How to get pages with no content to rank with no effort… Domain Ager? Domain Embarking?
I have recently gone nuts buying up domain names. Everything from short brandable names to keyword rich generic domains with search traffic for that exact phrase. I keep thinking “this name has got to be worth more than the $6 bucks it costs me to register it”. I am probably not the only one with this habit - starting to think drugs might be a cheaper habit with more positive side effects.
I am not getting much traffic from any of the domains, but I am surprisingly getting a trickle on almost all of them. They probably will average 30-50 visitors in a year per domain, which I know is not impressive, but most of these are for fairly high value services so even a few relevant clicks a year is probably profitable.
The challenge is that most of my domains are getting decent search traffic in Google for people searching my exact domain name as a keyword search, just without the dot.com. I have tried parking them at a variety of places and am getting paid a pittance compared to the potential value of the click and the targeting on these pages is terrible. Not to mention that I have almost zero chance at ranking in Google for any of the terms I own while they are parked.
So I have been thinking outside the box and trying to find a few services that can auto-gen content that will get the domains indexed, which in turn will probably lead to me being at least somewhat relevant for the search terms I own. My thinking is that if I can point a prospective buyer at a domain and it shows up on the first page of results for the generic search term that is the domain name, then the value to the buyer is higher than just a relevant domain name for their business would be since it already is ranking. My buyers would not be SEOs or internet marketers or domainers, they would be Dentists and Lawyers etc…
I have tried Domain Name Ager which is fairly reasonably priced ($37) if you have more than a few domains you want to seed with some age. It looks like dog breath - Forth Worth Divorces - and it is probably something a decent web developer could throw together pretty quick. The price was such that it was not worth my time to even try to figure it out - I just bought it figuring I would buy 6 less domains that day. So I have two domains testing this to see if they get indexed and can rank at all. (I am using this post to test giving one a link and not giving a link to the other to see if that matters)
The other thing I have tried, is called Domain Embarking. This free website takes some keywords you provide and fills up an 8 page website with youtube videos and flickr photos and rss news feeds on topics derived from those keywords. The pages are not unattractive, but they are stuffed full of ads, both adsense and otherwise. The way this program works is that the website creation is free and you share in Adsense revenues evenly with all other websites using the program (after the owners of the site take their share of course) usually seems to be around $.30 a click (so dont bring your mesothelioma websites). The other revenues from ads and product sales are thrown into a pot and divided evenly based upon premium shares which you can earn any number of ways. Since the sites are all linked to each other, Google indexes them pretty quickly. I created North Las Vegas Condo on Tuesday and it was indexed on Thursday. It remains to be seen if Google will rank this for what I consider to be a fairly uncompetitive term.
Once again, I am not trying to make serious money from either of these services, rather I am trying to help unlock the value of the underlying domain name by getting it where it ranks decently in Google, and I am trying to do it in an automated fashion. I have tens of thousands of keyword rich domains I could do this on, so I am trying to test a way to get them indexed without having to send lots of links or even time to do so. Something where I (and by I, I mean I pay someone to do it) spend 5 minutes and a few weeks or months later I have a decent shot at ranking for a decent percentage of the sites I try it on.
If the above names can get to the first page of Google for the phrase that is the domain name then I think they might be worth a few thousand dollars to a local divorce attorney or real estate salesperson who can both make that amount back in a single transaction, I just need to show the buyer that the possibility of a transaction is there just because it ranks in Google. Until then, the sales process of just a naked domain with no ranking is too unwieldy and time consuming for me to pay someone to do it in an efficient manner.
Anyone have any ideas? Other services I should test? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Does anyone even understand what I am trying to do?
Oh yeah, the links to the services here are affiliate links - I figure if you go make some other guy some money by testing one of these services, then they ought to pay me a few bucks for sending you their way. The purpose of this post and this experiment is to figure out how to take $50,000 in domains and make them worth $5 million+. If I make $37.23 in the interim from affiliate offers, I will cash the check, but it is not why the post was written…
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Do you have aim? if so, hit me up n2oHonda
November 3rd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Ala blackhat…. What you’re talking about a 100% blackhat strategies so that’s where you should be doing your homework. Build out automated sites to grab traffic and setup a link network is the blackhat credo. Granted there’s a lot ot know about it. Unfortunately something like you mentioned before usually has some footprints and “might” get devalued or banned pretty quickly. But you can just pull it off and let them sit and they’ll get unbanned eventually. Google likes to find networks like this and wipe them out.
Is it possible to do what you want? Sure, just be smart about it and do you blackhat homework.
November 3rd, 2007 at 4:04 pm
P.S. you can do research on Automated MashUp’s as that’s kind of what the format would be called in the non blackhat world. But the bottom line is it’s a fancy scraper site.
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:55 pm
I have had domains rank on Yahoo when all I did was use them for PPC campaigns. Beyond that, and a keyword rich domain name, there was no SEO involved. My guess at the time was Yahoo was using traffic data to rank sites (but who knows.) Funneling paid traffic through the domains, if you have campaigns for that niche running, might give them a little boost.
The best approach may be to pay someone to re-write a unique mashup script. Take a look at what the Demand Media and Marchex guys are doing, pretty much the exact same thing.
By the way, did you get my reply email? I have been having all kinds of problems with my email accounts lately..
November 7th, 2007 at 12:51 am
embark seems like a great idea - atleast for embark - i’m switching over to them!
however for domain-ager, you can do the same with google alerts. I just posted about it here;
http://www.livingoffdividends.com/2007/11/02/making-3000month-in-passive-income/
November 9th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Hi - I’m a domainer and your model is spot on for many in the domain space. Yes, $50K to $5Milllion based on 10X revenue is not unreasonable (have you heard of Frank Schilling?,…www.sevenmile.com). It’s sort of comical to see a post like this…domainers and affiliate markerters are one in the same and they don’t even know it!
November 14th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Curious to how you are deploying your Embarked pages. Are you manually setting them up (DNS, DE Install, Config, etc) or do you have an automated system of doing everything? If so and its commercial, mind sharing? (Ill click through an aff link if you provide).
November 26th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
[...] If you have not already read it, this is a follow-up to my original post about trying to get pages with no content to rank. Check that out [...]