Hey all you cool cats and kittens (did I just say that). It’s a year to the day that Tiger King swept the world and appeared as the number 1 binge-worthy show on Netflix. I honestly think I watched this whole series in one weekend, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It was lockdown, you can’t blame me.

I can’t take credit for this blog post, Carrie Rose was the brains behind this one in what is my favourite ever Twitter thread. But It’s the anniversary and I thought the world needs to know just how clever that b*itch Carole Baskin is (she did it right?), so I am re-writing the thread with the latest numbers.

Joe Exotic AKA the Tiger King himself HATED the fact Big Cat Rescue ranked no.1 on Google, “stealing his damn customers”. Well Joe, maybe it’s the 162k backlinks to the domain! We used Ahrefs and Buzzsumo to look at the backlink profile and here are some very interesting stats...

Before the series launched on Netflix, the site (www.bigcatrescue.org) had 4,391 domains linking to the site. Only one month after, the site had 6,352 domains linking back to the site, meaning Carole Baskin had seen an increase of 45% in domain links within 30 days! Currently, the site has an impressive 162k backlinks pointing to the site, coming from 9,177 domains, a further 44% increase.

Of those links, 1900 use the exact domain anchor text “big cat rescue”. And what is EVEN JUICER is that 79% are followed links. But we know it’s not all about the number of links, are they of quality? Turns out Carole Baskin has landed links from BBC, Forbes, Washington Post, Vice, National Geographic and MSN to name a few.

The majority of the links point to the homepage but Carole knew she needed some links to deeper level pages. So what does she do? Well, she knew that millions of people around the world were searching for her name. Everyone wanted to know who that b*tch Carole Baskin was. Just look at the google trend data in March 2020.

So she created a landing page on the 11th of April titled “Carole Baskin” (www.bigcatrescue.org/carole-baskin/). This page mentions her name “Carole Baskin” 30 times, has 7 internal links, NUMEROUS videos, and links to her books and DVD’s she is trying to sell (of course).

Now on April 16th, only 5 days after the launch of this page, she managed to get it ranking 5th for her name! She landed 211 links (84 domains) to this page but she also redirected some juicy links into the page (such as the National Geographic one). However, at the time of writing, she has slipped down the SERPs and now appears on the 2nd page of Google. It Looks like she has been penalised for mentioning and linking via the anchor text "Carole Baskin" too many times. Keyword stuffing is a thing, it can get you penalised, don’t do it.

Using Buzzsumo, we found that Big Cat Rescues most linked to content piece is their refute against Netflix and Joe Exotics fame, it went live one day after Netflix launched the show. Within 2 weeks the page landed 1,036 links from LA Times, NBC News and Time Magazine. The page also has over 51.6k social shares making it the most engaged with page on her site.

Finally, her biggest competitor is the site www.wildcatsanctuary.org - but they can’t even compete with these links. With just 12.2k domains pointing to the site (half of them Blogspot blogs), they haven’t got a chance.

Well, that’s that, hope you enjoyed reading these stats and took some learnings. One thing I know - that b*tch Carole Baskin is a link building, content marketing genius. Make sure you follow Carrie and me on Twitter for the next time.