Month 2 - SERP Rankings & The Google Dance

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Updated 8 years ago

Hi guys! I just wanted to give you a quick update on my progress here at Wealthy Affiliate. Its been almost a month since my last blog on WA and I have continued to try and keep up the pace. As many of you know attempting to build quality content pages, going through the training here and trying to help others along the way can be very time consuming. However I am making progress and have received a lot of amazing support from the Wealthy Affiliate Community, so thank you all for that!

My posts are now showing up in Google Search results for various terms and the other day I decided to do a little experiment to see if I could increase my rank or even outrank a competitor that was quite clearly presenting poor quality content. In this blog I just wanted to share my experience so far in the hope that it might help other and also in the hope that you can give me some feedback on your own experiences.

On my site as many of you will be aware, I write product reviews and try to expose scams. I was writing a review the other day for a product that was 100% a scam called "Passive Profits". I noticed that the No.1 position in Google was taken by a site that was trying to promote the scam, saying that it was fantastic an so on.

My experiment was to see, if by creating far better content alone and then constantly adding quality content in the form of comments, would my ranking position increase and would I be able to overtake the poor quality content at the top of the SERP?

After writing the article just 3 days ago, it was instantly positioned on page 4 within a few hours. I have slowly added comments through the Wealthy Affiliate Site Rubix comment system over the last couple of days. Yesterday my post had actually moved down the rankings to the bottom of page 5. Today my post is nowhere to be seen! Is this the so called Google dance? I'm not even sure if the Google dance still exists? I know this was a term used a few years ago, but to be honest I thought it was a thing of the past. Now I know that search results can change dramatically from day to day, especially with new sites and I will keep you updated at this experiment progresses.

But here is the interesting part and the bit that some of you may or may not find useful. I attempted to try and find out why the site at the top of Google was still hanging on so tightly to the No.1 position and why others below it with better on page content were ranking lower.

The site that still firmly sits at the top of the search results for the search term "passive profits review" had written their article 1 day earlier than I had. The site had very few inbound links pointing to it. The #1 page was linking out to a known scam, where as my article obviously wasn't. The site at #1 was actually younger than mine too.

So how did they manage to rank really bad quality content at No.1 so quickly for this phrase? I believe that I found the answer.

Over the last couple of months I have concentrated on producing in depth quality content and as a result have produced around 20 pages of content that I am quite pleased with. The site ranked in first place for this term has produced around 120 badly written, poor quality articles that link out to scams. These articles are probably not hand written either, since they appear to have produced in a very short time frame.

I know that they say content is king, but is it this easy for the scam artists to trick Google now? This is like going back to the times when blasting Backlinks at a site would get you top rankings in the search results.

I am going to continue to add comments to this article over the next few days to see if this eventually will put me on page 1. At the moment I am nowhere to be seen, so we will see what happens.

Stay tuned for more updates!

UPDATE: You can now read my update, one week on - here: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/ave212/blog/serp-r...

Further Update!

See the conclusion to this story here:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/ave212/blog/google...