How do you see the future and how are you moving forward?
In the past, it was easy to buy an EMD on a non premium domain extension, throw a quick site on it and then buy links like they were going out of fashion and easily rank. The quality of links didn't even matter - blogroll links, homepage links, footer links, links on dropped domains, links on off topic sites. All you needed was an account on a few spammy webmaster forums and you were sorted.
Back then, Google wasn't placing any real weight on preferring 'brands' in their rankings. They were also not really penalising people for crappy linking. Sure you'd see some penalties, but they were few and far between. They also weren't using any user metrics in their ranking algorithms. Or if they were it was so insignificant that they might as well not have bothered. And the exact match benefit was massive. Buying links was extremely simple and very very easy to scale up with a budget.... all of these things combined meant that it was now childs play to get a site ranking for a phrase of your choice. You just needed to get your hands on the exact match domain. Or rather 'an' exact match domain, you certainly didn't need the .com or the .co.uk. Picking up the .org.uk or .net for buttons worked equally well.
If you had the budget, it would have been relatively simple for 1 or 2 people to rank 20 different EMD's in completely different niches, all unrelated and chosen solely because they were high traffic and/or well paying affiliate programs. Anyone who's been online and in this biz between say 2009 - 2012 and that didn't have 100's of thousands of pounds in affiliate earnings passing through their hands is either an idiot, or wasn't taking it seriously at all. It was just so easy to rank one site, profit, roll the proceeds up into a slightly better emd, and rinse and repeat. You literally couldn't fail with an exact match domain and a link buying budget.
Today, that business model is completely finished. The days of 1 bloke sitting in his pants at home alone and ranking in 20 different high value niches is long gone, and its never coming back. All of the things like Branding, EMD benefit being slaughtered, WMT penalties flying all over the place, etc simply destroyed the business model of ranking crap sites on EMD's. Panda and Penguin were the final nails in the coffin of the sloppy, no value add web master.
I was as guilty as anyone else of abusing all of the above, probably more so. But what can you do... if you'd built a high quality site in 2011 and tried to win on content quality alone you'd have bankrupted yourself as all your rankings and income would have been taken by the 16 year old living down the street, with a site built on a free WP template, content written by an Indian, and giving himself RSI clicking stuff in his text link ads account.
So now, the game has moved on.
If google wants to rank brands, then the obvious answer is become a brand. I'm not suggesting you need to become a multi million pound entity, but you do need to at least be generating type in traffic, brand searches, loyal users, etc.
If Google want to penalise people for shit links, then the obvious answer is to stop building them and build quality links instead. The guy who wanted to build a great site in 2011 but kept getting overtaken by spammers, actually has a chance to thrive today.
If Google want to penalise people for building 100's or 1000's of auto generated spam pages, then the obvious answer is stop doing it. In the past there was money to be made spamming up loads of pages with 'xxxx voucher codes' from the one website. Now if you don't have the link equity you're extremely unlikely to pull that off. You're going to get wiped out very quickly. Today, if an individual page isn't adding much/anything of value then you need to do one of two things... add value or delete the page.
Right now, I think the only real way to succeed is to build a small number (maybe even 1) of high quality sites that have a legitimate use to end users. Work on generating very good user metrics. Does your site offer any real reason for users to repeatedly come back? If not, fix that asap. You need to look at stuff like offline advertising, which can inflate the number of people searching for your brand or typing in your url. Run competitions, give stuff away, work on link baits, etc.
Obviously none of the above is cheap, easy or quick. I think a lot of people who made money in years past are now going to be forced out of the game as they don’t have the skills or the resources to compete any more. It seems some people don’t want to evolve though. Anyone trying to develop a 5 word product name EMD today is retarded. Anyone trying to sell a 5 word product name EMD to some other sucker for 4 figures is bordering on being a scammer. They’re basically doing the online equivalent of charging an old lady 20 grand to clean her gutters. Yes, technically the victim agreed to the sale but they’ve been fucked in the ass because the seller knows full well the ‘customer’ is going to lose their shirt on the deal… they’re just having them over to line their own pockets. You only need to scan down the for sale sub forums in Acorn and you can see dozens that are completely undevelopable as you simply can’t do so without losing a pile of cash in the proceeds. The sellers all know this but they’re just choosing to dump then on someone else.
Look at the amount of great domains that could have been developed years ago and weren’t. Carinsurance.co.uk is a great example… the owners greed got in the way and now he’s stuck with a big massive turd that he can do nothing with. If an end user wanted it they’d have bought it years ago. They obviously didn’t, and won’t. Yet it can’t be ranked as an affiliate now. If it had been developed in 2007 I reckon the owner would have made 10 million or more in affiliate commissions. The site would have been penalised last year, but he’d have made so much more money than he could ever have sold the domain for, that that wouldn’t actually matter. Now its in a weird situation of no end users want it, and no affiliates can develop it. Its effectively worthless, unless you consider the ponzi / greater fool aspect of flipping it on to some other mug. The transition period of emd’s no longer working like they did was particularly painful for me, I lost a quarter million quid in one single transaction because of that.
Anyway I’ve sort of strayed from the original question :lol: Feel free to ask any questions but if they’re like the one above of what I’m working on now, I’m going to pass on those.
