Search Engines and Burnt Gonads
Posted On: 2012-06-15
Well it has been another crazy week here in our mainstream business. Some of it has been crazy good ... quite a bit of it has been crazy frustrating ... and a little bit of it has been crazy bad.
We've had work coming out our ears ... we've had clients who simply refuse to read simple instructions and then complain bitterly when things don't work ... and we've even scored a point or two against a content thief ... and you've got to love that!
Search engines ... it's way harder than you think
Yesterday Steve and I were chatting with an old friend from back in the days when I ran a link list and you didn't have to do too much to rank for some great terms.
Back then my link list didn't rank well for any one-word terms but it sure nailed a very good two-word term and it produced some great returns considering how little time and effort I invested in it. I still look back and wonder how I ever got it to rank for that term but then search engine optimisation wasn't the science that it is today.
And an article was released earlier this week that emphasises just how hard it is to rank well these days. The author has been around for almost as long as I have and he's worked in search engine optimisation for most of that time so he knows what he's writing about.
Back when I had great results you could cover the whole topic in two or three pages that you could dash off in an hour but not now. The article that appeared this week took far longer than an hour to write and covered 34 pages ... even more when you add in the diagrams and images. Two to three pages took five minutes to read ... I'm still trying to find time to read 34 pages.
Ranking well in the search engines was easy ... once ... but these days it's a lot harder than you might think.
An easy way to enter mainstream?
On Sunday morning I had a light bulb moment about something I could do with a website that I had built years ago so I went to have a look at the back-end just to refresh my memory. I couldn't access it ... my username and password didn't work and that's when the penny dropped. I didn't own it any more.
The front of the site still looked almost exactly the way it looked the last time I had been to it but it wasn't my site any more. I had missed renewing the domain and someone else had grabbed it and lifted all the content from the WayBack Machine. The only thing that was different from when I owned the site was the account number in the Adsense ads.
A quick chat with the new owner's host ... the completion of a DMCA take-down request ... 24 hours for the host to review my request and the site was gone ... gone ... gone.
Do you think I was too tough? Do you think I should have left the new owner to go on using my content? My partner thinks I wasn't tough enough ... his suggestion was that I write to Google and get her Adsense account canned for using stolen content.
Actually I wasn't surprised to see what this person had done ... I've seen a lot of people who should know better suggesting exactly what this person had done as an easy way of getting into mainstream and making money without much effort. And it is ... but ...
I have no problem with someone snapping up a domain name that I was too dumb to renew and it's a great way of getting some wonderful domain names ... but that's all you should take. Just because you now own the domain name doesn't mean that you have any right to take the content too.
So if you've been thinking of snapping up some old domain names that people have let go ... and then grabbing their content as an easy way of jumping into mainstream ... or even using that technique to extend your reach in mainstream ... you might like to think again.
As I said, there's no problem grabbing an expired domain but if you also grab the content you just might find that Google suddenly shuts down your Adsense account because the person you took all that from wasn't as nice as I am.
The old owner may be even nastier than my partner and do what Steve was just muttering about. What would your bandwidth bill look like if your little mainstream site was iframed onto something that was scoring hundreds of thousands of hits a day?
Yep ... it's an easy way to get into mainstream but it's also an easy way to get the equivalent of a blowtorch applied to your gonads ... and you wouldn't want that to happen to you ... would you?