Domain Magnate

Something changed in Yahoo Site Explorer today. I’ve checked many of my domains and all show lower link counts, about 2-3 times less links than before. For example this site is now down to 2118 backlinks, from over 6k before.  There is no way this could just happen on its own, so there must have been an update in yahoo today or yesterday. There is currently nothing about it on the official yahoo search blog.

Yahoo only amounts to about 10% of traffic on my sites, so I don’t pay much attention to it and most use it for checking backlinks. Yahoo is generally much slower than Google in all SEO aspects, serps change slower and newer sites get indexed and  rank considerably slower, so it’s interesting to find out more about this update and its significance.

According to MSFT and Yahoo deal yahoo search sites should soon start redirecting to bing and meanwhile yahoo keeps losing search share to Google

People who are new to domaining ask me from time to time how can they get started, how to make money, how to flip, what to buy etc. It’s not a question one can give a precise answer on, but my suggestion is this: buy for quick flipping when the market is high and buy to hold when the market is down.

Back in 2006-2008 the domaining space was full of incredible flipping opportunities in generic domains, short domains, .com and many other tlds – the market was on the rise and there was always healthy demand for good domains. Those who knew the market prices well and had some cash to invest were able to profit rather easily from this. However in 2009-2010 the domaining market direction changed and quick flips were harder to come by. There are short domains to be found at considerably cheaper prices than just a few years before, but selling them higher to get a decent profit margin may prove rather difficult as well.

Educated and well planned and researched flips will still work, but now is the time to buy cheap for long term investment or development, or to try to resell the domains higher to end users. Will the market go up next year or the year after that? Maybe.. maybe not, however buying domains just because they are cheap and then hoping for the market to go up to sell higher is not the best strategy any more. It worked well in the late 90′s and 2000′s, but in this new decade as the Internet penetration growth is slowing down domain prices won’t keep rising nearly as fast as before.

A much better strategy in my opinion would be to either buy good quality cheap domains that can fit well for end users to build up a portfolio and promote it to higher end customers, or to buy names for development projects – which is mainly what I do now. But development is not for everyone, creating a profitable site from scratch can be quite a challenge for someone who does this for the first time and is only used to buying and selling names. And outsourcing your domains for cheap adsense minisites will just turn your parking revenues into development cost losses, which you may not even make back in years of ad cents revenue. Google doesn’t like autoupdated blogs and it doesn’t favor cheap mini sites much, unless you build them in good, low competition niches with high cpc and do some serious link building to gain the serps.

So depending on which of the two options you choose your best strategy now would be:
1. Building an end user targeted portfolio carefully researching and picking cheap and fitting names
2. Developing domains into profitable sites one by one through researching niches, development methods and costs and especially – finding better monetization methods.

DomainMagnate.com publishes interviews with different domainers and webmasters to bring you a unique and personal view on domaining and site development. If you’d like to have your interview published on the site shoot me an email to ‘contact’ (at) this domain. The interviews are usually published unedited.

- Tell us about yourself
Hi, I am Shlomo Man, 29 years old from Israel
Forums name is usually is solokkhz, I do this stuff full time.

- What are your top domains/sites?
I have several domains and sites. In the last few years I’ve decided to concentrate in developing my domains into full sites as the revenue potential of established websites is usually higher than through parking.
Here are some of my sites:affiliate management, how to get pregnant fast, Online Jackpot

- How long have you been into the online business and how did you get started?
I am into the domain and internet marketing world from around 2003, started by getting scammed by some scammer that told me that my first domain m1db.com worth around $xx,xxx and pointing me to an appraisal service to apprise it. As a newbie this was a huge surprise to even know a domain can be worth money. But I actually need to thank this scammer guy for introducing me to the enormous world of domaining.

- How do you build your sites?
I usually outsource most of the content writing and building my sites to providers in India and the Philippines as it saves me lot of my time, so I can concentrate on what is really important, and that is building my assets portfolio. Usually we build sites that are based on wordpress and HTML, also we use the prestashop platform for Ecommerce sites.

- How do you promote your sites?
Me and my team have developed a special SEO system that involves buying links, forum and blog linking and more. We also do PPC and media buying. People often overlook the traffic generation aspect of a website by building small amount of low quality links hoping to rank higher in the serps. That is not how it works, If you’ll take a look at your competition, you’ll discover that the higher ranking sites have many links, some lower quality and some are really great ones. You need to get many kinds of links to make it look organic and then, and only then you’ll see some love from the search engines.

- What is your business strategy for the future?
As Search engines changing a lot lately, we are changing our strategies according to these changes. You must understand that what works today might not work as good in the future, so you should always be ready and read the market and its direction.

- What do you think are the best opportunities to make money online now?
As for opportunities, there are actually, uncountable offers you can choose from. Every person who wants to make money online must find the path he wants to follow and stick to it.

- What is your best tip?
Don’t jump from offer to offer and from site to site. Choose an asset you own and suck the juice out of it until it makes you the most you can get out of it, only then move on to your next project.

- Thanks Shlomo for doing this interview and good luck in your web adventures!

This is an update on my seo experiment that I started last month. I posted about it earlier on NB, so here is how it started:

I did a very interesting experiment last month. I purchased a link spot at a large private network of sites, which has millions of pages and sites indexed.

It was for a relatively unestablished site. The site was actually pr2 and had maybe 50-100 backlinks in yahoo. It’s also a few years old, but I’ve rebuilt it completely several months ago.

Before this experiment it was ranking somewhere between #9-12 spots in Google for the main keyword and somewhere on 2nd or 3rd pages for other keys. The site wasn’t making any serious money and I didn’t have much expectations from this, so this was done purely in scientific purposes to see what effect a million links can have on serps.

