Gutting the Baked Chicken Recipes Blog

This article was originally published in Spanish in the blog of the online marketing influencer Alex Navarro, Vivirdelared.

Here I explain what an MBN is and I give all the necessary information about its creation process to obtain high traffic safely in a short period of time. I end the article with the amount of money I invested building it and the income it was making monthly a year ago.

Hope you enjoy the read!

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Today I want to introduce Romuald Fons.

Alex Navarro: Romuald is one of those big Spanish SEOs working «anonymously» and that by chance, we inadvertently called his attention in the previous post that Dean and I wrote about the chicken website ranking first in Google.

I won’t tell you more. I’ll let him introduce himself and tell you the story. It is an absolutely spectacular post and perfectly complements the previous article we published a few weeks ago.

Let’s go there…


romuald-fons-bigseoIt’s a pleasure to write these lines; randomness (and chickens) brought me here. Let me introduce myself.

My name is Romuald Fons and I work in an online marketing agency called BigSEO, in Barcelona. As far as I remember until now I have read everything within my reach about online marketing and SEO, from blogs to forums, both for Spanish and English, learning and trying to go unnoticed.

And I had succeeded quite well… until a week ago.

Dean and Alex published an excellent article about positioning a niche website in 2015, I read it happily until I saw they were talking about recetapolloalhorno.net. An aloud “Holy Shiiit” accidentally slipped from my mouth, “such bastards!” (true).

As you can imagine, recetapolloalhorno.net is one of my websites.

I opened the analytics and effectively found visits peaks and increased traffic in crawlers such as Ahrefs, Moz, etc. Great.

Since the cake was uncovered, I decided to do something useful, so I sent an email to Alex and Dean, thanking them for their «favor» and telling them I could show them an article explaining how I positioned the website and how much money is earned by creating such network.

Alex, with whom I had already exchanged emails other times, laughed at how small the world was and invited me to write these lines, so we’re here.

I hope this article based on a real case (online and that can be visited right now) will prove interesting insights.

Defining Objectives

This project is not a network of private blogs or traditional PBN since it doesn’t intend to help position a money site. Its aim is to monetize the entire network, what we call an MBN (Money Blog Network).

Since we invest time and money creating various websites, better to have all of them bringing money and not just one, don’t you think?

To achieve this I defined three requirements:

  1. All blogs have to respond exactly to what the user is looking for. Especially, I want the user to browse through the website, to have a low rebound and for the onsite time to be high, since those factors are increasingly more important for positioning in Google.
  2. All blogs need to be of the same niche (not keyword). Interlocking blogs on the same topic would help your rankings, but everyone should have different keywords and on top of the search results.
  3. Target users that would click on the ads and preferably of mobile navigation. I was looking for a high CTR, so no geek, computer, or online marketing themes. I wanted something that might interest not hardcore Internet users.

I remember the moment of epiphany in which I imagined someone cooking with a frying pan in one hand and with an Iphone on the other, without paying much attention to the finger passing over an ad.

That’s it, a recipes blog!

Recipes are a niche with many searches, which lets you create blogs optimized for different keywords on the same topic, in which the content (recipes) is exactly what the user wants to see. Perfect.

I was clear in my mind about the subject, now I had to decide how to execute the plan.

Studying the Competition

The best advice I can give as SEO (and for everything) is that before starting a project, study what works for other people and copy it while improving it.

What I’m saying may sound ugly, but history shows us that copying works (ask Google). SEO is a business at the end of the day.

I quickly located a huge network of blogs of recipes I had done a couple of years ago (almost three) something similar to what I already had in mind.

This network dominated the SERPs in a brutal way and still does in many keywords (for now), you can find an example right here: www.polloalhorno.co

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Target located. It was time to collect data from their network.

Studying the Competition’s Network

With a bit of analysis we discovered what our (future) competitors had done to get so well positioned in the SERPS.

Starting from the big to the small, from PBN to blogs, I would summarize our work like this:

  • Discover the sites that make up their PBN: Extracting the list of all their websites would have been difficult if I hadn’t made a mistake: in the sidebar I was always linking to the web www.alimentacion.es, so by analyzing the inbound links from that website with Ahrefs’ and filtering all domains and recipes, I had a list of over 200 domains (yes, more than 200!).
  • Studying the PBN’s Domains: This is certainly one of the strengths of the network, it got very good domains, all of them had the exact keyword or formula «recipe + keyword» and also had variation between .com, .net, .com and .co.

