Back in March of 2009, I had some inspiration from TrekkieMelissa to improve and promote my Lens on Cash Gifting Scams. One of the things I did was to add “cash gifting” to the titles or subtitles of most of the sections. I even changed the entire title of the page even though I have seen people strongly warn against doing so.
As the days went on, I watched the search results on Google daily to see my page slowly rise from not even appearing after 37 pages of sites returned for the phrase “cash gifting scams” (without quotes), to it’s current location of being #5 overall. It took a couple of months, but that was with just a few blog posts, and hardly any additional social bookmarking.
But wait a minute! That’s only out of about 250k sites, and an average monthly search volume of 4,400 searches… Nice, but the real brass ring for me would be to get onto the first page of Google for “cash gifting” with a little more han 1 million sites against me, and an average of about 135,000 monthly searches!
I was able to reach the top of the heap on a somewhat simple search phrase, not to mention several “long tail” keyword phrases, and stayed there. I could have easily claimed to have reached “Page One on Google in a Week” (maybe less) based on the “Long Tails” like many “SEO Gurus” do, but that’s not my style. Besides, I have higher aspirations!
Well, I sort of lost sight of actively trying to do anything more after the page seemed to stall at about page 10 for “cash gifting”. I had added more content, and better pictures. I also added a new link I had found to a recent (at that time) article by the Better Business Bureau warning that people running Cash Gifting and Pyramid schemes are like little Bernie Madoffs all over the Internet trying to scam people out of their money.
After almost six months of getting wrapped up in my quest to join the Giant 100 Club on Squidoo, working with Tenfinity and learning more about Web Site Design, I finally went back and looked to see how well I’ve been doing, I see that I’m now on page three!
Looking over the other sites on the first three pages, I only see four or five sites besides my own that expose Cash Gifting for the scam that it is, that’s like 5 or 6 out of 30 sites! Besides that, only two of them are older than mine, and most of the scam sites are sites that weren’t up in the top returns when I last checked.
This is a highly competitive category, and while there are many newer sites that have managed to get past me in the race for the top, I suspect that, as I saw when I was watching this search before, many sites race to the top, then steadily slide back down the slope, or drop off completely. I suspect that the drop offs are scammers who either get their articles deleted from the free sites, or their sites get shut down as one Law Enforcement agency, or another catches up to them.
Of course much of the backsliding is do to poor SEO tactics that can’t stand against onslaught so many desperate people building sites to rope in suckers.
One thing I haven’t done, is work on promoting this site using the many ways described in the Squidoo Step-by-Step Guide, I guess I need to find time to do that. Here I helped work on this Step-by-Step Guide, and I haven’t been able to find time to put it all into action on my own Lenses. It was put together by 10 individuals, so it’s not like it was written by a single person who was outlining every step they had done on their own. Many of us had overlapping experiences, but each of us brought something unique to the table.
It’s not so much that I want a ton of traffic because of the few items I have for sale, but it’s a matter of pride and prestige. Last year at this time, and for a good portion of 2009, the highest ranking Squidoo page for this search was a scam Lens that had been locked.
Despite being locked, that Lens remained on the front page of Google for “Cash Gifting” for most of a year. Google’s description for the page even identified it as a locked Lens. There was no information, good or bad, about “cash gifting” on it.
Now, that Lens is gone and my Lens is the highest ranking Squidoo page about “cash gifting” on Google. I can’t be happy until it is displayed on the first page of Google for the more general phrase of “cash gifting”! 
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