It’s no surprise that domaining and domain development has had significant changes in 2011 and domainers have to adjust rapidly to keep their revenues.
Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm, some are announced publicly, like the Panda update and some are never shared with the public.
Back in early 2000’s, when I was developing websites for myself, I had one goal in mind from start to finish and that was to get lots of “traffic”. Best traffic was the search engine traffic which is free. In fact, I don’t recall me paying for any traffic or banner ads or even adwords. I’ve used adwords before but have not spent much with them.
The key was to develop websites with thousands of pages and put the SEO to work. Yes, I have used the best possible SEO from early on, which is the mod-rewrite to make all your urls contain description of the page or title, see my blog as an example.
Search engines loved it, they would index thousands of pages and never complained. And I’d get instant traffic, within a month and domain didn’t even matter much.
However, my biggest mistake was that I didn’t built the sites for users/customers, although, they were nice sites but had little original content and did not offer a unique service to the users.
While this worked for number of years as a passive income, I saw my sites constantly drop revenue and traffic.
Folks, 2011 has changed domaining and development. Now, I have one goal in mind when I build sites and that is to make it the user and NOT the search engines. I need to make sure the users will come back after their first visit. Therefore, site has to offer something unique, something that would benefit the user. And don’t worry, if the users come back, search engines will fallow them.
