PageRank, PageRank, PageRank that one little word that before 1996 didn’t even exist now holds so much weight and importance in both the SEO and domaining community but with only two updates last year and none so far in 2014 has even Google moved on to bigger, better and more relevant measures?
From an expired domains perspective, a domain with a good to excellent PageRank will either sell for a premium price or will simply sell a lot quicker than those without. PageRank in this area is still often regarded as the highest and most consistent measure of how well the domain will perform from an SEO perspective both at the point of purchase and later into the future as PageRank stays with a domain regardless of its owner.
So what happens if you purchase an expired domain like I did with no PageRank at all? So I asked myself at the time will Google forever penalize my domain simply because it has no PageRank? With so few and infrequent updates to the algorithm will any efforts I make to gain PageRank go unrewarded? To be honest I was convinced my domain was destined to languish in the netherland of search around page 8 forever….
The expired domain I purchased had few backlinks, no PageRank and an extremely poor Alexa Rank BUT it did happen to be an EMD, this I felt was very important from a marketing perspective and has formed the premise for our whole go to market strategy. Yes I would have preferred a nice shiny product name to build a cool easily recognized brand around but we had no neither the money nor the expensive domain to this so we simply went back to basics and started from scratch with our EMD.
We spent many months building the framework for our website and our expired domains search engine, consolidating millions of records of data, ultimately ensuring our tool was accurate and robust. Then we waited and waited and waited we were pleased with our final product and through the very nature of what it did we were automatically adding additional pages of information every single day but yes you guessed it we were still scraping the bottom of page 8 on our top search keywords..
Frustrating to say the least if you didn’t already know this but Page 8 is a pretty lonely place to hang out at, I am sure you see more traffic out in the Sahara Desert in the height of summer then what we saw back in those days. But to be fair we did get the occasional visitor and to our great delight they started to come back and yes may have even told their friends about us as visitors to our site slowly but surely did pick up and over time we hiked our way up to the dizzying heights of Page 5!!
And….. that is where we stayed, we hung out there amongst old blog pages dating back from anywhere from 2005 to 2002!!! I was annoyed here was an exact match domain to our target keyword, with content being updated daily and there were sites ranking above us that had not been updated in 10 years! Come on Google give me a break please? It was at this point I decided to start playing the game a little better, I was determined to drag my domain up to Page 1 PageRank or no PageRank..
I started by expanding our site to beyond our main service which is our domain search engine and started blogging, I created a Google + Facebook and Twitter page and gave Google some money and started using Adwords, surely now they would start to notice me? I was playing by all the rules wasn’t I?
Over time I learnt to run simultaneous Adword campaigns across many different countries targeting multiple different keywords, I became pretty proficient at optimizing our advertising budget to ensure our Ad was able to compete with the likes of Godaddy’s, NameJet’s and Sedo’s endless advertising campaigns and yes we did start to see results.
Our site traffic grew exponentially overnight, and yes it was kind of thrilling to log into Google Analytics everyday and see active visitors on the site at any given time (remember our experience in the Sahara desert..) But in many ways it felt like a hollow victory we were paying for the priviledge of these visitors so they werent really real or were they?
Well we did see a high bounce rate from our ad visitors which to this day I still haven’t quite been able to figure out, we are an EMD to our targeted keyword and the Ad pretty much spelt this out so I am not sure why these people clicked on the ad if the site didn’t interest them…? Netherless we started to see organic traffic grow considerably and over the course of three months Google rewarded us with the lofty search result of Page 3 – still no PageRank though.
And that is where we felt we would stay, surely it would be impossible to move up any further without the coverted PageRank? With a steady flow of organic and direct load traffic now coming from our Page 3 position I discovered an alternative search engine that I had simply underestimated – Twitter!
With a growing number of followers and an increasing number of tweets I started to notice a change in the dynamic of our traffic sources – social media was now accounting for nearly 35% of our visitors nearly as much as what Google search was providing.
Even on days I was not tweeting I was getting a steady stream of traffic proving to me that people were using Twitter in much the same way we think of the traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, but even more importantly there is a community here that cannot be underestimated, it has become a valuable forum for sharing articles and ideas that the big three search engines don’t really have but the icing on the cake is yes Twitter really can drive targeted, consistent traffic to your website, even at times when Google does not.
Fast forward a couple of months and we have a consistent base of returning visitors, an ever increasing organic traffic source from Google and a healthy social media presence AND a solid position on Page 2 on Google search and we have even flirted with the bottom of Page 1 a couple of times but yes you guessed it my PageRank is still a big fat 0!!
Clare Coggins
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