Whoa. I’m late to the game on this one. I just surfed over to the Matt Cutts blog. Low and behold, there is a 302 redirect from mattcutts.com to www.dullest.com. Matt posted about this change here, and it looks like he made this change on April 26. Apparently, he is changing things one at a time, so he can avoid any major catastrophes. Matt says it will be interesting to see how search engines react to this change. I’d say! His new domain has a PR NA and an Alexa rank in the 16 millions. I, too, think it will be a great experiment to see how the search engines react.
For one day, we can all pretty much gloat about our blogs having a higher Alexa Rank and PageRank than the Matt Cutts blog. :) Even if it’s only for one day…
WordPress Failue Notice. You know your Friday is going by very slowly when you get a failure message when trying to sign out of WordPress. Goodness. Logout Fail.
Muy interesante! As it turns out, Digg has started selling sponsored text links on its homepage. And they are not trying to hide it or anything. There’s practically a giant flashing neon sign pointing out the paid text link. Here is the current one that is live right now. It’s a link to a credit report site, and it’s highlighted in red:
Digg Sells Text Links then NoFollows them
The sequence of events is interesting, too, because at first the link was dofollow. Then today the link was nofollowed. How exciting. I wonder what Matt Cutts is thinking about Digg selling links. Anyways, I’m sure we’ll be hearing about this for the next few weeks. Be on the lookout for the paid link fallout. Or not. For more on Digg selling links and how it might impact the SEO world, go here and here. But also, here’s some free advice from Greg Boser’s twitter page:
I’m curious who the genius is that told Experian buying a straight link on Digg was a good idea. Pretty f’n clueless. Just an FYI for all the new kids: If you have a national brand that ranks #2, you don’t buy links on high profile sites. Especially on high profile sites that a lot of people hate.
On Monday, Danny Sullivan published a great post on expired domains (link). More specifically, his post discusses the link equity benefits from acquiring expired domains. For example, I have a website about topic X. I noticed that another website about topic X recently went offline. It’s down. It won’t load. Oh look, the domain is available for purchase. Wow! Really? That domain has 12,000+ inbound links, and it’s a PR4. Could I purchase that domain and redirect all of its URLs to my site? Would that help boost my PR and my rankings? Or would it set off an alarm at Google? I mean, all of the sudden a domain expires, is subsequently purchased and then redirected to another domain – that’s gotta trip some sort of wire in Google’s algorithm, right?
Danny goes through several scenarios, and he even quotes Matt Cutts a few times. The article is very informative, and I’m glad he wrote it. No one has posted about this practice for a long time, so it was great to see something on the topics of expired domain acquisition and link equity. You should read the post, but the quick summary is that there are certain instances where the link credit would remain or pass to new domains. But for the most part, if you are buying expired domains and then 301 redirecting them, don’t expect any significant boost in link credit.
As I was reading this article, I could not help but remember my recent experiences and how they do not really align with some of the points in this article. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disagreeing with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan. They are like the Moses and King David of SEO (I mean, they were there in the beginning, and they are probably the two most trusted sources in the SEO industry). I’m only saying that my observations don’t exactly line up with what they said in the post. I believe there are times when purchasing expired domains can be extremely useful, and there are times when I have noticed that link credit does pass from an expired domain. Here’s some of the strategies I have used in the (recent) past with good results:
Launching a new website? Wanna get indexed quickly? I wanted to get one of my websites indexed quickly. I found one expired domain with a DMOZ entry, and I found another expired domain with a Yahoo Directory entry. These domains were related to the topic of my new domain. I redirected them at the same time. Whether or not DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory are important or relevant any longer, my new site was indexed within a few days. Simple and sweet. I can’t argue with science.
Building PR and Link Equity for New/Existing Sites. There I was. I had that site for a while, and I wasn’t really paying attention to it. I decided to see if I could increase its traffic and PR from redirecting a few more expired domains. I found a page on the web that had a list of links to sites that were relevant to my site. Wouldn’t you know it? Some of those links were to domains that had expired. After a little bit of research into those dead links and some speedy domain purchases, I had 15 domains at my disposal. I redirected them over time, not all at once. After a couple of PR updates in 2008, I noticed that my site had increased its PR. And believe me, it wasn’t because a ton of other people had linked to my site. The only thing that changed was the fact that I had redirected 15 domains. I saw an increase in traffic from referring domains because the domains that I purchased had links all over the place. And I noticed an upswing in search engine rankings, which lead to increased traffic from organic search.
