Skip to content

SEO Unpredictability

I’ve been doing a test lately for reputation management using search engine optimization.

I have a product and want to control what people see about it when they search for a term like “Product x Reviews”

In order to do so we’ve created 30+ social media sites using “Product x Reviews” as the title tags.  Over time some of these profiles have ranked page 1 with no effort.  I decided i’d grab 10 of the highest ranking (for that term) profiles that we have and do link building to them to try to dominate the entire first page for “Product x Reviews.”  I purposely did not diversify the anchor text because I wanted to see how easy it would be to rank over authority review sites.  Quite honestly, I expected it to be easy.

What happened though was kind of strange.  Although some of my social media profiles did move up a bit, some of the authority review sites moved down and other random sites moved up to 1, 2 & 3 position.  So in essence I acomplished pushing down the authority review site but a random site rather then my own took it’s place.

SEO is Unpredictable

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

Published inSearch Engines

10 Comments

  1. Question is, how much did you help pave the way for the new sites at the top, or did their efforts help you?

    Wouldn’t that suck if you pushed down an authority site, only to have a random site posting even worse content take over the #1 spot?

  2. @Sucker – Well the goal wasn’t necessarily to push the authority site down and allow someone else to get in there but rather to push my sites up, which didn’t work so well so far. However, we are only 3 weeks into this so it can change.

  3. Ed Ed

    Don’t forget that you are not the only one doing SEO. It’s probable that the random site is working twice as hard as you.

  4. […] “SEO Unpredictability“ – Some people would have you think that SEO is straightforward and easy to manage. AdHustler has a wake up call for those people! SEO is not predictable. More often than not, you get results you weren’t expecting. […]

  5. I seriously doubt that anything you did had that effect. Especially after only 3 weeks. I would bet more on the random shuffling effect google goes through than anything you did.

  6. It seems especially after Panda, Google likes to make things unpredictable, and particularly significantly delay results from standard link building, to make it very difficult to run clear cut SEO tests.

    I’ve seen very strange results from my own marketing – a poor quality video with no back links appearing way higher than a quality article with many backlinks. That will probably change over the coming weeks, but this was an odd initial result.

  7. […] “SEO Unpredictability“ – Some people would have you think that SEO is straightforward and easy to manage. AdHustler has a wake up call for those people! SEO is not predictable. More often than not, you get results you weren’t expecting. […]

Leave a Reply to Leg Ulcers Treatment Cancel reply