First few days I watched in yahoo backlinks how my link counts grew, first it was around 100, then 500, 1k, 5k, 10k.. 50k.. 100k – it was rather surreal to watch backlinks growing by thousands every few hours.

Now, a little less than two weeks into the experiment there are about 200K backlinks shown in yahoo for the site, all going to the frontpage. These are only backlinks shown and only in the yahoo tool. So take into account that yahoo doesn’t list all the backlinks they find in their tool and that Google might find more backlinks, so this could easily go up to a few million links for Google.

And guess what happened to the serps?

They are all gone! The main keyword where my site used to be #9 in Google it’s now #190 and for the other one #163.

The site is not banned or deindexed and ranks #1 for the domain name, but all the serps for keywords are gone and Google is not sending any traffic now.

I guess that means adding tons of backlinks very fast can cause you to lose serps and now I have some definitive proof for it, as nothing really says SEO like doing your own experiments and analyzing the results.

So.. adding 200K links in 2 weeks will kill your serps, on the other hand it should work on your competitors too.

It’s been 2.5 weeks into this now and the site is now back to its former place around #9-12 spot in Google for the main keyword (it’s actually an exact match domain, but the keyword is rather competitive).
There are around 300k backlinks shown in yahoo now and growing daily, but despite all that the rankings haven’t actually changed, after a short Google dance it’s back to former positions in Google.

My quick analysis of this is that these links aren’t counted for much since they are all similar and from similar and rather spammy looking sites. It’s important to have a well diversified link profile. I guess it’ll take a bit longer to see some more conclusive results on this. I’ve expected the serps to improve but that hasn’t actually happened yet, however I still believe that this should get the site closer to #1 place for that keyword and improve serps for other keywords once it all settles.

Google recently added new case studies or “success stories” as they call them. These are mostly established sites that use adsense as either the main or the secondary source of revenue. They all look good, have nice and neat designs and lots of unique high quality content. Some are major news, entertainment  or informational portal, others are smaller niche sites.

The funny part is most success stories start with a tale of how someone decided to make a site to provide some useful information for students/patients/stock traders and one day decided to try adsense on it – put a small ad unit at the bottom of the pages and was forever surprised by the high earnings:

Furniture.ie was founded in 2003 by Richard Moyles to make the process of finding products for the home easier, with the goal of saving people time and money by allowing them to search many stores from a single location..

Finfacts.ie is a business and finance portal launched in 1997 with the aim of providing content related to business and personal finance to the Irish market..

Livecharts.co.uk is a stock market data portal covering global markets. The site started out as a hobby site in 2005 and – depending on market conditions – now gets up to 3 million page impressions per month..

Spartacus Educational started life in a small office at the home of its founder and director John Simkin in 1997. Simkin left a job as a textbook publisher to set up his own company, providing academic publications online.

I guess that is the image they want to present to the world (that is the regular people are not into online marketing) and not the one of a growing number of people researching keywords, buying targeted domains, cheap content and links and trying to maximize their adsense revenue by placing tons of ads everywhere. Adsense turned content into online commodity and made massive amounts of low quality free content available online and  profitable like never before. Not that I’d complain of course, on the contrary. However duplicity and hypocrisy rules as always.

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I blogged about some of my successful site and domain purchases and sales before, but this time I’m going to tell you about a rather different story. As is known failures are a part of any business and if you don’t fail you simply don’t try hard enough. However I try to see failures as merely temporary setbacks and don’t let them stop me, but rather try to learn the lessons and make the necessary  adjustments to prevent them further along the way.

One of the first domains I purchased with the sole purpose of reselling it for more about 4 years ago was a 2 word .com generic. It had many good results in Google, quite a few advertisers in adwords. Was a solid 2 word generic and registered since 1998. Many potential end users and even the previous owner was an end user, however I got lucky (or so I thought..) as he didn’t have any further need in the domain since he was retiring from his business.

I was researching keywords manually and emailing .com domain owners to see if they might sell the domain cheap, a long and tedious job, but it is how most domainers who didn’t have the privilege of registering the top generics back in the late 90′s make their money. So I emailed this domain owner and he replied that he’s retiring from his business and willing to part with the domain. I offered $5k and he rather quickly accepted. The deal went through escrow and a few days later I was a proud owner of a 2 word .com generic domain.

There was a lot of excitement at first. I collected a large list of potential end users from Google results and ads and similar domains in other tlds and emailed them all. Several replied asking for price, but none seemed to be much interested after receiving my overly optimistic price tag of around $30k. I also tried selling it on the forums and auctions with no results. Then I decided to put it on ebay. The auction ended at only around $500. That’s when it hit me – I seriously overpaid for the domain!

So what went wrong? The domain was indeed a 2 word .com registered since 1998 and with a decent amount of google results, but it had a negative connotation – which is a very bad sign for a domain. There weren’t many searches on the main keyword and all the end users couldn’t afford to pay much for it. The advertisers on google were either low budget local companies, or even non profit organizations. I was totally wrong in my initial evaluation.

I tried to sell the domain several times after that but never got any significant offers to at least get back half the costs I paid for it. I still own the domain and it serves as a good reminder to be careful and do more and extra research and all the proper due diligence when buying. It’s a constant reminder not to be overly excited about any new domain purchase  and keep a healthy dose of realism in my evaluations.

Do I still see it as a failure? Not at all, I’ve learned many lessons on this one and they have paid off many times over since I applied them to my other purchases. I did lose quite a bit of money on that first one – especially considering that I didn’t have much cash to invest in domains back when I was just starting with it – but it taught  me some invaluable lessons which has proven to be a good trade off! Don’t get discouraged from your mistakes, but rather absorb the lessons and move on!