Driving More Traffic from other Google TLDs. Guess what? I bought an expired .es domain and redirected it to a .com site hosted in the USA. I really just wanted the link juice, but I got something more than that: top rankings on Google.es for some important keywords. I guess it makes sense. Have you ever noticed that some of Google’s European properties give you more search options? For example, on google.es you will definitely notice that under the search bar there are options to search the web, search only pages in spanish, or search only pages in Spain. Crazy, huh? I have worked on a few European-based sites, so I have seen these before. I just never thought about them in the context of redirecting expired domains. I guess we learn something every day.
Driving More Traffic from Local Search. One of the domains I redirected was the expired domain of a company based in a certain city in America (yeah, I have to be ambiguous about that one :) ). A couple weeks after I redirected the domain, I noticed that I was ranking for long-tail search terms that contained the city where that company was located. It turns out that the company had several listings in local search databases, online phonebooks and directories, etc… If you want exposure in new cities or if you just want more exposure in the city that you’re in, check into an expired domain for a local company that no longer exists. The economy sucks right now. Lots of people are going out of business. Contact some companies and see if you can buy their domain. Don’t be stupid about it. Don’t redirect a bunch of domains all at once. Just try one and see what happens. Maybe it will work for you like it did for me. Then again, maybe it won’t.
Don’t Alter the Whois Data! Domain Privacy? Shah, right. Google is a domain registrar and an accreditted member of ICANN (proof). You think your domains are private because you paid some extra money for domain privacy. Well guess what. Google knows it’s you! Don’t pretend that you are getting away with anything here. If at all possible, purchase domains through Escrow and leave the Whois data unaltered. Updating the Whois data is a dead give-away that the domain changed hands. When domains change hands, you can count on the existing link juice to be crushed. Mostly. As Danny points out, Google admits to having systems that do stuff. I assume these systems must do stuff like keep track of businesses acquiring other businesses, businesses merging, and any other instance where a domain might change hands. Hell, Google probably has systems monitoring other Google systems. They’ve thought of everything, haven’t they? If not, people like Dave Naylor, Jeremy Shoemaker and Greg Boser are forcing them to.
Servers, DNS, IPs, Oh My. You know how you just bought 50 domains because of this post? Well, before you point them all to the same server, using the same DNS numbers, you need to think about something else: how odd will it look to Google if you buy 50 domains and then point them all to the same server and then have them all redirect to the same site? It’s a dead giveaway. Some registrars are offering a 301 redirect from the registrar, so it’s not as easy to catch the fact that one person just bought and redirected 50 domains to their own site. Or you may look into virtual IPs, so that not all of your domains are sitting on the same IP address. Or you may try to grab a few hosting accounts from various hosts and split up your domains. This makes it seem like there is a true game of cat-and-mouse going on, but there really isn’t. No matter what, Google will catch you. It’s only a matter of time. Just be smart about it. Or at least as smart as possible.
Just Buy an Existing Website. Is there a website for sale in your vertical? Why not just buy it and add links to the site (where appropriate)? I mean, buying domains and purchasing links will cost as much money in the long run. Why not buy a website that is already trusted by the search engines and actually getting traffic from organic search? Maybe you could optimize it and add some links. Maybe both of your sites will rank high. And then you’ll have 2 sites in the SERPs. It’s not a bad approach to take, and it’s certainly more white hat than redirecting expired domains.
You must remember: The key is to do your research on old domains. Make sure they weren’t up to no good. Make sure they were not blacklisted. Make sure they’ve got a healthy number of inbound links. Only redirect domains that previously contained content related to your site. Also, even though everyone says that toolbar PR is outdated and not important, look for domains that have a PR of 1 or higher. It can’t hurt to have a PR (no matter how worthless/overrated/outdated many SEOs will tell you PR is these days).
There. I hope that helps you in your gray hat endeavours. Now, go forth and prosper. I mean, uh, go forth and find expired domains and then redirect them. Jeez. SEOs are nerdy.
