Popularity: 5%

Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

Popularity: 15%

Here’s the scenario, I have two domains, xyz.com and exact-keyword.net…

1. xyz.com has been registered since 2004 and exact-keyword.net is only a few months old.
2. exact-keyword is a small site (a handful of pages) all centred around the keyword
3. xyz.com is a ‘blog and I made one post with the url http://xyz.com/exact-keyword/
4. All other aspects are fairly similar, eg. meta tags, title, keyword density, etc,.
5. Both sites have no link backs
6. Both sites have been indexed by google

In this situation, xyz.com is ranked #11 in google for “exact keyword” whilst exact-keyword.com is ranked 45. What this tells me is that google has severely dropped the significance of the keyword in the domain name and is looking firstly at the age, and then the keyword in the path after the domain name. I thought this was strange but here’s a clearer example that I can show you. If you google for “domainholics”, you will notice that the first entry is my domainholics.com site is #1 but it’s not the root domain listed, it’s actually my inner dot com auctions page - http://www.domainholics.com/dot-com-auctions/. Now do another search on a highly competitive keyword “loans“. You will see that the top entry is http://www.moneyexpert.com/Compare-Loans.aspx … ie. no keyword in the domain name at all.

How bout that… maybe I don’t need to be registering 1000 domains and all I need is a really old domain with 1000 pages :) I’ve got my eye on officialdealers.com which is 9 years old and is being auctioned on eBay with me as top bidder @ $1.74

Popularity: 5%

Google Webmaster Tools is one of the must have tools in a link builder’s toolchest. I visit it monthly to

1. check on the backlinks that Google has crawled for my sites,



2. check what keywords are searching for to reach my sites
   
   You can see I’m ranking quite highly on keywords like “lana krost” and “livinia nixon” - it’s probably about time I did some deep linking to maximise these other keywords :)
3. check that my sitemap.xml is correctly formatted
4. Increase the crawl rate to my sites.
   
   Obviously, the more frequently the crawl, the quicker you’ll come up on search keywords for new terms. However, Google normally only lets you set normal, or slow, unless your site is quite established and frequently being updated.

Popularity: 5%