There’s little to improve on this point.

  • Studying links between websites: It took me much longer to extract the type of interlinking between blogs, the truth is that I found the interlinking improvable:
  • Looping links at all levels.
  • Outgoing links with the same IP destination.
  • A variety of subnets.
  • Studying anchor words of links between websites: The profile of anchor words used were those used years ago:
    • Little variation and a lot of exact match (anyway, the Google recipes niche is very permissive with this point)
    • Almost all links point to the root domain and not to the internal pages
  • Studying external links with authority to the PBN: Nothing really remarkable, some links from their websites of different niches such as education or employment counseling, but no high authority links.

Studying blogs from the competition’s network

Broadly speaking we found the following:

  • Programming: their websites were not based on a CMS like WordPress or Joomla, which allow creating very light websites and have greater control in managing duplicated content.
  • Design and navigability: With regard to the design, on desktop computer it did the trick but it had a serious flaw: it was not responsive; therefore, it was hard to read on mobile phones. This, in addition to the large number of ads, results in a poor user experience, damaging positioning.
  • URLS structure: The URLs logic was not well resolved, in many cases these were too optimized such as http://www.polloalhorno.co/PolloAlHorno/PolloAlHornoMarinado/PolloAlHornoMarinado.html
  • Contents: Contents were disappointing; many recipes poorly drafted, photographs did not match, the alts and titles were upgradeable or non-existent and the keyword appeared more than 30 to 40 times on the home page (keep in mind that the optimal density for keywords for Google depends on the niche, and when it comes to recipes you can make real stupid things that Google does not penalize).
  • Interlinking: The interlinking between articles within websites was decent. It could have been improved but it’s not something that I considered critical.
  • Internal keywords: The keyword study for secondary recipes was correct, so in this respect there was little to improve.
  • Extras: They didn’t take advantage of the large amount of rich snippets that can be achieved using Schema.org’s goals for recipes. In the recipe niche it is almost unforgivable not to use them even if they have no impact on the SERPS.

Now, what you really want to read about…

How to position a high traffic MBN safely in short time

To be clear, the strategy used to position this MBN is not the only one that works. We have done different strategies with optimal results for both own networks and customers.

But I can assure you (and you can see for yourself) that this technique works nowadays, and it really does! In 3 months (Dean found the website 6 months since its creation, but it began to rank on the top positions in the SERPS well before).

The best thing is that blogs get the top spots without external links of authority (although if you get some, you will accelerate the process), and those that do not reach the first position today continue to rise in the rankings slowly.

What we knew before designing the MBN

I think it is important to make a point on what you may already know from previous MBN: the positioning force of subnets.

Links are important, but most important is not the link but the characteristics thereof. I will make a practical example:

In these two pictures you can see the profile link to the website of the competition and my blog on baked chicken:

Competition: http://www.polloalhorno.co/

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Mi blog: http://recetapolloalhorno.net/

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The competition’s website is 2 and a half years old and has 95 inbound links from 65 different domains of 20 subnets.

My blog is only 4 months old and 35 links from 23 domains of 18 subnets.

How is it possible that the second one dominates the SERPS if it has less than 60 links and 42 reference domains?

Much of the blame relies on subnets.

Nowadays there’s no point in having different links from different domains with different IPs. We need different links of different domains with different IPs of different subnets.

Knowing this, I spent a couple of weeks on designing this one:

Designing the MBN

The first thing was to mark the three premises on which I built the links between blogs.

My requirements:

  • Sites with more traffic should receive a greater number of links from the MBN: almost always keywords (recipes) with more searches are the most difficult to position; therefore, they need more link juice and authority.
  • Do not link a blog on the same subnet if there isn’t at least two different subnets blogs in the middle: and I say “at least” because in some cases there will be 5, 6 and 7 subnets of distance.links
  • And most important, never, I repeat, NEVER make a link «going back» at any level: The aim of this point is to avoid creating loops where the link juice flows in circles. If you do not control this from the beginning (especially when we talk about MBNS of more than 20-30 blogs) you end up creating a network of totally unnatural and over-optimized links.Captura de pantalla 2016-07-19 a las 10.11.04

These are three very basic rules, it seems simple, right?

