Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

Although thousands of domains get reserved each day, there are also many that expire.  I’ve blogged before about domain names and how some are worth a lot of money, and also the “£1 a day from lots of sites” concept.

I’ve recently reserved some other domains which hopefully will fall into this category and they are:

Vonca.co.uk
IronmanComics.co.uk
OffersandDiscounts.co.uk
Snogged.co.uk
TheSpermBank.co.uk

At the moment, there are just holding pages up for these domains and content will be added shortly. The holding pages plus the links above will allow the sites to be picked up by Google, and the content and Adsense will get it ranked hopefully quickly for keywords.

Live by Google…. Die by Google…  With Google having 65% or more of the market share and often driving more than that percentage of traffic to websites, you need to make sure that if you do any big changes to your website, that it doesn’t have a detrimental affect on your website traffic, or you’ll loose your positioning on organic results, Adsense revenue etc.

Your website should have detailed stats to allow you to see visitors numbers and cross referencing should allow you quickly pickup on big changes in traffic.  Some people say that you shouldn’t check your stats every few hours, and I’d agree or you’ll start to get paranoid - but checking once or twice a day won’t do any harm.

I tried a little experiment on one of my sites which in theory should have boosted traffic, but infact it had the opposite affect.  The experiment was to change the Title Tag and Meta Description of the pages to all upper case text.  So when my site appeared in the search results, Google would have shown this text in upper case for my site.  Users would have seen the uppercase text and their eyes would have been drawn to it.

Within about 3-4 days of implementing the change (across all pages on the site), traffic dropped by about 40-50%.  I kept it going for about another 10 days just to ensure that the peak/trough wasn’t down to something like good weather and people being outside enjoying themselves and not using the internet as much.

When I reversed the change so that the Meta Description and Title Tag fields appeared in propercase, within about 10 days traffic went back to the same level as before - phew!

Although I’d lost Adsense revenue during that period from having less visitors, the leads to sales conversion rates actually went up - so I was getting better quality leads - just not as many.

So I think the moral of the story is that if you do big changes to your site that search engines would notice, then check your stats regulary to assess any negative impact on traffic to your site and act accordingly.

My background is in programming and when I have ideas, its extremely easy to sit down, start programming to find data, analyse data or do “something” without having to write a brief and get a programmer to do it for you - and saves on the cost too.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been extending my portfolio of domain names and the chance of registering a good domain name is quite rare as millions of domains (even .UK domains) have already been registered.  LLL or three letter domains are extremely scarce and even if they don’t make sense, e.g. UZK.com, then they can still go for money.

A lot of people reserve domain names, and loose interest or forget about them and when the domain comes up for expiry, they let it lapse and after a period of time, the domain gets deleted and is available to reserve again by anyone.

Existing domain names will have a history, potentially back-links from existing websites and other “factors” that can be of value to a new owner.  They may want to quickly get traffic and start earning money from it (see my article on lots of sites earning £1 per day).

Some registrars (e.g. Network Solutions, Nominet) provide services that allow people with a technical background to programatically do the same as what you can do to check domain names but hundreds of times per minute.

I spent a few hours this weekend developing some program code that uses Sockets to look for available domain names (I’m being deliberately vague with some details as I don’t want to give away too many secrets), and after finding a dictonary of words, I was able to scan over 26,000 terms/words in just under 30 minutes and see whether the domains were already registered and give me a report on what was available to register.  One word domains are often valuable and one of the ones I’ve just reserved is snogged.co.uk.

What I’m now able to do is to extend my little program to check for when existing domains expire and get deleted and then try and reserve those domains..  The technique is known as Drop Catching - effectively catching/reserving a domain as soon as its been dropped/deleted.

One problem I do have is not enough time to try all these things out, but with more domains being reserved each day, the number of good domains not already registered is diminishing fast and anything you can do to give yourself a headstart is got to be worth a try.