We started this project several months ago. It’s a complex software problem, and I’ll admit we didn’t think about mundane things like a domain name until September. We had a brainstorming session and came up with several options. Surprisingly, Promote-My-Site.com was available. We figured something like that should have already been taken, so we grabbed it.
The site has been up with minimal content since October. We started putting articles up at the beginning of November, and we’ve promoted them in the relevant social networks to drive some traffic and some link love. The site has been doing remarkably well on non-SERP traffic.
I pretty much expected that Google would index us in a few days. My experience has been that once you hit the social networks, the googlebot is not far behind.
We got zero love. Nadda. Zilch.
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So we checked Yahoo! Site Explorer. Hmm, lots of incoming links there. But they’re all from Dave Naylor a Uk SEO. I’ve been a fan of Dave for a long time, but I couldn’t believe he was linking to us….
So we took a look at the wayback machine and we found that this was pretty much a sponsored listings page. Great. We bought a spam domain.
We’ve started the process with Google to ask them pretty please to consider us for the index because we’re the new domain owner and our site has real content now. Whether or not we’ll hit the SERPs in time for launch is anyones guess.
But I’ve got a question for the SEO Community. We’re building a toolset that will be useful for SEOs working with Web 2.0 promotion. You’re our target customer. We figure that our marketing message is pretty focused and that we can get to our potential customers without going through Google. The beauty of social networking is that you really don’t need the SERPs to get your word out.
On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t buy a suit from a tailor wearing cutoff jeans. It seems our options are to find a less memorable domain name and work from that, or to just gut it out and see if we get any Google love.
So here’s the question for you SEO experts: Assuming you like the product and think it’s a good value, would you do business with a company that couldn’t get its pages into the Google Index?
