I had purchsed a domain nearly two years ago but never really developed it. I had roughed in the look of it and put in some sample copy and pictures to get a feel for the design. And then I moved on to a more pressing project.
One day I discovered that my domain, EasyDiabeticDiets.com, had been indexed by Google as well as several other sites I had put up but not developed. These sites had never been submitted to any search engines. They had not been linked to. And I had never used Google Analytics or any pay-per-click on them. If you didn’t know the domains, you could not have found them — or so I thought. It would seem that Google is using the whois index to find websites to crawl.
Flash forward nearly two years and I decided it was time to develop my diet site. Since the intent was to monetize it with Adsense, I set it up, created a channel to track ad revenue, and put Analytics on it. Imagine my surprise when not long after that I had a day with several clicks totaling nearly two dollars!
That’s not big money, certainly. But for a site that hadn’t been built? And the clicks steadily trickled in. How was it found? What happened to the Google Sandbox for my competitive keywords?
I had achieved a number 11 ranking on Google for “easy diabetic diets” for having done almost nothing. Wordtracker showed people were actually searching for that keyword phrase. And I had them clicking on the ads.
Amazing!
Conclusion: If you have an idea for a site, buy the domain and put up a barebones site. Good domains are getting tough to find and won’t be any easier if you wait. And the earlier you put up the site, the sooner you will overcome Googe’s Age Rank.
– Rich Pulham
Posted by: Rich
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Webdev
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