Well, if we apply these rules to an MBN of about 220 blogs, which is what the competition had (I would not create less), it ends up being something like this:

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This “abomination” is the spreadsheet of link control between 218 blogs, and this is the content of its columns:

  1. A numeric ID.
  2. The main keyword.
  3. The searches.
  4. The Domain.
  5. The IP of the domain.
  6. A column by numeric ID (i.e., a column with the header 1, another one with number 2, well until 218).

The result is a matrix of approximately 218 x 218 (47,524 cells). I say approximately because there are columns with other information, such as the total number of outbound links from each domain, a row with total entries, etc.

The numbers «1» you can see in the cells are the links, the orange area is the «forbidden zone», where there cannot be links or loops would be generated and blue rows distinguish different stages of web publishing.

Once we do this, we extract the «1» per column and have the outbound links that one website will have to the other sites of MBN. At this point we have to compose a text with all those links (sometimes more than 50, so it can be quite long texts), and put them out on the main page.

This spreadsheet is the main one, but we have other simpler ones to complement this one with the list of outgoing links per blog, another with the dates of publication of the web, one with keywords for internal pages of each blog, another with anchors densities per blog, etc.

Each blog is different in terms of inbound links and anchor words, since we make small variations among them, this allows us to see which blogs get positioned better than others and why. This information is useful to see whether there are opportunities with Google and apply what we’ve learned so as to create other MBNs or optimize customer’s SEO.

Other relevant considerations in creating the MBN:

In addition to the variety of interlinking between blogs, you should do the following:

  • Buy domains with the keyword in different registers and varying between .com, .com, .net, .org, .co and .com.es.
  • Get as many different IPs as possible.
  • Use different accommodations, shared hostings, VPS, dedicated servers, etc.
  • Add a few free blogs to give variety to the matter.
  • Create 100% original content.
  • For each website have at least 6 recipes.
  • Look for pictures of the dishes on websites of languages other than English.
  • Use inbound links to specific authority web sites to apportion the Link juice throughout the MBN.
  • Conduct a gradual growth of the MBN and not to publish all websites at once.
  • Do the same with the links, we don’t publish them all at once, but progressively.
  • Allow Google to index the sites before adding outbound links.
  • And above all, create exceptions to vary the variety.

Sure this gave me a lot of little things, but in general rules, that is the most relevant.

What’s the result?

In terms of positioning, it’s a success. When we had about 50 published blogs we started to see the first pages of Google for interesting keywords. Let me show you here a screenshot of the MBN’s Serpbook, each row is a different website ranked for its main keyword:

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Full of top positions.

Studying the MBN’s blogs

The aim of this monetized blogs network was to replicate the competition improving the most deficient aspects in this respect. So as to internal design of blogs we decided to use WordPress as CMS for several reasons:

  • Because you can create a website within minutes, and when you have to create more than two hundred, this is a factor to take into account.
  • Because it’s a CMS that with a few tweaks gives amazing results in a SEO level, which certainly allowed us to improve the structure of the competition’s URLs.
  • Because we could make changes in bulk using the Infinite WP tool, a manager that allow you to make changes to as many websites as you want with a click, such as installing in the 200 blogs all plugins at once, or update all topics, etc. Imagine the time saving something like this represents.
  • Because there are free subjects perfectly responsive, and one of our initial premise was that our MBN had to be optimized for mobile devices.

Once we have decided the CMS the internal structure of the blogs we copy it from the competition’s network: on the cover a general list of recipes with ingredients and four links to internal pages with the complete recipe:

  • A text link with the anchor word «Read recipe.»
  • A link from an image with the name of the recipe as an alt attribute.
  • Two links from the sidebar (picture and text).

The links between different blogs from the MBN are all in a text at the end, the truth there’s no need to complicate ourselves in this and it’s something very improvable, but because we knew it worked, we didn’t seek alternatives.

Right now our websites look like this:

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Very little to add, plus you can visit the websites to analyze what you need.

Burring myths

This section, in my opinion, is the most important of the article because it can save you time and headaches if you are starting to position microniches.

I intend to demonstrate that some of the commands that are enacted on «how to perform SEO for positioning» are unnecessary (not negative) for positioning microniche sites.

New people in the sector worry in excess with keyword density ratios, of link-generation, of distribution of anchor words and the list goes on and on. But is this really so important? Let’s see:

First myth: keyword density.

