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Andy Hagans has a great post about getting a new domain indexed and ranked.
Now a new domain probably isn't any better than the other one we had, and I wanted the launch to go right, dang it. So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) -- Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)... Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.
I wonder which friend gave him that trusted link ;)
The trend to ranking in Google is moving away from just get more more more more more more to getting less but higher quality links. After you get enough trusted links you will probably automatically pick up a few spammy links, but the value of actively building low quality links is diminishing daily (at least, if you care to rank well in Google).
Occasionally you will see people say that paying $300 for a link in the Yahoo! Directory is a rip off, and a couple years ago the economics leaned more toward getting many low trust links. But over the last few years there have been tons of bottom feeding business models which have sprung out of a link = a vote line of thinking to where Google needed to obfuscate the market and increase the cost of low cost links.
Indeed the concept of link = vote will still be sold for a great deal of time (similarly to how people still sell search engine submission software and services). Most of it is not honestly valuable, but if it is profitable and scalable and there is a market people will keep selling it.
Keep in mind that if many search spammers follow the same recipe then the relevancy algorithms might get rebaked, but for now
- for Google, with links less is more
- the cost of some trusted links (in terms of time, money, and/or editorial review processes) makes many of them prohibitively expensive for certain spam content models
In one of Matt's recent SEO videos he also mentioned the value of soft launching.
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Aaron,
Do you think this story reinforces the idea of a "trust box" versus a "sand box"?
I've seen SEO firms that stated a 6 month penality by Google for new sites and even suggesting buying old domains. I think that's a little extreme.
At our agency, we've been caustious about the "trust box", but would never suggest buying an old domain for rankings nor expect a 6 month "penalty".
By the way, hope to see you at SES San Jose.
Cheers,
Daniel R
Old domains should not be frowned upon as an SEO technique. Give them whatever they want.
I think I have tried pushing the concept of trustbox for quite a while now. I think I rank #2 in Google for "trustbox" at the moment ;)
Maybe a post about the top 10 sites to buy your trusted links from would be good?
Patrick
Thanks again for the link m8 :-)
Old domains are good, but Google recognizes when the registrar changes and thus this the domain age doesn't give you much value. The most important thing you can do is to write quality content on your site and engage in ethical site promotions, that's all.
Or, you could test out various theories and methodologies to find what works for you.
Does google see buying links as a bad thing? And do they punish sites that buy links?
My site is just over a month old and I've had good success getting high rankings on Google. I don't think I'm doing anything special but I am trying several different techniques that seem to be working. You can checkout my article "Google SEO Success"
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