Index Faster, Increase Value of SEO, Immediate Traffic

If you act on the advice I’m about to share with you it has the potential to increase the speed with which your new website is indexed by search engines, increase the value of your search engine optimisation efforts in the short term and bring traffic to your site on the day of launch.

Got your attention? Good, please calm yourself and read on.

With a little luck and elbow grease you’ll get “one up” on other new websites in your industry and you will leave the competition eating your URL’s dust and wondering what your secret is.

This advice is especially important for websites that do not require a specific brand name URL, because non-brand names allow for more flexibility when selecting URLs. It will be harder to find a domain for www.MyBrand.com than it is to find one for www.advice-about-topic.com, I hope that is clear.

For some website owners this tip will help them get their new site off to a flying start but I’m not suggesting it is the ‘silver bullet’ for everyone.

The Internet Is Getting Old

The truth about the Internet is that, like all of us, it’s getting old. Countless websites have reached the end of the line, domains have expired and websites have lapsed, drifting off into the cyberspace heaven. Still one (wo)man’s loss is another (wo)man’s gain.

Expired domains soon become available again, waiting to be re-incarnated as a bright new shiny website URL. Some of these domains still carry good pagerank and inbound links from its previous owners linking and SEO activities. This is where the opportunity presents itself.

A True And Tragic Story Of Domain Loss

A little back-story will help illustrate my tip about old URL value. A few months ago I allowed a domain to expire. There I said it. It wasn’t intentional as such, the reasons it happened are not important. What is important is that when I went to renew the domain it had already been purchased. Now it’s one of those annoying ad sites that show adverts for all sorts of rubbish.

I noticed an interesting thing about this ad site though, it still carried a pagerank of 4 and when I checked its inbound links I discovered that all the hard work I had done in building links to the site was paying off, for the new owners of my old domain at least!

Needless to say I contacted many of the sites I had requested links from and asked them to update their links. Almost three months later about 70% of those sites have still not updated their links pages. My old URL still enjoys a pagerank 3 despite my efforts to delete or redirect it’s old inbound links.
The result is that the domain is still getting passive traffic from most of the links I built and people are clicking on the ads its running. Good for the new owner of my old domain.

A Domain is (Re)Born!

I recently found myself on the other side of the coin when purchasing a domain for our local event organization group. We’ve been using the name River Of Shadows since last year and we decided we needed a website to help promote our community efforts. I found www.RiverOfShadows.org and registered it for the group, fired up a single page website and started designing a poster for this summers Music Festival.

I added Google Analytics to the page a couple of days after I put it up and too my surprise it that a little bit of traffic coming into it already. I hadn’t linked to it or told anyone about it just yet, but sure enough there was a trickle of traffic every day since the site went live.

I checked it out with Smart PageRank to see what was happening and sure enough there was a few ‘0’ pagerank links pointing to the URL. I checked the Way Back Machine and discovered the site used to be run by a witches coven. How interesting!

Now in fairness River Of Shadows had only a few links to it that accounted only for 5 – 10 visits a day and it’s completely off topic for our organization. I haven’t submitted it to any search engines just yet but within a couple of days it was indexed by MSN and even a little ‘lost’ traffic is better than starting at scratch.

The Lesson Learnt Is…

Before you go buy a new domain for your business or personal online project have a look for some recently expired URL’s that are on topic and carry some inbound links and maybe even a little pagerank. If you find a domain that the previous owner spent some time link building you could be off to a flying start with your new website and old domain.

//Related Posts:
Smart PageRank For SEO Spys, Hush-Hush!
Go Way Back In Time To A World Without CSS and AJax
Creative Tools For Bloggers With Bloggers Block!
Content Tip For Bloggers With Bloggers Block!

What is Google Pagerank?

Most website owners are familiar with Google pagerank and have a reasonible understanding of what it is. Here’s a brief reminder: “PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance.” If you want to know the pagerank of your webpages or other webpages simply download and install the Google Toolbar from here  http://toolbar.google.com/

That’s it in a nutshell, but for a full explanation visit www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

Smashing Magazine have a comprehensive article on pagerank and does a pretty good job of explaining it’s meaning and how it works [as far as we know!]. It asks questions such as:

• Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?
• How Does PageRank Work?
• Impact on Google PageRank
• What is PageRank?
• Which factors do have an impact on PageRank?
• Which factors don’t have an impact on PageRank?
• Google PageRank: Theory & Scientific Background
• Google PageRank Tools & Services

Check out the full article at Smashing Magazine Google pagerank , they explain it far better than I ever could.

I’ve always been of the opinion that part of Google’s success is that they get website owners involved in the pagerank competition; many become obsessed by their pagerank ’score’, counting the days until the next pagerank update. It’s addictive and can distract from the real work at hand. A word of advice, high pagerank doesn’t necessarily mean high page visits so don’t get too obsessed by your Google Pagerank.