On the websites of our MBN the keyword appears 20 to 30 times on the front page, on the competition 30 to 40 times, and both are up in the SERPS, crystal clear.

Second myth: mixing dofollow links with nofollow ones.

In our websites we don’t have a single nofollow link, and we are talking about a MBN which has about 6,000 links between websites (yes, 6000, with all its zeros). It is evident that for sites which have 800 inbound links, not having a single nofollow link can be a problem, but for sites with 30 – 40 inbound links, this is, of course, not a problem.

Third myth: we must vary the keyword greatly, to make it an exact match in a 20% as maximum.

This myth in microniche websites is very common. There’s no need to change the exact keyword too much. As I’ve said before, we have a tracking sheet of keyword’s densities for each of the websites, and I can assure that for 20 to 30 links, there is no difference. Moreover, we have seen better results in sites that have 50% or more links with exact match keyword than using variants such as urls, see here or other long sentences.

Of course this applies only to microniche sites, if we talk about macrosites with many inbound links, that’s a totally different thing.

But here we are talking about microniche websites and I want to make clear that, today, and with the experience of other MBNs of two and a half years, there’s no need to worry too much on those technicalities.

Fourth myth: Let’s not leave traces so that Google will not detect us.

After striving to provide diversity of all kinds, many of domain registrars, three dedicated servers, VPS, IPs on different subnets and everything explained above, I decided to make the ultimate test: Use Google Analytics code on all websites that were in Google’s top 10.

Or what is the same, telling Google that these 200+ sites belong to the same owner.

Here we risked a little, we didn’t know what was going to happen.

The result? Absolutely nothing happened, and the best of all is that we’ve passed through a couple of manual revisions (I guess someone denounced us to Google).

We need to keep in mind that we placed the websites on the front page before adding the Google Analytics code, in terms of the link and content, with which Google received data from user behavior upon entering our website.

User behavior on the web sends some signals to Google that, today, have much weight to determine if a site can be or not at the top of the rankings.

I do not recommend to add this type of info to an MBN that was not positioned before. It is an experiment I have not done yet and I have no idea what might happen.

Ultimately, the most important when creating an MBN is the content which has to please the user and the interlinking between sites, which has  to distribute, the best way possible, the link juice across all the websites, and if possible, without creating loops .

The thing about avoiding loops I do say it advisedly:

  • In other MBNs I’ve created loops and results have been worse.
  • In those same networks I have removed loops and positioning has improved significantly.

Show me the money!

I guess everyone is curious to know what a MBN of more than 200 blogs cost and its income. I will explain it without missing a thing:

MBN’s Investment

I am breaking down the MBNs expenses into those which should only be paid once and annual expenses:

  • 210 domains x 9 € on average (there are .co domains that are a little more expensive, and cheaper.com.es ones, but to round it up we leave it at 9 €) = 1890 € (annual)
  • 180 IPs x 12 € (this price depends on the provider, but the average is 1 € per month per IP) = 2,160 € (annual)
  • Hosting: this is difficult to estimate because we have dedicated servers we use for other purposes, but among the dedicated, VPS and monthly hosting, I do not exaggerate if I say that the monthly cost for these 210 websites is about 300 € x 12 months = 3,600 € (annual)
  • Writing: currently we have 1582 written recipes x 3 € = 4,746 € (single payment)
  • Publication hours: this point is difficult to assess accurately, but I’d say between cloning the WP with its plugins, uploading the content, looking for images and other contingencies (that always pop up), each blog takes about 2 hours. The amount per hour depends on many factors but if we put it at a cost of 20 € then it results on 210 sites x 2 hours x 20 € = 8,800 € (single expense).
  • Extra costs: we must add other expenses that arose, such as writing texts with combos, time for backup, development of improvement (retouch themes, add plugins), manage the Infinity WP, start writing more recipes on websites that give more money, fix problems on servers, mails and mails to get IPs from different subnets, etc. Let’s say a year is 2,000 € in unforeseen events (annually).

Totals:

  • Cost of startup of this MBN = 23.196 €
  • Annual cost to maintain the MBN = 9.650 €

To get an idea of what it takes to make this MBN, the numbers shown here are quite approximate to reality.

