Google Gives Me The Benefit Of The Doubt

If I can start a new web site from scratch and find it in the top 10 results on Google less than two weeks later, does that mean Google trusts me more than the average web developer? Is there a reason Google tends to trust me more? And lastly, am I leveraging that trust?

The answers to those three questions are yes, yes and yes. Here’s why:

#1 - My domain names are very old
I registered my first domain name in 1996. Or rather, I had someone register it in my name for me. I literally had to get on the phone and ask someone if www.gu.com was available [which it was]. Back then there were no GoDaddy’s or other one-stop-shopping sites for domain names, etc. I used that domain for years and then sold it in 2000, but the others have been put to constant good use ever since. The other half of this coin is that I’ve bought and then kept a handful of domain names all of these years. Like cars, boats and motorcycles, I tend to buy and then keep what I’ve bought.

#2 - I’ve put my domains to good use
Let me repeat that: GOOD USE. Everyone knows about all of the sneaky, abusive and tricky crap online…ever since Google monetized clicks through Adsense, the internet has gone through a slow decline as the snake oil salesmen began beating a path to your computer screen. I bought domain names and built useful web sites around them, and I think there’s some little part of Google’s algorithms which take into account both who the registrant of a domain name is, and what that registrant is doing with it. Doing evil is easy and can bring short term gains, while doing good is harder but brings long term success [as long as you stick with it and put forth constant effort].

#3 - Constant effort
You can’t build a quality site and then just let it age like a fine wine…I have first hand experience making that mistake. One domain name I bought in 1997 [once Network Solutions made domain registration fairly easy], is www.nurseryman.com. I built a site around that domain name with the intention of using it to drum up freelance work as a web developer, but by plugging away at it for years, it grew into a 2000+ page destination of it’s own…all without me getting paid for it [although I did pick up some very nice clients because of it!]. The day Google introduced Adsense, I signed up immediately and at this point I have earned over $100,000 in Adsense revenue. At one point I was earning over $3000 per month, simply because I had put years worth of effort into www.nurseryman.com, and the gravy train just started rolling. My main failure was taking my eye off that web site and spending too much time on my freelance clients, and traffic and revenue on www.nurseryman.com eventually began to drop. Because of that failure, monthly revenue eventually dropped to as low as $500 per month. I’ve spent the past three years trying to clean up and rebuild what I had let slide.

#4 - I think Google knows who I am
I’m just guessing here, but I think Google gives the registrant of old domain names a significant amount of trust when that same person registers a new domain name. I bought www.up3d.com in 2005, pretty late in the domain game. However, the site started showing up well in search results far sooner than I had expected. What I had read about Google’s “sandbox” led me to believe it would be at least a year before I saw any decent results, but yet it only took a couple of months before I saw the results I was aiming for. And I think it was partly due to the fact that I linked from one of my well-established sites to this new site, even though the content of the two sites were not similar. I was basically following the principle of creating my own hub of sites, using the leverage of my trusted sites to jumpstart search results for my new site. My guess is that if person A owns multiple old domains and has done only good things on them for years whereas person B has no reputation yet, person A has a huge advantage over person B when it comes to buying a new domain and building a site around it. Reputations carry weight.

#5 - Recycle old domain names
I also recycle old domain names for new purposes. I operated as a freelance web developer for 12 years, using www.hitspring.com as my own web site since 2000. Once I quit freelancing, I let that domain name and web site age like wine [not a good idea, but at least the domain name had an unbroken history of use]. Once I found out how much I like to shoot and sell stock video, I recycled www.hitspring.com as my own independent stock video service. We’ll have to see how that goes, but so far the serps look good!

#6 - Create a hub of sites, but with caution
I leverage the trust of my established sites to help gain trust by the search engines in my new site by linking from old to new. Now, I know that linking to unrelated sites is generally frowned upon…but if it is done sparingly and conservatively , I think this strategy is a winner. Once a new site has developed some trust of it’s own accord, the hub link can safely be removed and the new site can stand on it’s own, gaining search results and traffic based on it’s own merit.

Most of the above methods for kickstarting a new site are now fairly common knowledge, but I began utilizing these methods almost by accident, learning and stumbling along the way. I still wonder about this one: if you buy a domain name from another party, one which has been registered for years, does that trust tend to transfer from the old domain owner to the new domain owner, or does Google tend to wipe the slate clean when a change of registrant takes place.

One thing to keep in mind is that I am a strong believer in “the long tail”, meaning I don’t compete for high value products and services in a highly competitive market. I somehow ended up focusing on a market which is decidedly low-tech and slow to adapt to the internet. While the resulting traffic is lower than in other target markets, there’s still plenty of money rolling around to keep me well fed.

In the end, I suspect I can get away with more and find success more quickly simply because I personally have [1] an old online reputation, [2] old domain names, and [3] web sites with longstanding track records. It also helps that I’m in a smaller market in which I can successfully compete for traffic.

Because of my reputation, Google gives me the benefit of the doubt. Do you have that?