One of the concepts that I keep telling people when they talk to me is links aren’t everything. Don’t get me wrong though, links are a very important factor in ranking for terms. The main point that I try to stress (and Whitehat’s always stress this obviously) is that content is king. So I did a few case studies and did some attempts. Let’s go over some figures and see what really makes sense based on a case study I did this month. I ran 5 spam blogs with not one ounce of hand written content, and added 30 links to each. The content is all generated via keyword scraping & reposting using EPN (eBay partner network). I also had a friend do a regular phpBay site. At the end of the month he made $300 and a few hours of work (including domain, redesign, content, and linking). He paid $20 for social submissions & $8 for the domain, I paid $8 per domain for 5 domains for $40, but made $600 by the end of the month from 1 hour worth of work.

I could have made almost the same using one domain and just using orphaned sub-domains, but I decided separate domains were a good way to study it. So, what was the difference and how did I make more? Was it the links? Was it the multiple sites? Or was it the fact that for every page of content on his phpBay site I had 1000 pages of my own?

It was a mix of everything, but links was not one of the factors. I was raking in on longtails across 150-300 different unique terms every day while he got 100-150 uniques a day from one term (and that’s not bad for only $20 worth of social submissions!). He targeted one niche, I targeted thousands. As important as content is, so is redundancy and dedication. One main factor that plays a big role in long term blackhat income with this method is the fact that all 5 of my sites were sandboxed down and almost banned after the month, but are still getting traffic today. But now instead of each site getting 150-300 a piece, they get that combined. It’s still not bad, but it’s not near the same amount of income anymore.

The life expectancy of his phpBay site is certainly longer than my little 5 site network, however if I did the same amount of time put into mine as he did, I would have actually had 25 sites by the time his 1 was finished – and earned roughly $3000 (theoretically). Just keep in mind that your content and terms are what makes the income, not necessarily just links.

Going to do another few case studies over the next two or three weeks, I’ll post the results to see what you all think. As always the Request a Post page is up, leave a comment if you have any requests or questions regarding something I haven’t mentioned yet.

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