I have been looking into PageRank because the topic of fake pagerank has come up over the last little while for us. While it’s easy to find a PHP script that returns PageRank, I have found it pretty challenging to find one that tells you if PageRank has been faked. In the middle of my search (that spanned a couple days), I realized that Google updated their PageRanks yesterday. Google does a massive update of PageRanks every three months or so (beginning of every quarter perhaps?), and when they do it, they recalculate all the PageRanks reported by the toolbar and other PageRank checkers.
So, why am I reporting this? Well, it appears that many of the sites that I came across in my search that reported to have an inflated, fake PageRank have had their PageRank downgraded, most of them to -1 (meaning, it’s not even reported to have a PageRank, as opposed to a PageRank of 0). Is fake PageRank a thing of the past? Only time will tell. One forum I came across had a comment to the effect of “as long as Google keeps finding our blackhat techniues (i.e. faking PageRank), we’ll find ways to get around them”.
Can anybody else verify that Fake PageRank is now dead?
An important part of domaining is using parked pages to get some revenue from domains before they are sold. Domain parking is a huge industry - the leading parking sites are probably Parked and Sedo, but there are many other players in the business that don’t accept newbies. We will review the parking companies in a future post.
However, we have tried a different tactic. We had a few of our sites on Domain Embarking - who basically create a microsite for you - and after we shifted them to Sedo, we realized that we were actually getting some traffic from some of our .info domains (DE doesn’t give the best stats, but we now know, after the fact, that yahoo had given us a bunch of backlinks, since domainembarking sites point to each other). We didn’t go back to Domain Embarking because we found it quite slow and we weren’t making too much money anyway, but we liked the concept of creating a microsite rather than just a page with ads. So, with this in mind, we looked for a script that would allow us to park our domains on our servers with some content - this way if a search engine bans a certain service’s DNS servers, we’re unaffected.
We settled on a script and we’ve tried it on a few of our sites. Check them out:
We have a number of other domains we’re trying these on too, and since we have Google Analytics on them all, we’ll be able to tell you the affect that it had on our traffic. If you’re looking for sites like ours, try Steady Niche.
Are you trying other parking tactics? We’d love to hear from you about what you’re using.
We’re excited for Google’s new browser, called Google Chrome. It’s supposed to be launched tomorrow, as per the gGoogle blog. W’er going to try it out and blog about it for sure - let us know what you think via our comments! Go Gooooogle!
Well, we are ready to start publishing our purchases. We plan to buy a variety of domains, not in any particular niche. Since we’re newbies, we figured, as most intelligent people would, what makes a good domain. We’re not sure our analysis was correct, but we figured that if a domain contains high paying keywords, it can’t be too bad of a domain.
In that vein, we began to look for good keywords to use for domains from top keyword lists. We found that many of the paid “top keyword” or keyword reserach services are crap - however we found a few that we won’t disclose - oh, come on, you can’t expect us to tell you everything! So, given that we were looking for high paying keywords, we looked to see what domains were available with the words “high paying keywords” - as we suspected, most would be gone. At this point, we’re not sure of the affect of dashes on domain traffic, so we’re going to jump into domains that have dashes - good idea? Only time will tell. I suspect that two domains, one with dashes and one without, with all things being equal (data on their sites), the one with more quality links will win out. So, we figured we’d give the domain high-paying-keywords.com a try.
Now that we were unafraid of domains with dashes and we were looking for relatively high paying keywords, we went a bit crazy on some domains - we’ll be able to tell long-term if these were worth purchasing, but we suspect they’ll have some value in the future, even if they are .info domains! :) We purchased:
That’s all we got this time around. Keep apprised for our future purchases!
The Two Dummies have been in business for almost three years - we started off dabbling in affiliate programs, directories, informational sites and some consulting, which has eventually led us to this blog. We have also been buying and developing domains for three years, but our initial intent was not to sell the domains we purchased - we now are active sellers as well (so feel free to contact us if you are interested in any of the domains we blog about).
We have about 200 domains aand we’re still adding to our treasure chest, slowly but surely. Let me tell you - once you hit about 100 domains, you’ll invariably forget about some of the domains no matter how good your memory is. You forget if some were developed, you forget where they’re parked and how much money they made you. We host our domains on multiple servers and parking programs - we’re still testing out the best methods of monitizing and we’d be ecstatic if this blog was used as a forum of sorts to get feedback from other webmasters and domainers out there about best practices in the domaining world.