I’ve been writing entries in this blog for a little over a week. If I had started the blog on a new URL, what I’ve written would be lost in cyberspace somewhere. But I just got a call asking me to edit a blog entry because the details I wrote up from the “Search and Branding” session at Search Engine Strategies weren’t ones the organization in question wanted published publicly.

The amazing bit is how they found me - according to them when they entered [search and branding] in Google our page was the #2 result. I think part of this is Google’s personalized search algorithm, ’cause while it did show up as #2 for me when I did [search branding organization name], it was #10 when I did [search and branding], and a lowly #88 when I did [search branding].

Still, a week and a half old blog ranking #10 for a term like [search and branding] is actually pretty excellent given that the phrase is somewhat competitive and our domain didn’t have “search” or “branding” as keywords associated with our domain or any inbound links to the post in question.

So, what’s our “secret sauce”? It’s simple - our domain was registered March 22, 1999. Yes, the page title was exactly “Search and Branding” (which was an exact match for the search query), but we’re talking about getting into Google’s main index and getting onto page 1 of the SERPs in about a week… It’s not just the page title. Nor is it due to general link building - we have relatively few links (though some of the ones we do have are from well-trusted sites).

What kills me is when I see clients throw away the power of their established domains. Just yesterday I was with a client who had registered a new domain for a new service they’re establishing. The client’s home page used to have a PageRank of 8, but then they broke things into a series of subdomains and now their highest PageRank is a 7. The new site they’re establishing is for one of their core businesses (not a joint venture or anything that would require a separate site) and while it will do a lot better than if a random person started the domain (because their established sites will link to it), it won’t do as well as if they made it part of their primary domain.

In the past we’ve made the same mistake - we put up img2d.com for our product IMG2D. While it’s got great PageRank (6) for a “new” site, the bottom line is that it will do better in the SERPs (when we finally get around to marketing it) if we move it over to slicksurface.com. So we did exactly that this past week - we put a 301 permanent redirect in place to a page on slicksurface.com.

If you have an older domain - make the most of it.

[Follow-up (later that day): Curiously, modifying the post on Search and Branding (as per the request by the presenter) seems have had the result of dropping the page from the main Google index, as well as dropping the related "labels" page from the index. Curiously, the seorountable.com article on the same session was also edited but remains in the SERPs (then again, it has a very different history and profile than our domain). It will be curious to watch to see how quickly our blog post gets back in the main index and if the ranking of the seoroundtable.com page changes at all after their edit.]

[Follow-up (the next day): The page is back in the index - back where it was the prior day - #10 for 'search and branding'. Not sure why it dropped out for <24 hours, but it's back. Incidentally, the related labels page was back this morning...]

Tags: Blogging, domain-names
Categories: Domains, PageRank, SEO/SEM, Search Engines