Well, it has been about two months since I started my little experiment with the Google SERPs. If you don’t know, which you won’t, I started a small, on the side project of getting into the top 10 listings for a very difficult search term; “christopher”

First, to understand the difficulty of the situation, understand this. The top 9 websites have years! over me. Google tends to give more rank and favor to websites with a good history and age in the SERPS. My website has been around, but not as long as those in the top 10. Besides that, one or two have a few hundred well trusted backlinks. Wikipedia would have been a monster to take on once I broke the top 5, but….

Sadly, the highest rank I reached was 11th place on the SERPS in early April. I bounced around from 13 to 11 to 12 and then I made a horrible mistake. I bought some traffic from adwords for that specific keyword and I dropped me hard off the first three pages to about 30+. I don’t understand why it happened. It was legit traffic and I’m sure no bad backlinking come from this. I mean, its Adwords! Why would google penalize for this? Perhaps there is more to this scheme then appears. Somehow, Adwords is being abused to gain a backlink of some sort and Google found out, closed the hole, and penalized anyone doing this.

Anyway, after a few days of running the Adwords campaign, my website managed to get in the top #20 and now I’m bouncing around, once again; and I think I’ll stay here, in the #14 - #17 spots.

I’m slowly building up a small “army” of websites that I’ll let age for about a year. They aren’t spammy, just sitting informational goldmines. I’ll wait til they get indexed, then cloak some articles over and let them sit. Once they get up there in the serps for a few keywords, I’ll link them to my website. Hopefully that will do some good, but that isn’t for a long time. For now, I’ll let it chill on page 2. Time for another SEO experiment though…