Toluu

Web Promotion Service

A blog on web promotion tools and techniques.

Investing in Domains: revenue thru Adsense - How much and whenNovember 10

Investing in Domains in these days more profitable than putting the money in bonds, stocks or any other financial instruments. Of couse, this is November 2008 and the markets are quite upset. My view is that they will come back to almost normal in a month or two. In the mean time, Domain Development is a very good alternative.

Since I started DomainGrower.com I am trying to predict how a domain will perform, depending on its name, the intended market, and the investment the owner is ready to do. Every domainer wants to make sure the investment will be highly profitable, and they ask about Google Ranking, Traffic, Adsense revenue, maintenance cost, increased domain-site value and finally, profit.

I am not able at this point to provide exact projections or a formula. However, I have now a pretty good idea of how the domain can grow and how much will return.

Very good domains convert visits into sales at 1% or more. This is quite unusual, but sometimes we see it. When your domain does not sell any particular item, just adsense clicks, the conversion rate can be 0.5% and be very good. It is also important to assess the quality and quantity of the traffic. If your visitors are real estate investors ready to buy expensive property, the clicks will be very valuable. Maybe U$D 40 or 50.

On the other hand, if they are poor Hispanic teenagers looking for free music or porn, their clicks will be much less valuable, maybe $ 0.03.

My advice would be

What a web promoter learns from a Trojan site infectionAugust 27

I noted yesterday that the visits to a website of mine had multiplied 5 fold in a day. After feeling some satisfaction on the success of my promotion efforts, I noticed something unusual: the requested subjects had nothing to do with my main theme, but with foods and drinks. And when you visited one of those pages, you were redirected to a malware site.

I entered my sites by FTP and I found many offending pages that some bot had placed there. And when I say many, I mean about 5000 files in dozens of directories in several sites accross 3 servers… Many hours were needed to clean up.

Of course I had to clean my PC from malware, apparently coming from a mailing software that I had downloaded 2 weeks ago.

The offending pages were quite complex, and all leaded to an exploit page that showed an infection scene, with strong advice to buy their antivirus, at www.adware-spyware-removal.co.cc. I am not sure if that page succeeded in loading malicious code into my Windows. They can have one inocent-looking page to enter thru a hole in your Windows, and another to sell you antivirus. In any case, I do not advice to buy anything from them. It is like paying ransom for your computer, and also giving the offenders much broader access to your system.

I saved a few of the offending files for exam. They use obfuscated Javascript to redirect traffic to their site. Something like:

script language=”javascript”>function not(kf,cybf){if(!cybf){cybf=�

Results of the 3rd Positioning ExperimentAugust 27

Once completed the “Familia Raimundez” positioning experiment, results were available in just 10 days, what makes them very interesting and convenient compared to those times when one had to wait 45 days for an indexation cycle.
The results matched the previous ones, as some domains seem to be penalized in an arbitrary way. And I say in an arbitrary way because there is no obvious sign in the website for it to be penalized for: no black hat techniques, no links to questionable sites, no keyword abuse or obvious content duplication.
One of the evaluated domains was a client’s, that had bad ranking results with related and non-related keywords. The domain history, before we took part in it, had some abuse elements (keyword repetition within metatags), as we detected in http://Archive.org. Therefore, it is hard to get good results until the domain is completely transformed, we ask Google for forgiveness, and wait a few months.
An interesting fact was that one of the well positioned domains of the experiment had received two relevant pages, instead of just one. This enhances the “theme” theory, meaning, if a website is focused on one predominant subject, it can rank better than a website containing different pages.
Another observation is that websites that will rank better show up in the search engine results one or two days before the rest. This allows a results’ double check.
We also noted that one word indexation is a superficial in

Support for purchasers of our GGG softwareAugust 18

The GGG (Great Gateway Generator) project was born in 2002 as a gateway page generator. Over the years there were 2 spinoff softwares: Keyword Thief (a keyword retrieving spider) and Synonymizer (a content generator). There are also some beta-stage PHP scripts that complemented the main product: Octopus Link Quadrangulator, Search Engine Optimized FAQ System, and Delinker.

Over the years we collected several testimonials from customers who succeeded in improving their SE rankings using GGG, and we used it to provide service to our customers. Several buyers requested special features and appointed custom programming from us. Most of those improvements were incorporated into the products.

We suddenly realized that the gateway pages WERE NOT the reason for the good ranking results obtained with GGG… Something else was, and the links had something to do with it. Thus, the product should might be renamed from Gateway Generator into “Optimized Site Generator”, “Website Ranking Enhancer” or something like that. The new name would also reflect the fact that the product did not rely on Black Hat techniques, like gateway pages.

The many changes in the Google algorithm have not affected the ranking power of GGG. However, there is a need in a strategy change. Very large projects are no longer acceptable, because the sudden increase in pages and links is seen as unnatural by the Search Engines. Slow but permanent site growth is now required. In GGG, that

Results of the Antolinez Family ExperimentAugust 5

In only 10 days I got results for the experiment that tried to detect Goog penalization. It turned out that 2 domains are penalized with a -20 fall.

The other result refers to the extent of indexation. It seems that penalized sites receive only superficial indexation. For instance, if a site is well indexed, all the word strings will be indexed, and searching for phrases within quotes will find them. If the site is badly indexed due to penalization, only individual words will be indexed, and the strings will not be detected. Interesting…

The other result is that penalization covers all subjects, even those unrelated to the main one. For instance, a domain penalized for duplicate content will be penalized for content that has nothing to do with the abused content.

However, I am not making a difference between penalization types, which probably exists. In the next test I will include one domain that was penalized for duplicates and other penalized for linking to bad neighbourhood. Let’s see if the penalizations are similar.

I am now working on a new experiment (3rd of my controlled series) using more domains, mixing penalized with healthy domains.  

On the other hand, I am analyzing the directories I use for submission with reciprocal link exchange. It seems that some of them are considered bad neighbours, maybe because they include black hat sites, or they sell links, or whatever. My analysis includes only existing factors, because