In my continuing obsession with exact matching keyword domains, I’ve snapped up Web-hosting-Reviews.net! Web hosting is a massively competitive market and not only did I not get a dot com, I had to include dashes AND I only picked it up on a backorder at godaddy. It was a pending-deletion domain and actually did its round at another registrar who had it for a few days before letting it go. Apparently, domain registrars can pick up deleted domains with an automated script, holding for a few days to see if there’s any traffic going to it, and then put it back out on the market if it does not meet their traffic / value algorithm - all this at no charge!
Anyway, I’ve decided to run a little experiment to see how fast I can get this domain out of the google sandbox. The easiest way to check if google’s index’d a site is to simply search for the domain name or use the site command in the search (ie: http://www.google.com/search?as_q=hosting&as_sitesearch=web-hosting-reviews.net).
What I’ve done so far is:
1. Install wordpress and write a post. I noticed with my discount coupon codes site that it was binned by google for months and the moment I installed wordpress and posted a handful of entries, it appeared on Google literally within hours!
2. Stumble the site - A free link from a PR8 site :) http://brilliances.stumbleupon.com/review/13053359/
3. Digg the site - Another free link from a PR8 site :D http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Web_Hosting_Reviews_4
4. Add a wikipedia link - unfortunately, the wiki guardians have weeded me out. They’re bloddy efficient. Even though wikipedia uses nofollow, my hunch is that Google still notices the links for spidering purposes.
5. Add it to my signature on the forums I frequent.
6. Submit to some free web directories
7. Install the sitemap plugin and add the sitemap.xml to Google’s webmaster Tools.
8. Submitted the url to Google, Yahoo, and Live
That’s it so far. StumbleUpon and Digg are so handy cos they let you pick your own anchor text for the links - although I doubt whether the Digg boys will like me exploiting their site like this. O well, that’s the price they pay for being so damn popular.
I’m hoping all this will put me on the google radar within 24 hours. Wish me luck! :) If I can get this site anywhere near page 1 like the Maltese Dog and the Hottest Girl, I will have struck gold - the web hosting companies I’ve affiliated with pay $100 per sign up that I refer to them! (Feel free to sign up to any one of them - hehehe)
Popularity: 2%
3 comments ↓
Jerry,
Great write up. Do post back in 24 hours and let us know your progress.
Couple of suggestions:
1. Google Analytics to track your visitors. It’s free and provides you a wealth of information about your visitors (including the crawlers). Not sure what the long term plan is for the site, but I was expecting the link in the Top 10 to lead to a content page providing a detailed “review” which would then lead to me to buy. Sales is a bit lacking at the moment in my opinion.
2. Introduction post or “About us” link to give you credibility
4. Ability to submit requests for reviews on a given host (and your opportunity to seek out another affiliate). At least a “Contact Us” link of some kind. At $100 a signup a little customer service to seal the deal should not be out of the question.
Thanks for the suggestions Frank. All my sites are probably operating well under their potential and I can definitely do better at providing better content and reasons for the visitors to stay. I will definitely try and milk this domain though and wet my hands in the affiliate market. For the time being I’ve just slapped something together in half an hour just to please the google bot
[…] (Here’s the link to the original post for this indexing experiment) […]
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