Calling all gurus: Analysis of .com with 50K+ linkpop

[Paddy]

Calling all Gurus: What's the Low Down with Linkpop Domains?

* About to purchase .com with 50,000+ linkpop shown at MarketLeap for xxxx

* Trying to find out more about linkpop, appreciate all feedback thx.

Questions:

1. Can the links "drop off" in mass? A few here and there is fine, but can it go from 50K links to 10k over a few months for whatever reason?

2. Does Page Ranking affect link popularity at all, or vice versa? (The name is PR3 predicted PR6 at iwebtool.com)

3. The name has had a few owners with different sites showing at archive.org- if i buy and build a new site again, what implications does this have on the search engines/linkpop/PR ?

4. Are there any other critical things to look out for in assessng a linkpop domain?

--------------------------------------------

Are there any basic things to avoid to prevent getting sandboxed?

Presumably unethical SEO practices will be a danger, but if the site is just a basic "adsense" site with quite static content, will this be penalised?

If so, does putting a RSS / news feed in the main page sort this out?



Thanks again for all feedback.

 

[Peter]

Link pop will not suddenly drop off unless there is something fishy going on. Check what it used to be and see if the incoming links tie in with it's previous content. Also check what sort of sites are linking to it. Links will naturally drop off if the subject matter of the site changes, as and when webmasters notice the change they will delete them.

Search engines like google do not think much of incoming links that are not deemed relevant ie that the sites do not have anything in common. For example a site about music would not gain much from a site linking to it that is about cars.

Regarding the pr ensure that all looks genuine, ensure that no dodgy business is going on for example make sure that google's cache looks similar to the site itself (also worth making your browser identify itself as google when browsing the site see if you notice any difference, there are firefox extensions that do this)

 

[Paddy]

Link pop will not suddenly drop off unless there is something fishy going on. Check what it used to be and see if the incoming links tie in with it's previous content. Also check what sort of sites are linking to it. Links will naturally drop off if the subject matter of the site changes, as and when webmasters notice the change they will delete them.

Search engines like google do not think much of incoming links that are not deemed relevant ie that the sites do not have anything in common. For example a site about music would not gain much from a site linking to it that is about cars.

Regarding the pr ensure that all looks genuine, ensure that no dodgy business is going on for example make sure that google's cache looks similar to the site itself (also worth making your browser identify itself as google when browsing the site see if you notice any difference, there are firefox extensions that do this)

Thx for your f/back.

>>> How do we check if a domain has been SandBoxed by Google?

 

[Peter]

If it is sandboxed then it should not show up if you do site:domain.com as a search.

 

[Amnezia]

If it is sandboxed then it should not show up if you do site:domain.com as a search.

thats not true, sandboxed domains are added to the index they just dont rank.

Thx for your f/back.

>>> How do we check if a domain has been SandBoxed by Google?

it would have a pagerank of 0 if it had been sandboxed

 

[Paddy]

thats not true, sandboxed domains are added to the index they just dont rank. it would have a pagerank of 0 if it had been sandboxed

Are there any basic things to avoid to prevent getting sandboxed?

Presumably unethical SEO practices will be a danger, but if the site is just a basic "adsense" site with quite static content, will this be penalised?

If so, does putting a RSS / news feed in the main page sort this out?

 

[Peter]

it would have a pagerank of 0 if it had been sandboxed

That is certainly not true some sites never achieve a pr but get ranked.

If a site dramatically changes it get's sandboxed and 1 thing that happens then is that it does not show in google AT ALL

 

[Paddy]

If a site dramatically changes it get's sandboxed

So if you've just bought a strong name with a weak site and wanna develop a new site, what's the best way to do it?

 

[Amnezia]

That is certainly not true some sites never achieve a pr but get ranked.

If a site dramatically changes it get's sandboxed and 1 thing that happens then is that it does not show in google AT ALL

i didnt say that that all site with PR0 were sand boxed did i?

I said that a sandboxed site will have a PR of 0 thats not the same thing now is it.

If a site dramtically changes it still remains in the index it just doesnt show up in the SERPs. The only way to remove a site from the index is via robots.txt exclusion or to get it banned (trust me i know about this).

Are there any basic things to avoid to prevent getting sandboxed?

Presumably unethical SEO practices will be a danger, but if the site is just a basic "adsense" site with quite static content, will this be penalised?

If so, does putting a RSS / news feed in the main page sort this out?

there are serveral ways of avoiding the sandbox.

1) build a site that is completely original that does not compete with any other sites for keywords. Say for example you developed a brand called "holikikkik" no other site would competing for this keyword so its unlikely you would get sand boxed.

2) create a site on the subdomain of a very old domain and set the page modified headers back, google loves age.

there are other ways but they could result in your site being banned and we wouldn't want that.

 

[-db-]

As mentioned by others, I would check what type of content the previous site had, and who was linking to it. This is very important because all traffic is not equal.

Personal blog sites for example. I've purchased blog domains with 50K links and good traffic, only to see them dry up quickly once the person's blog is gone. I've also purchased blog domains where traffic kept coming but nobody would click or purchase anything.

Needless to say, I no longer purchase personal blog domains for traffic.

*Note: I made the distinction of saying personal blog domains, so not to be confused with domains that were blog companies or services providing space to bloggers.

 

[Paddy]

2) create a site on the subdomain of a very old domain and set the page modified headers back, google loves age.

What does this mean exactly, how do you set the page modified headers back?

I would check what type of content the previous site had, and who was linking to it.

I am using marketleap, iwebtool and odditysoftware. Also checking "site:www.domain.com and link:www.domain.com at the SEs"... are there any better tools or methods?

 

[Amnezia]

if you look at the standard server header response from a static HTML page you will see that most pages return a last-modified variable. This is the variable that search engines use to determin the age of a page. One of the tricks i have found recently is when i launch a site i set the last-modified variable to an older date on some of my sites pages (not all of the pages and definately not the index page). Obivously you can only set this date back as far as the day the domain was registered (other wise your site is gonna look false). This is why an old domain is great, you can set the dates back several years.

When google spiders your site for the first time its finds several "old" pages and thinks that your site has been around a long time. Google like a site with age, it trusts it and therefore is unlikely to put it in the sandbox.

if you do a search on google you can find how to set the last modified date for stactic and dynamic pages.

 

[Paddy]

if you look at the standard server header response from a static HTML page you will see that most pages return a last-modified variable. This is the variable that search engines use to determin the age of a page. One of the tricks i have found recently is when i launch a site i set the last-modified variable to an older date on some of my sites pages (not all of the pages and definately not the index page). Obivously you can only set this date back as far as the day the domain was registered (other wise your site is gonna look false). This is why an old domain is great, you can set the dates back several years.

When google spiders your site for the first time its finds several "old" pages and thinks that your site has been around a long time. Google like a site with age, it trusts it and therefore is unlikely to put it in the sandbox.

if you do a search on google you can find how to set the last modified date for stactic and dynamic pages.

Thanks Amnezia