Following up from the observation in my last post, I decided to test against a domain where I’d bought the hyphenated .com version just over a month ago and the concatenated .org version a week ago. That is word1-word2.com and word1word2.org.

Now since the hyphenated version went live, it debuted at position 125 on google. It quickly dropped out the rankings and has not returned to date. The concatenated version meanwhile has just debuted at 22. That’s quite a difference in treatment!

Okay, so 2 sets of examples is hardly a test, but seeing as I’ve already heard that this is the case from what I believe are reputable sources, I am taking these as first hand evidence. And pretty strong evidence too that hypenated is a no-no.

Oh by the way, regarding my last post, there was a second twit that stole my content. This one posted it up on squidoo. It did rank. I can’t remember whether on page 2 or page 3 but google has since slapped it.

Meanwhile, the original (or at least first discovered of the two twits) has edited out much of the verbatim, and added some category placeholder posts and currently ranks at 27.

So yeah, definitely go .net or .org, else tack on a surplus word before entertaining hyphens if you want google to treat you nice from the get-go.

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.

I noticed something interesting in relation to that site that I referred to that got slapped in Niche Subdirectory SEO Restructuring & Search Engine Slappage

While I believe the first slapping may have occurred due to the restructuring and the need for the google cache to update and flush out the old structure, the site has since been reindexed into the latter half of page 1 three times for the main keyphrase.

After the restructure, the site was already doing well, returning from it’s latest down in the google yo-yo experience. It was on page one, hovering in the latter half of the top ten. Within days it ended up as high as position 5 once google acknowledged a dmoz backlink. Shortly after that it got slapped.

Then after two weeks it returned and was slapped within 24 hours. Then another 2 weeks later it returned for 3 days then got slapped. Then it was back again a week later and slapped within 24 hours.

So if it keeps comiong back and then getting slapped, what’s going on?

Someone at google is manually targetting it? I doubt it, the content is good. I’m quite proud of the site. It’s about the only site amongst all the clearly ecommerce sites that actually contains useful information about the niche subject.

The restructuring? Not anymore, the google cache has updated, the old structure is nowhere to be seen?

Some minor structure tweaking? I have played around with a few smaller silo’d sections of the site that sit outside of the original main structure. Personally I don’t feel this should have had such an effect that I could be returned to page 1 and then slapped.

Too SEO’d? Nah, the SEO techniques used have hardly changed since the site first started ranking and going through the google yo-yo effect.

So back to what I hinted back in the title, incompatible plugins. I had installed All in One SEO and SEO Ultimate. On occasion I can be a plugin junkie, and especially with the site concerned. It was one of my first Internet Marketing sites and I was fascinated with the ease of adding plugins that you could now do since Wordpress 7 came out. This site was also the one I’ve expended the most effort on. Anyway, somewhere down the line I had both plugins live – pity that there’s no update trail (or if there is, I’m not yet aware of how to discover it) to allow me to find out when I installed and made SEO Ultimate live. Anyway, the problem with these plugins being used together is that they overlap in functionality, thus creating a functional contradiction that may have been screwing with things like the robots.txt file and other parts of the site when the search engine bots came crawling.

To further support this theory is the fact that I didn’t just get slapped by google, but yahoo and bing as well. Furthermore, I’ve since getting slapped, I’ve started to rank for the domain name without the “www.” prefix on yahoo and bing. The site’s domain uses the “www.” prefix which suggests a problem with the search engine bots interpretting certain information about the site. Why else would it go from indexing the domain correctly, then slapping it, then a few days later reindexing the domain using the incorrect format? Doesn’t sound like a problem with the content to me.

I have since disabled SEO Ultimate as I can’t be bothered to learn how to use it right now and All in One SEO is tried and trusted. If my theory proves correct, I would expect to see a return of my site within 3/4 weeks that will be permanent, rather than looking like some sort of blip. And I’ll be posting the result here.

I had to laugh at this silly email I received from someone calling themselves the Undisputed “Queen” of Internet Marketing.

Yeah if you’re the queen then don’t be arrogant enough to email me asking me to buy your affiliated product as that just says “Scream” of Internet Marketing, as in desperate. Yeah THAT I don’t dispute. And get yourself a proper domain name to email me from while you’re at it, not gmail. Spam, Delete. Nuff said.

Yeah, it looks like this was an affiliate of the “Queen” using the text from one of her emails, then paying some other internet marketer for my email address. So it makes the both of them look stupid.

This is why when people buy stuff off Internet Marketers they should use a backup email address just in case any of them sell your email address on the back end to other marketers. Hopefully most that do at least disclose that they are doing so, but it’s still a crappy practice. They shouldn’t simply disclose it, they should make it a choice, just like most legitimate companies do. Who really wants to see emails personally addressed to you coming from rank amateurs?

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!