Just wanted to make a quick post about recent observations when purchasing a domain name.

As part of this year’s 30 Day Challenge with Ed Dale and co. I registered an additional 2 domain names for a backup niche. Both consist of two words, but one is word1word2.net while the other is word1-word.com.

This came about because of the whole .com is worth more (not that I’d dabbled much in selling domains and websites) and as the hyphenated version was considered acceptable, albeit down the pecking chain after word1word2.net/org and word1word2word3.com/net/org.

I decided to go live with word1-word2.com live at the end of the first week of August with a single post. It didn’t rank. A week and a half later, I made word1word2.net live with a newly written post. I also submitted an ezine article which went live 2 days later. I don’t remember how long precisely it took other than it being within a few short days that the .net site ranked.

Interestingly, some lazy twit also stumbled upon this niche, most likely also a 30DCer in that they used a WordPress blog with full on page SEO – and that this blog coincidentally appeared in the month of the challenge. Anyway the twit copied my post from my .net and posted it verbatim on its blog.

There’s a slight irony here in that the keyphrase is actually worthless. The google keyword stats said there was a lot of traffic, but that traffic certainly doesn’t appear to be search traffic as despite the high page 1 ranking of my .net, it’s lucky if the site pulls even 1 organic search visitor a day.

Anyway the point I wanted to make here is that the domain name was word1word2word3.com. The blog currently ranks on page 4 for the main keyphrase and is less than 10 days old. As a case study I’m going to track it, as of course there’s also this issue of duplicate content. It would appear that for the time being at least, google doesn’t attach that much weight to it being a copy as it does being a new blog incorporating the keyphrase into its domain name.

My hyphenated .com meanwhile ranks in the mid 400s. In light of the evidence and that this project was the first and never ranked in the 100s for broad match,  it appears that google starts off in a position of mistrust for a domain that incorporates a hyphen.

So this has all been very educational. I’ve learnt two things:

1. Hyphens really are to be used as the last resort, don’t be surprised if you are held back in the rankings if you start off a project using them in your domain name – even if it is only one.
2. Duplicate content is not that big of an issue, at least not as first – perhaps it also depends on exactly how many pages of duplicate content google detects amongst unique content.

Don’t Do It!

Well, not when you have a niche blog and a lot of your main content is under that subdirectory. I did that, and promptly I got slapped. At least I think it is slapped rather than deindexed as I can still find some of my pages in google, ironically at least one being a page from within another subdirectory I had renamed (so I can expect those to disappear shortly too).

I’m a bit annoyed by this, as I had managed to breach the top 10, and had just got into dmoz, which boosted me slightly higher in the top 10. I thought finally after the project yo-yoed up and down the rankings for about 3 months since starting the project, that the site was finally going to stay in the top 10.

And especially as the bounces were getting narrower and the last bounce was also from the bottom of the top ten. However, this was misguided, and the site was blasted into oblivion the next day!

However, at the same time, I am learning from my mistakes experiences, I am trying not to get frustrated and I am trying to remember that I have other projects to keep working on. Projects that may very well turn out to be far more profitable than the one currently slapped.

So it certainly seems like a good idea for a beginner to have several projects going if they are going to rely on SEO alone as if your site gets slapped, so does your income, as nobody will see you.

Therefore it is good to back your projects up with article marketing, blog commenting, emailing opt-in contacts and anything else you can do to gain traffic through third party sources.

Now most of my traffic is now coming through from my article marketing efforts. Which is better than nothing at all, albeit small fish.

You can also learn how to do PPC properly, so you gain more money than you spend.

So, now I’m just waiting to see how long before google, yahoo etc decides what to do with my site. Hopefully it’s back within weeks rather than *gulp* months.

So lesson learned, don’t mess with your subdirectory once the search engines have started indexing you unless you are prepared to lose rankings. The only question that remains right now is how long will the penalisation last! And will the site come back and ascend into the top 10 quickly, fail to get back into the top 10, or simply resume the yo-yo effect? Stay tuned!

Talking to a friend a few weeks ago about online marketing, the subject of adsense came up. He immediately dismissed it “You can’t make money off Adsense!” he boldly claimed. I said I begged to differ. While I had only made about $10 in April, that was the most I’d achieved in a single month since turning Adsense on towards the end of last year.

What changed? I started activating more sites that I had purchased domains for but never used. I put some content on them. Some I was lazy with and just published a few articles on. And then I underscored them with 3 Way Links, which is a set once and leave system.

