My recent articles about doing SEO for the porn industry led me to believe that I have a perfect link exchange experiment sitting right on one of the sites I own.  Which site?  LyricVault.com. Payne, where are you going with this?  Is this another advanced form of spam (ahem, viral marketing) you are notorious for creating? Nah, nah, nah.  I just have a music lyrics site that isn't making any money at all, so I thought I'd try doing some SEO testing on it. 

So far, I have found that linking from LyricVault to my resume with a set of words one week versus another week (in fairness from index to index--which is about 10 days or so for the pages in the test) changes what the resume ranks for within Google. Let's analyze that for a second:

1. First off, an inlink from a site on the same IP address shouldn't carry much weight, right?
2. Secondly, a link from one site with a low overall authority shouldn't weight much either, right?
3. Multiple pages from one site is not nearly as powerful as one page from thousands of sites, right?
4. Music lyrics versus an online resume: related content?  I don't think so.  Should it weight?
5. Both domains are registered under my one and only account with Network Solutions.  Should it weight? But we'll set aside #5 above for this test because I doubt anyone wants to hand me over the ownership of their domains for this test.  ;-)

So, how will it work?

1. LyricVault has hundreds of thousands of song lyrics (though most are about 24 months old since the site hasn’t been updated in a couple of years now--I'm busy doing other things that make me money), and those lyrics have a lot of text on it.
2. I can do a SQL replacement of specified words or phrases with an a tag and destination URL instead.
3. This will provide anchor text and link to any site that wants to participate in this test.
4. These links will NOT utilize the rel=nofollow attribute because . . . these aren’t paid links, they are free!
5. The coolest thing about this is that the lyric industry is horrible about scraping other lyric sites, so it is likely your links may show up on other sites as well that have more authority.

Cool!  Free links on targeted text?  Sign me up!  How do I do it Payne?

1. Choose ONE word or ONE phrase.
2. Choose ONE URL destination.
3. Discover the URL’s current rank for the chosen word or phrase in the SERPs (as many SERPs that you want to track).
4. Post the above information in the comments below for all to view.  First come, first served, btw.
5. Be patient.  I have a lot going on right now in my life.  Don’t flame me.  I’ll get to it as soon as I can.
6. I’ll comment back when I have done a global replacement of the word or phrase in the lyrics section of the SQL db.
7. Monitor the SERP changes (if any) once a week for a month and post the results as a reply to my comment. BTW, the current number of Google indexed pages for the LyricVault site is about 145,000 pages, but there are literally millions of other pages on the site that haven’t been indexed.  The site gets approximately 250 visitors per day, with the demographic of teenage girls being the most dominate.  I have no ads on the site because I hate spammy lyric sites and it was the sole reason I started the project in 2005.  It does have the ability to make money on the Buy.com affiliate links.  The Amazon affiliate links pass no link credit (yet, this is an Amazon/David Payne issue which I am hoping to resolve soon)

Even bigger BTW . . . I haven’t touched SEO on the site in years.  Please don’t judge the site’s SEO tactics.  I ran out of money to fund the project shortly after launch in October 2005 and there were a number of things I meant to get done but never did in regards to user features, design, coding, and SEO.  In other words, it is poor quality workmanship and I expect more out of me.  ;-)

Lastly, I'm not guaranteeing anything . . . I can remove the links whenever I wish without notice.  Plus, if you pick a word or phrase that never shows up in any of the lyrics live on the site (or indexed by a particular SE), you can't pick a different word or phrase.  So . . . do your homework!  ;-)

Brent D. Payne