Banking On The Brand

It’s surprising how many people revisit a site by typing in the name of the site in search engines. And not just once or twice, but revisit many times. Some just type the name without the .com and some type even the entire domain like www.wordpress.com and visit. Why can’t they type that on the location bar? Beats me.

Anyway, so I used the name of one of my websites and did a search on Google. My website shows up first. No surprise. But what surprised was there were some web pages created with that combination of keywords and offering something that has nothing to do with my website.

That’s how it occurred to me that when a new website is started and if it’s reasonably successful, then one can build additional pages with the combination of keywords in that domain and hope to get some extra traffic. What makes this technique work well is

a) A domain name is a unique name (yeah, there is .com, .org, .net etc). So, if someone recently got that domain, chances are no one used that word(s) much.
b) Search engines display only one or two pages from a given domain on the results page. So, even if the top one or two goes to the original website, subsequent results will be from other websites. So, that increases the probability of your own website.

Now, while I found this interesting technique, I can’t comment on the effectiveness. Remember that tricking someone to click on a website is not going to be useful if what you offer and what the user is looking for are different.

PageRank & Quid Pro Quo

No, I am not talking here about exchanging links.

What if your receiving a job is dependent on you providing a link to the company’s website?

I was doing some research about a company to figure out where it was getting the inbound links. You should be knowing this can be easily done using the “link:” syntax on Google. What I found was that some of the links were coming from blogs and those blogs were of people from India. The company that I was investigating is a US company. Why will a blog that talked about some Indian movie contain a link to this company’s website? That’s why I visited the blog and looked around a bit. And finally I realized that the blog belongs to a guy who is an employee of this company in it’s India center!

Now, my post title might be over hyped a bit. For all you know, the guy might be just unknowingly passing on the pagerank to his employer’s website. But these days PageRank seems to lose it’s value completely. Those who know what it is have stopped passing it to others. Those who don’t know, passing it unnecessarily. And not knowing what to do, Google keeps changing the algorithms every few months, potentially introducing regressions or providing guidance which again is only followed excessively by people who know about it, and blissfully ignored by the rest.

In this context, let me give a specific example. Killerstartups.com reviews about 15 sites a day. Given the explosion of the web, with potentially thousands of websites sprouting up each day, a handful of carefully reviewed and picked websites by Killerstartups maintainers should definitely deserve a bit of “vote”? But killerstartups.com only thinks that these websites are worth mentioning as killer startups but doesn’t think that they are worth passing the pagerank! Irony. Isn’t it?