Search Engine Optimization at SEO Empire

Status: Mission accomplished August 16 2009, it took 48 days.
Time Spent: 2 hours
Cost: $14.99
Google Pinged: June 25 2009
Site Indexed: June 27 2009
Site Top 10: #8 reached July 4 2009
Site No 1: Mission accomplished August 16 2009 - Successful search engine optimization indeed.

When looking at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I often get amazed by how many people search for terms related to Runescape. The other day I was playing around and I found out an astounding Global Monthly Search Volume of 74,000 for the term zezima with an Advertizer Competition not being at max. Zezima is the most known player of the game, and has made his name from obtaining the max level in all skills. A good opportunity for search engine optimization indeed.

Said and done, a domain (zezima.org) is purchased and the website being built.

Update 1: The site is now in place but under construction. It was indexed 3 days after being created and already at #12 for the desired keyword!

Status: In Progress
Time Spent: 5h
Cost: $210 (!)
Google Pinged: July 2 2009
Site Indexed: July 4 2009
Site Top 10: -
Site No 1: -

In the hunt for interesting domains, I have purchased runescape.gp and a Catalan domain, the later being a so called sponsored domain. The purchased domain name is great but there is a catch:

You can apply for a .cat domain if you belong to the Catalan cultural and linguistic community in the Internet. .CAT is a sponsored domain and domain name applications require validation by the .CAT Registry.

Being a foreigner living in Catalunya, I sent them my registration documents with the city, however making the site in catalan will be a challenge. I will link it when it’s ready.

The other domain, the real test subject in this post; runescape.gp is using the top domain for Guadeloupe. I had to send my passport to prove my identity and pay a stiff registration fee but everything seems to go well.

The interesting thing is that gp is the abbreviation for gold piece in Runescape and pretty much an acronym for money inside the game. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows a Global Monthly Search Volume of 2,400 for runescape gp and that should be high conversion traffic.

The question is how long it will take to rank for the term. Timetable is listed at the top of the post.

Status: In Progress - No PageRank Update Yet
Time Spent: 30 minutes
Cost: $150 (!)

The idea is simple - Make a website and let the Indian dudes loose submitting it to all directories there are to find. By far the quickest, and also the most expensive test so far. Each submission is cheap, but doing over a thousand, it adds up to some dough. 30 minutes to write some submission variations with good link texts and entering the credit card details. Not harder than that. Now it will be really interesting to see how this works out. Submissions are made over a period of a month and then the approval process takes another 0-3 months, spreading out the links over a nice span of time. Some people are afraid to submit their sites to too many directories so this experiment will find the definite answer and find out if their fears are justified or not.

The site? it’s a Joomla poker affiliate site called Real Poker. I’ll update this post when it ends up in the top 10 SERP and gets some Google Toolbar PageRank.

Status: In Progress - Updated with each Google toolbar PageRank update.
Time Spent: 8 hours so far.
Money Spent: $13.09 for 11 .info domains.

Update: The sites got their pagerank assigned before the pagerank update. I think this is because a few blogs linked to the feeder siter and that made Google put focus on them. However I just came to know that nofollow links make sites lose as much linking power as if they were normal links. This is making the backlinks to this page mess up the PR calculations completely. I deleted the back links from the node sites so they should now get higher numbers at the next toolbar pagerank update. The results so far: feeder sites all pagerank 2. All nodes except node A got pagerank 1. Node A pagerank 0.

I have set up a simple network according to the example network found at Wikipedia’s page on PageRank. PageRank is a number that may or may not be very important for search engine optimization but it’s still fun to conduct an experiment with it. Each site is a .info domain and in total there are 11 domains,each setup with a basic WordPress install. I even made the header colors of the kubrik template match the colors of the sites in the image below. Any outgoing links on these sites will be removed, set as nofollow, or, in case I want to use the sites linking power identical on all sites.

As shown above, The sites use the same structure as the classic PageRank example at Wikipedia. There are no links from outside the network to any sites other than the feeder sites. I am aware that the strength of the network should be regulated by the number of feeder sites used, not the linking power to the feeder sites, but I chose to do it this way in order to be practical. The links to the feeder sites are made as identical as possible, with each page linking to them linking to them all, in a random order. I never thought I would ask anybody not to link to my sites, but please don’t, since it would mess up the experiment.

Similar but rewritten posts are placed on all the sites in order to make them all unique to the eyes of Google. They all use the standard sitewide bloggroll links to link to each other. The sites will also use Google Sitemaps and ping Google so that they will all be indexed at about the same time.

Since the Google toolbar PageRank is split into only 10 values, of which only 0-5 are realistic to get, each toolbar PageRank will not give a lot of data. However if I get proper links to the feeder domains and observe the experiment over a few PR updates, I may get useful data in order to make a guess on the logarithmical base that Google uses.

My humble guess is that with no inlinks to the feeder sites, nodes A, D, E and F would get a PageRank of 1 and nodes B and C would get  a PageRank of 2. Twith the logarithmic base being 5, an increase in inlinks to the feeder sites making them PageRank 1 should then push the link power upwards and make A, D, E and F into PageRank 2 and B and C would become PageRank 3. However I don’t think the PageRank works exactly as in the theory described at Wikipedia. I suspect that Node C will get much less power than Node B, compared to the image above. This is because mathematically, a site would pass on all its link power in a single link and if there are two links, it would be split in half. In my humble opinion I think that it’s more likely Google values both links at perhaps 70% of the single one, making them more valuable in combination than the single link.

Here are the initial links to the feeder domains: Feeder 1, Feeder 2, Feeder 3, Feeder 4, Feeder 5

Status: Completed Successfully - The domain got the PR2 back after 2 weeks!
Time Spent: 3 hours
Cost: $10.19 domain name purchase.

At empire-std.com, I have made a website on an old expired domain that used to be registered by a chinese company. It still has 11 inlinks according to Alexa (Another link will be added to Alexa’s count thanks to this post) and supposedly a PageRank 2.

At the time of writing it is not yet indexed and displays “no PageRank information available).