MBN’s income

The recipes niche is quite seasonal, but in these 6 months we’ve gone through the highest peak (December) and the lowest one (February), so I can give fairly well bounded numbers of actual earnings resulting from these webs within a classic PPC system. In summary I would say that:

  • A website in the top 3 generates between 1 and 2 € per day in low season (1.5 € on average)
  • A website in the top 3 generates between 2 and 6 € per day in high season (4 € on average)

There are websites that yield 15 € in one day, others yield 9 cents. These numbers vary depending on the subject of the sites, such as desserts and cocktails have the highest benefits, while potatoes, chickens and the like are at the lowest threshold.

We have currently published 112 websites and we have 33 websites in Google’s top 3. SERPs keep rising today, and the remaining 100 sites missing help to keep the ratio of these websites in the top 3, so let’s say if we get 50% of websites to be in the top 3, we would have these numbers:

Totals:

  • 110 sites x 1.5 € =  low season 165 € a day
  • 110 sites x 4 € in high season = 440 € per day (this only lasts a month)

To all this we will have to add another 110 websites providing us with some money, not much, on average we could say that they give 0.30 € each per day x 110 that’s 33 euros a day, which is not negligible.

MBN benefits during the first year:

The first year, assuming the MBN will start in January, for the 220 sites to be published in 8 months and for the websites to take about 4 months to get positioned:

  • Total spending the first year: 23,196 €
  • Revenues in low season: 7 months x 30 days x 165 € = 34,650 €
  • Revenues in high season: 1 months x 30 days x 440 € = 13,200 €

1st year annual earnings: € 47,850 – 23,196 € = 24,654 €

  • Total spending the first year: 23,196 € / 365 days = € 63 days
  • Total revenue the first year: 47,850 € / 365 days = 131 € day

Daily benefits 1st year: 68 € per day

These numbers seem like a lot, but looking at it coldly we see they yield on the first year earnings of 2,000 € per month, and you have to keep in mind that we are talking about a LOT of work, carried out between several people.

We could monetize the MBN in many other ways, for example, adding more advertising both for PPC as well as direct (ads for restaurants, suppliers, more banners, etc.); however, MBNs are not our core business, they are the labor camp where we learn so as to apply it to our customer’s SEO. This is the reason we do not dedicate them all the love they need.

We will surely exploit this MBN to the uttermost when we complete the entire network (until now half has been completed).

Daily benefits of the second year and consecutive ones

If the MBN continues the path it’s following right now (on SEO issues you never know), no doubt the benefits will be higher in subsequent years, since the investment in time, content and infrastructure will be much lower and income should not vary too much.

We could duplicate or even triple it, but since we have not yet completed a year of life of this MBN (and so far we have half of websites published) I do not dare to give data I consider reliable.

If it’s fine by Alex, we’ll leave it for another article in a few months, so I can show you real data.

The future of this MBN

There are many things to improve in this MBN, for instance:

  1. Replace the WP for lighter websites, if possible without database, debugging the code for maximum SEO.
  2. Make the interlinking between sites not a large text at the end of the homepage, but make them have real value for the user (I have an idea that might work).
  3. Complete publishing outstanding websites.
  4. Add more relevant and quality content.

And a list of 20 more things we queued and that we’re coming up with almost daily. Surely you will also find many things to improve.

Moral of the story

Simplifying an MBN such as this one requires:

  1. A defined goal: in this case to end up dominating a large niche such as recipes.
  2. A detailed planning: 1 minute planning can save you many hours of work, and in a MBN there’s much to consider.
  3. A good initial economic investment.
  4. Having considerable human assets, I do not think anyone is capable of doing something alone in less than a year. Servers, facilities, writing, publishing, etc.
  5. Have the patience to create a spreadsheet of 47,000 cells

It’s been a while since we offer the service of creating a private network of blogs or PBN, they have many things in common with the MBN. This has allowed us to reuse media, run the processes quickly and have the experience of knowing how to position it quickly to capitalize on the rapid initial investment.

I hope that with this article I’ve shared the experience and saved some time to all of those who are thinking of creating an MBN.

In addition, the size or investment of this MBN isn’t a determining factor to make money, there’s no need for 200 websites to make the project viable, for example we have an MBN of 15 websites positioned and monetized.

I assure you that there are many niches waiting to be exploited with this strategy.

What are you waiting for? Go get them!

por Romuald Fons

CEO & Founder de BIGSEO

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