Competitor Cataloguing & Fred: Let Them Do Your Work For You

[Ryuzaki]

I wanted to share something I've been doing since the unnamed Google update (called Fred) came out.

We've had more and more mentions of people feeling like they've reached the end of their own rope in terms of developing content ideas, places to acquire natural links, social media promotions, etc.

The situation right now is there is little competition in the SERPs from affiliates right now. Penguin killed 95% of light-weights and medium players. New folks are stepping into the game but aren't keeping up with the current SEO news, and therefore aren't aware of Fred and what it does.

The short of that is, if you set out to only do articles like:

• Best Product
• Product Reviews
• Product vs. Product

Then you're going to end up getting tagged by this filter. Yes, I understand that not all have been getting hit and there's more variables, but that's the one thing we have statistical confidence in.

I started doing this before Fred rolled out so I got real lucky in terms of having some competitors who led the way before they tanked. What you can be doing is preparing for the 2nd round of Fred.

So here's some things you can be doing:

Reverse Guest Posting

This is something that's been mentioned in the Boot Camp & Crash Course, and it's genius. If you have a site that's doing well enough to rank or have set up a "guest post with us" page, then you're going to get scraped and targeted in other people's outreach campaigns.

What you can do is monitor the sites that are hitting you up and see which are newer. Regardless of how nice their site is, they will have had some successes. Your goal will to then pull up their backlinks and find sites that they've pitched to and successfully had a guest post placed live.

Your site and content is undoubtedly better. You can get all of those placements too, and likely aim the links where you want them. If not, I'd still take them. It should be noted that you can do this with old established sites too. Anyone who hits you up can be reverse-engineered. Duplicate all of their other easy-to-get links too!

Snipe Their Rankings

Again, it's not just these competitors. You can snipe forums all day, for instance. But these newer sites will be sliding up in rankings here and there for commercial and non-commercial terms that you can steal simply by pressing publish, most of the time.

But if this is a site that came up after Fred obliterated the SERPs, or they survived because they didn't ramp up enough until afterwards, AND they manage to rank for commercial terms while being weak... Well, you can thank them for putting money in your bank account.

Go pull all of their rankings and filter them for whatever you determine is an acceptable volume. Whatever they're ranking for can be yours. You don't have to act on it now, but you need to pull the data now. If you want, you can keep doing that every couple of weeks until they tank when Fred refreshes.

The point is that you want them to sneak up into weak rankings while they can. That means these are "gimmes" that you can take now, or just wait until after these sites tank or whenever you have time to outsource and edit the content.

Buy Them After They Tank

I've not done this, and I'd prefer someone else test it first

The reason is, if they tank, you can purchase them for cheap, but they've been hit by an algorithmic penalty too. So either you purchase them, keep them alive separately and get them unpenalized, or you scoop up your balls and go ahead and merge them into your site. Alternatively, you can take their site down and just use the content on your site, if it jibes well with your own content style.

You can do this with any non-earning and non-penalized but juicy site as well, but most people are delusional, basing the worth of their site on how much they're attached to it.

Watch Their Social Media Activity

Most of these guys will automate the posting and get no engagement. I'm guilty of it, because we all intend to turn our eye to social media when we have the time, but we're just seeding it for now.

But some will know that game very well and will be writing original entertainment posts and slinging them out there and getting a ton of action. Guess what you can rewrite later?

Also, take a look at which of their followers are constantly re-tweeting and sharing their work and follow them. You may get a follow back and turn them into one of your marketers. But you can also use them as a form of 'alert' for when the competitor posts something share-worthy.

Conclusion

The ultimate point here is there are a lot of hustler's out there grinding it out in a post-Fred world that will get some decent rankings. Let them find the nice keywords that are easy to rank, and then take them down before or after they tank. If you dominate all of their SERPs right after they email you, it's going to set off some red flags and possibly bring some problems to your doorstep. But if you wait and catalogue everyone's rankings and backlink profiles, you'll have some real easy, decent ROI activity to be working on later when you get the time.

Can you guys add anything here or provide more efficient methods for getting all of this done?

 

[Ryuzaki]

More ideas on how to keep this manageable for the future when you can act on it...

Go Ahead and Rip the Content Too

If you know you'll act on this data, then I'd go ahead and set up a spreadsheet. You might consider columns such as:

• Keywords for the page
• Volume of the keywords
• URL with Slug of the page
• Full content of the page

I'm not interested in every ranking these sites get. Just the money making ones and any that stick out to me as decent topics I'd be proud to have on my site. These are the ones I'll keep in the spreadsheet and update it over time if needed if they keep growing.

And later, you can cross-reference a backlink report and pull links to these exact pages. No need to go too buck wild up front, but having it organized to this level will allow you to hire a writer and editor or an SEO buddy who knows the game and pass the entire spreadsheet off to him or her as one project.

Basically, if you pre-plan, you can have the entire ordeal created for you, and even formatted and posted, all without any future involvement.

I recommend copy and pasting any must-have content versus relying on the Wayback Machine, which may be blocked or a removal requested. What it also does is gives the writer something to re-write instead of needing to do research. You can also look at the headers and other on-page points of interest to emulate and enhance.

I don't recommend simply reposting the content. Someone else may come along or the owners themselves and recreate the site without checking to see if someone else reused the content. A re-write is your best bet.

Check Out Their Network & Expand

You can do a little reconnaissance if you know that you plan on expanding out to other niches in the future and find the rest of their sites if they exist. By the time you're ready to jump to another vertical, you'll be able to do something like this:

• Find an aged, legitimate, non-commercial site in the niche.
• Buy it for the content and the backlink portfolio, even overpaying.
• You can value it on the content & links instead of a revenue multiple and still come out ahead while giving these attached site owners an offer they can't refuse.
• Then go through the process above, finding the easy-to-snipe commercial rankings from the Fred'd or soon-to-be-Fred'd site, and add the content in.
• Boom, insta-money-rankings powered by age and links, shielded by age and non-commercial content.
• Anything that doesn't hit the top 3 can be interlinked from within the site. I'd do this anyway to bolster and solidify all of the rankings.
• Anything that lingers after that can have some links acquired for them to finish it off.

At that point, you'll have an earning site in a new niche that can fund it's own continued growth or be flipped nearly immediately for cash to go back into your main project.

Rinse and repeat if you have the team to pull it off.