#CaseStudy #Webdev #SEO

This case study about a project that started like a blog, became new website, became international commercial product review affiliate site, became hit in media several times. Let’s go…
If you think Verge is a big publishing company and it’s tough to outrank them for a “COMMERCIAL KEYWORD,” here’s a result to change your perspective. I built this project from scratch and dominated Verge, PCMag, Tom’s Hardware, Reviews.com, GamesRadar, CNET, and the Wall Street Journal through topical authority and links acquired from link-bait news content.

This site also got Google News approval (quite rare, with only 1 in 100,000 sites achieving this).

Some of the site’s older content still appears on Reddit, Twitter, and Google News. The Google News strategy was a game-changer and allowed us to do powerful things that normal sites don’t have access to.

The link-bait content was real and strategically planned to be picked up by other news publishing companies. These companies copied our content, and we tracked them and requested that they either (1) pay us or (2) give us credit through a do-follow link. Naturally, they chose to give us credit and move on—which was exactly what we wanted from high-authority sites.

The site became so popular that it reached a refined audience through Google News just a few minutes after publishing. Google’s AI did its job, but we were publishing well-researched content that older publishing media had no access to. We also encouraged users to submit news content and ideas.

The site also published content about real issues people faced.

We focused on creating content that people and other news outlets cared about.
Readers shared our content on social media. Sometimes, people saw their names in our articles and added them to their profiles without us asking. Here are two examples:

This added credibility to both their profiles and our website, as these were high-profile individuals from prominent companies.

The site was on track to make $50K USD per month in affiliate revenue, but the traffic took a hit when Google targeted the affiliate marketing industry. Revenue dropped to $2.5K USD. Right now, it serves as a solid SEO graveyard case study to refine strategies and understand that when Google targets your industry, there’s not much you can do.

My Responsibility On The Digital Hacker:
I led this project end-to-end. A friend helped me with Google News approval, but everything else—from domain registration, design, and SEO to team building and management—was entirely handled by me.
There’s more to this story than just this keyword! You can check out this folder . it has screenshots of traffic, news approval, and keywords.

Strategy It Touched: International SEO (US, UK, Canada, German, Global, Google News, Free Link Acquisition)

More Information on Keywords, landing pages and Ranking: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FbLMGlij75ZIF22P0lOSam52DSvyBOnr?usp=drive_link
Top Publications where the site got featured can be seen here: https://thedigitalhacker.com/about/
Team Size: 12-20 people (all part time, mostly students, 23 articles per person/per month limit)

This is one of the two mega projects I managed from scratch, alongside my 100+ small SEO site projects. You can ask me anything about this.

Anyway, if you ever feel stuck in terms of SEO, feel free to ping me. We’ll figure it out together.

Also, I personally don’t care about KD (keyword difficulty). haha.
Resources and Time push the ranking over time.