This was a question myself and quite a few other people were asking, and then Mark Thompson had a brainwave and decided to hold a competition to find the answer. As it turned out, a fair few things had changed with the Google Panda updates..
The idea of the competition was that entrants would have about two months to get a brand new domain ranked as high as possible in Google, for a reasonably competitive keyword. Any and all tactics were valid, although we had to bear in mind that we were going to keep a diary of our activities and after the competition the winner had to reveal everything they had done. In addition to the diary, Mark was going to do some videos and case studies and the whole thing was going to be packaged up and offered as a mini course on how to rank a site in Google.
Well, the awesome news is that myself and a good friend ended up winning the competition. Our site actually reached number one, although I think it was at number three when the competition officially ended.
Although I would love to share all the information here, that would be very unfair to the people who bought the mini course, so I will just mention a couple of the things it includes.
Firstly, we noticed that adding new, regular content to the site really did seem to make a difference. I’ve suspected it in theory for some time, but it was nice to see it confirmed, as much as it can be in an experiment like this.
Secondly, social buzz also turned out to have a noticeable effect on rankings. It’s difficult to prove anything, but we had a couple of sites to test different approaches and the one which got the Facebook likes, Tweets and Google +1s did significantly better. I actually ended up creating a social sharing plugin specifically for this competition. The existing plugins I tried tended to increase page load times so I made one that loaded scripts in the background. You get a free copy of the plugin with the course.
If you’d like to find out what else we discovered, and see exactly what it takes to rank a site in these post Google Panda days, you can get a copy of the course for next to nothing.
Mark has put it up on the Warrior forum here: SEO Debunked
The course itself consists of;
- 6 core videos
- separate audio files
- 4 detailed studies
- a custom plugin you can’t get anywhere else
- a full list of tools and resources which were used in the competition
- a series of in depth SEO reports
You can already read some fantastic testimonials on the sales page, people are finding it hugely valuable, not to mention enlightening!
Have you discovered any new or interesting ways of succeeding in the search engines since the Panda updates? What do you think has changed? I’d love to hear your thoughts..
