Archive for April, 2008
April 25th, 2008 by andy
A few posts ago, I said I’d get a bit more in depth about my feelings about Google. Basically it comes down to this: I don’t understand why everybody is walking on eggshells when it comes to dealing with Google.
Google is nothing but a tool. So many SEO folks are like, “Oh my God. I don’t want to do anything that would make Google not want to be my friend! Without their friendship, I’d just DIE!”
Hey, I get it. A top ranking in Google for a term that gets a lot of searches is really great. But really people, you give them too much credit! If you can build a site that is sustainable from other sources besides Google, they have no choice but to come begging! It’s their whole business. Without listing the most credible sources of information at the top, they’d just end up another AltaVista. Despite all their genius and algorithms, Google can’t think for themselves. They need to look to others to figure out who to like.
Didn’t anyone ever teach you that playing hard to get is a great way to attract someone?
And just like playing hard to get with the object of your desire, you weren’t REALLY making yourself impossible to get. You do things that make yourself more attractive. Look at this blog. It’s not an SEO piece of art, but I did do the fundamentals. But I spend more effort getting attention from other sources than I do worrying about optimization.
April 21st, 2008 by andy
Last night I watched the UFC pay per view fights. No major upsets. GSP beat Matt Serra, Michael Bisping beat Captain Miserable McCarthy, Kalib Starnes killed his career as a UFC fighter.
I always notice the intro music. You know, the music over the louspeakers that blast as the fighters make their way to the ring. It used to seem that every fighter would come out with some aggo-scream metal song like Korn, Godsmack, Disturbed or Drowning Pool. The other night, there was much more a mix of more recognizable music with classic rock, rap and country. Eminem is used a lot. The funniest I’ve heard was Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ for Mirko Cro-cop.
I wonder if the metal is out of the fighters’ itunes playlists or if it’s an overt effort by the promoters to have more encompassing songs. Do the fighters have complete control over what they could play assuming it’s a pay per view fight and naughty words isn’t a problem? If I wanted to use the theme song from Happy Days, could I? What about inserting subliminal messages? “You will wet yourself in fear when Andy Sweet enters the ring…. You will wet yourself in fear when Andy Sweet enters the ring…”
That got me further thinking… what would I choose for an entrance song? The following are some possibilities:
The Serpentine Offering by Dimmu Borgir - evil symphonic metal
Come to Daddy by the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton – insane redo of Aphex Twin which was insane to begin with
The Foggy Dew by the Chieftains and Sinead O’Connor – The Dropkick Murphys use this before they take the stage. Or at least they did the last time I saw them. It gives me goosebumps.
What would your fight entrance song be and why?
April 18th, 2008 by andy
Chris read my post from yesterday and sent me this reply:
I think you basically reflected what I said correctly. To take my own domain
portfolio as an example, I have about 350 domains, and in March of this year,
they generated about $67 in parked revenue. Now, one domain generated $31 of
that total, but let’s ignore that for now, and just say that the average annual
revenue for these domains is about $2.30. Just to make some back of the
envelope calculations, let’s say that we can multiply traffic by 20x through
minimal development that just targets the keywords in the domain name. However,
revenue will fall substantially, because CPMs on parked domains are
really high. Let’s be generous, and say that revenue falls to 60% of its
former level. That means that the average domain will now make $2.30 x 20 x .6
= $27.60. Net out the registration fee, and I could average $20 per year per
domain, or about $7,000 per year.
That’s the good news. Now the bad
news. If every domain takes me two hours to “develop”, I need 700 hours in the
first year to launch those domains. That means in the first year, I make $10 /
hour. I still need at least one inbound link to get listed in Google — add
some more time. Now, put on your white hat Google search engineer perspective
– should my 350 sites really rank? Do they genuinely help people? Do they
genuinely solve a problem? I doubt that a site developed in 2 hours (or even 20
hours) is going to be very useful to end users. Essentially you’re exploiting a
rule in the search engine algorithms that says “there’s a good chance that a
site whose domain name exactly matches a query is related to that query”. My
guess is that at some point very lightweight sites whose only strength is that
they take advantage of that algorithm hole will be downgraded in the results.
As more domainers try to figure out how to make money on their portfolio the
search engines will have to respond.
