my keywords started jumping in Google's search results up or down 7 – 30 positions in the matter of a few hours. Before all of this jumping, usually also called a “Google Dance,” I would search for “mydomain.com” in Goggle’s search and Google would show that my site had about 50,000 results. However, after the Google Dance began I searched for “mydomain.com” in Google’s search and I only got only 2,000 results.
By reading on the forums about Google Dance, most responses were indicating that it’s a temporary thing that happens mostly to a new websites and the best way to get out from it is to continue building quality backlinks and generating unique content. So I stopped blasting everywhere except to articles directories, where I was still constantly spinning articles and blasting them to about 500 articles directories per week.
The Google Dance continued for about four months then my website dropped to positions 100-600 of Google’s search results for all of my keywords. Google would only show my website in its top results, if I searched for my website’s name. I decided to submit to Google a reconsideration request hoping to get my website back to top rankings and save it from its misery, and my obvious loss of income. The response that I got stated that there was no manual action taken towards my website and one of the reasons why my website is not doing so well is because my competition might be working harder on their websites (or something similar.) I thought to myself, it does not matter what my competition is doing, all of those websites that rank above me now could not out compete me over night! There has got to be something wrong with my website, there is some kind of penalization from Google that Google did not disclose in reply to my reconsideration request. I decided to go to the Google’s Webmaster Forum and post my message there, by asking what happened to my website, what should I do to get back my good rankings, and if I should start all over again with a brand new domain.
One of the best responses I got stated that the reason why my site is off of the top pages of Google is because of anchor over optimization (even though I was rotating my keywords; 70 % were my main 8 keywords and only 30% were related keywords, long tailed keywords, or just URL as an anchor) and the articles directories spamming was not a good idea as, most likely, it will be considered by Google as a linking scheme. I was told that I do not need to start a new domain but what I should begin doing is something to attract natural links.
I stopped doing all kinds of URL blasts at that time. I started researching deeper the top thirty ranking competitors in my niche. I thought to myself that if top ten competitors are ranking so well in Google for a long period of time under high traffic keyword that means they have got to have good Google trust. I looked at their backlinks, domain age and on page SEO. I found that some websites that were ranking on page 2 and 3 of Google’s search results for the same competitive keyword have approximately the same domain age, similar on page optimization (keyword density, keyword in the title, keyword in the description, keyword in the url, “h1” tags etc,) and the same amount of backlinks that the sites on the first page of results had, some even had more backlinks than websites on the first page of Google's results. My next thought was that the websites that rank on the first page that have only 10,000 backlinks yet rank better than the websites that have over a million backlinks must have that keyword advertised in their anchor text advertized more often, but I found that this was not the case. I eventually figured out that the reason why these sites are ranking so well is because they have more backlinks coming from high Google PR domains (I thought anything higher than 4 as high PR), high PR pages (this is different from domain PR because some websites have a high PR on their homepage, but its internal pages had low or no PR) and high Alexa Rank (I consider any site with Alexa Rank higher than 200,000 as a high Alexa Rank domain.) Websites that had quality backlinks (high domain and page PR and high Alexa Rank) dominated websites that had more than 100 times more backlinks. (see THE HISTORY OF IBACKLINKPRO PART 2 - QUALITY VS. QUANTITY AND PAID BACKLINKS)