Setting expectations. We have all heard this term at some point, and a few weeks ago I happened to see an entire blog post about how to set expectations effectively for SEO. Yuck. I mean, it was a great post, and I get the point of why it’s important to set expectations. We all have to set expectations, but the whole topic just makes me want to throw up because there is something fishy about the term setting expectations. Personally, I despise this term because it wreaks of a typical cover-your-ass business attitude. It’s in the same vein as making sure every correspondence is emailed, so that there is a record of everything. Documenting every last message is utterly ridiculous and ultimately pointless. It’s like you’re going into a relationship with the mentality that you have to gather and organize data for the purpose of one day using it as evidence. If you have that mindset, you need to examine your life.
If you have ever been in a situation where an email could actually prove something, you probably already know that those emails are rarely used as evidence in situations where both sides are so astoundingly pissed off (in those situations, it’s best for both parties to just part ways). In fact, the only reason those emails exist is so that both parties can read them and feel like they were in the right (i.e. “See that? Right there? I told that b-hole that I wanted to rank for 2 specific terms.” Or… “That guy’s a nightmare. Did you see his email? He asked me why his site is not ranking in the top 3 results for a couple of impossible terms after only 6 months of SEO. Then he told me that I had not done anything for their business! What a jerk.”). Gosh. It makes me cringe to think of those experiences.
Maybe we could avoid those stressful events if we do a better job at setting expectations. Or maybe not. Have you ever noticed that ‘setting expecatations‘ only raises its ugly head when a client is unhappy or dissatisfied? Whose fault is that? As an SEO, it’s your responsibility to keep your client happy. If you can’t manage a client relationship, being a badass SEO won’t really matter because you’ll lose all your clients. In fact, you may need to find a new line of work. More than half the game is managing relationships. Maybe even more than half. Sorry, I’m not a statistician.
Let’s face it. There are a lot of times when the SEO/client relationship is not optimal. Let’s just call these bad relationships. Many factors can lead to bad business relationships, and they rarely have to do with SEO recommendations, work or methodology. In the end, everything comes down to results, but quite often there are external factors, such as the current economic climate or the client’s company culture. These factors can play a huge role in creating a bad business relationship, and sometimes these external factors can actually outweigh your SEO campaign results.
If you’re a good SEO, results are not the culprit. Results will keep your clients happy for the most part, and your results are always there to change the client’s mood from “WTF is going on with our SEO?! You suck at SEO!” to “Yeah, you’re right. Your results speak volumes for how awesome you are at SEO. I’m not pissed off at you. It’s just that my boss is on my ass about everything. Wanna get a beer?” We’ve all been there. People are taking it out on you when you actually did a great job. It’s like that scene from Three Amigos when El Guapo is taking out his frustration on Jefe:
Classic scene. Now where were we? Oh yeah – If you’re not a good SEO, you’ll be up against the fact that you suck at SEO and you’ll be up against the many external factors that are producing pissed-off clients.
If you have any sort of social skills, you can probably discern the nature of a business relationship within a few minutes of talking with your client about your SEO recommendations. Some people are happy, easy-going and good-natured, and these people would never insult you or get in your face about anything. These people don’t work in marketing (and for the most part, they also don’t work in e-commerce). However, this is not to say that all marketing people are sadistic jerks. Most people in the search industry are awesome people who have a nerdy undertone about them. However, you must understand that there is a lot on the line when you take the reins of company’s SEO campaign. Livelihoods, families, that super sweet Cable TV package – directly or indirectly, your clients are placing their job and all their most beloved possessions in your hands when you take over an SEO account. You’ve gotta respect it. So don’t F*&$ it up.
As an SEO, you’ll need to be able to communicate your thoughts and prove your methods with solid results. If you ever find yourself discussing ’setting expectations’ then you can be assured that you failed at creating a good relationship with your client and/or getting awesome SEO results. Hopefully you can own up to that. And then you can move onto the next client with a new, wiser perspective. Well, hopefully you can. Hopefully. [If you can't, go find those emails you saved. They will make you feel better. Either way, no matter what happens, at the end of the day both you and your (ex)client will be sitting at a bar with a beer in hand, and all of life's problems will disappear. At least for a while.]