Now, take a different
approach: choose 1 domain out of those 350 that has a high query volume on
highly commercial terms with relatively light competition. Put those same 700
hours into building useful content and functionality, optimizing revenue
(through a combination of contextual ads and affiliate offers), and bringing the
site’s content to the attention of webmasters who have an interest in the site’s
topic. Now you have an excellent chance that you can generate substantially
more than $7k per year from that single site. And you’re also building a site
that the search engines will love, so that it gets more valuable year after
year.
All that said, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to quickly develop
a broad swath of sites. In theory, you should be able to develop / buy tools
that give you leverage across all those sites — user-generated-content tools,
for example. Or perhaps tools that integrate the site with Mechanical Turk so
that you can generate and release relatively high-quality content
inexpensively. By virtue of throwing a whole mess of sites against the wall,
you may find that a handful of them take off. You might be able to argue that
this approach is a more failsafe approach to finding high-volume commercial
niches with relatively low competition.
Thanks for the thought-provoking
post!
-Chris
April 17th, 2008 by andy
A couple of weeks ago (I was on vacation last week or would have written about this earlier), I met a friend for coffee to talk about domains and SEO. Yes, I actually schedule coffee get together for the sole purpose of talking about this. And I LIKE it!
Anyway, I met Chris Brooks at the Cambridge SEO MeetUp and he and I had talked briefly about this. I think he was intrigued about my monetization strategy for all of my domains. These are small, niche-specific domains that MIGHT recoup their registration fees by parking alone. In truth, most don’t even make that much. All of these domains have been ‘tasted’ multiple times but set free because they require development to be profitable.
Chris’ take on it (and a very intelligent take, at that) is that it would be very difficult to adequately develop on that scale while my perspective is that these domains would be able to rank highly on search with minimal effort as they are very specific. These domains may not be able to pull their weight by direct navigation, however I view direct navigation traffic as merely a hint at the potential traffic that awaits if you can rank for that term. Direct navigation to unknown or previously unvisited domains (not well-known destinations such as ESPN.com) is so tiny compared to the use of search engines that you can safely assume that it’s 15-20x the volume you might see from parking. Do I have evidence to back that claim? No, but doesn’t it make sense? And that multiple grows the more niche the term or phrase.
Well, I think the answer is a little bit of both. I quickly threw up a bad WordPress template for one of my domains, LasVegasTempAgencies.com, as a test. It ranked #2 for the term “Las Vegas Temp Agencies” (with the quotes) within 4 hours on Google. Granted, it requires the quotes. But it’s got no content! So I think my theory holds true. But so does Chris’ as I still haven’t developed those domains and they’re just sitting and either treading water or slowly drowning waiting for me to get off my butt.
So, what’s the cost? $.03/day for the domain, $.01/day for the hosting (I use a HTTPMe package for hosting). If you’re domain has any pulse at all over a week from parking, you can beat $.04/day. As I pointed out in another post about traffic valuation the average value per unique visitor across Frank Schilling’s network and the average value per unique visitor that helped create Shoemoney’s infamous $132k AdSense check was about $.06.
But Chris’ point is that it take scale to feel the impact with that strategy and he prefers to focus his energy on bigger sites like his septic system site (which I think is great).
I think the big difference is that my strategy relies more on the power of the domain to attain high natural rankings for a specific term while he builds sub-pages to rank for multiple terms. The advantage he has is not carrying the reg fee for 800 domains.
I think as you can guess, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer here. We didn’t reach one over that cup of coffee. It just goes to show that there are multiple ways to skin the cat. There are other reasons I prefer the multi-domain strategy which I will write about soon. I’ll give you a hint: I don’t worship at the church of Google.
April 2nd, 2008 by andy
A lot of people tell you that parked domains can’t get any natural rankings in search engines. Google says they won’t rank parked domains in an effort to keep the index clean. Companies like Parked.com have set up templates that allow you to post content with the idea that maybe it will look like a developed site instead of just PPC ads.
And then there’s this:
I just searched for food critics on Google and what I see is that thefoodcritics.com holds the #4 position (5 if you count the double listing) out of 424,000 possibilities.
By looking at it, you immediately know it’s parked and most domainers will immediately recognize it as belong to a certain Mr. F. Schilling.
