Page 18 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Test Results: April 10th, 2020

In the 28 days before this update, we saw big movement on this test site’s overall impressions,
including terms like “Chicago SEO consultants”, “SEO consultants Chicago”, and “social media
marketing agency Chicago”. Most of these terms were up +100% from the previous 28 days.
Chicago is a high competition area, so even though we weren’t getting page one rankings or
clicks, we’re happy to see the
content performing well in local,
as it was 100% duplicate. The
ability to copy another site’s
content from previous local
projects to jump-start a
campaign makes launching a
new website much easier and
cheaper..

Update:
April 24, 2020

At this point, we saw little movement for our main terms but a large increase in impressions, and
Google testing the site in the SERPs. There was no definitive result or outcome, but we had other
duplicate test sites running as well…

2nd Test Setup:

We built a full website in the "title loans" niche using free, unique content sourced from the
archive, building 20 pages and 21 blog posts, for a total of about 50k words across 41 pages. We
then launched the full website across 30 different subdomain URLs in 30 different locations,
changing the NAP references. All inner linking content and site structure was 100% the same.

We wanted to test not only the indexability of these duplicate content sites, but also see how
they perform over time. How effective is utilizing duplicate content in a local niche to build
well-performing lead gen properties without all the effort of manually writing unique content?

Test Results: April 24, 2020

After one week, we had great results tracking “car title loan” terms across the multiple cities. So
far we saw everything indexed and ranking properly. In fact, we had over 200 out of 250 of our
target terms in the top 100 across 30 locations. We were targeting “title loan” primary service
page terms such as:

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