I think the main thing is having a site with good on-site optimization, including having a domain that consists of a keyword with low competition. Then obviously having relevant content. For most of these sites, I at least published a single article on EzineArticles so that the sites had at least one high quality backlink coming from a page containing relevant content. Having 3 Way Links must surely help to keep them ranking thought, building up some level of external support and authority. Great to build up links while you work on multiple mini site projects.

The cocktail seems to be working well, I made $55 in May and can also more clearly see which sites are getting ad clicks and which ones aren’t. One of those sites is seasonal however, relating to fathers day. It gets high traffic, but alas the domain name was based on an informational keyword not a buying keyword so that site gets a disgustingly high bounce rate, but nevertheless generates enough clickthrough to be on a par with the other sites.

For June, that site may possibly perform very well as last minute people send the traffic even higher and in turn attract a higher number of people seeking to buy.

Regardless of that June is off to a great start with £12 three days in – more than I made for the whole of April, and 1/5 of what I made in May. Maintaining that rate for the month alone should double May’s figures. However, I did have quite a few days ending in $0, and of course some days there were highs, while on others there were troughs.

I expect to see the same again, except perhaps this time avoiding a $0 day would be nice.

So I believe yes, you can make money with adsense, just that you have to work harder for it than you would through affiliate marketing or creating your own products. However, over the long term it could prove to be the more steady and lucrative income earner out of the two for some. A major benefit is that the sites are yours rather than someone else’s and assuming you look after them, they should continue to generate revenue for you. Just ask some of the folk that have spent time building blogs and websites where adsense is now generating them at least a five figure income monthly! How’s that for a day job?

This is a part 2 of Google Slaps my niche.

Interestingly, the slap was only temporary. A few weeks later I was reintroduced on page 3, then slapped down several hundred places before I now finally being reintroduced to page 2, which I am hoping is permanent this time.

I slowly climbed up to position 11, but I understand page rankings “snapshots” have been happening recently, which have caused me to slide half way down the page. Hey, I’m still on page 2 and I can climb back up right?

Just need to apply some social bookmarking and get around to a few relevant blogs and the like and see if I can promote my site onto page one. The site is on topic with useful information compared to the other sites which are just retailing products so I think it should be there anyway!

Main focus now has to be building backlinks so I can increase ranking and traffic. I’m also going to hold off applying for affiliate schemes until I do that. Crawl before I walk so to speak.

As google have lifted my site higher in the SERPs, I am getting some traffic through search as well as a trickle through article marketing – and I’ve not even scratched the surface of Article Marketing yet as, I’ve only dealt with Ezine Articles thus far.

So anyway, I guess the main thing when building a new niche site after market research is not to panic and get disheartened if your niche gets a nice ranking position then gets blasted into no man’s land. If you’ve not employed tactics google doesn’t like then you may very well return with a matter of weeks. Keep working on your site in a natural way, and relax!

Google slaps my niche site out of its results. You can now find me in the second hundred list of sites – although from the way the domain is listed (minus “www.”) I assume that’s some sort of historical listing, as it’s supposed to appear with “www.”

Hmm, will have to try this again sometime with 30 day challenge style approach to see if there is a way I can avoid my site being put in a box! I think their vintage electric guitar project never got the google slap.

Am I bothered about my site getting some google slaps? Yes and no.

Yes, because I’m not going to get any organic search traffic for a while now. Not that I had much to begin with, but I did get a few.

No, because as I am learning about article submission and social media. I’m learning that I can generate traffic without google. Google is seen as the be all and end all. “I must get listed in google” blah blah blah, but really, so what? Google should be seen as a chunk of traffic, but not the only source.

In fact if the recent post on SEOBook is anything to go by, google may soon become less valuable to focus your efforts on. The post claims google adjusted their algorithms in January 2009 and is now giving extra weighting to brand names to determine at least the top 10 listings on some search phrases.

Examples given demonstrated in one instance the change in results for a search for “airline tickets” now results in 4 brand name airline companies suddenly ranking in the top 10. So it may be in your best interests to get smarter and seek out new ways of generating traffic. Because these changes might ensure you never even had a chance to begin with.

Another reason why I’m not bothered – I’m very interested in this niche and keep thinking of things I can do to grow it and offer lots of useful content. Of course there’s a chance the efforts may be a waste of time.

But I like to think that by the time it gets reindexed on google, not only will it make it to the first page – hopefully to the first few positions if not the first, but that it becomes great at converting into either affiliate sales or adsense clicks.

I may do away with adsense at some point as affiliate sales are more profitable and reflect the purpose of the site. But at the moment I’m still building content, so affiliate offers wouldn’t integrate well just yet.

Anyway if there is a tecnhique that generally avoids resulting in the google slap, please let me know.