Improving a domain is not just about SEO

December 3, 2009 | Posted by Sapphire

In recent weeks, I detailed the moves I’d made to improve this domain. Most of those moves had to do with SEO: setting up for better inbounds, setting up for better ranking keywords and recovering page rank – the last of which, of course, is strictly a Google thing. During the first couple of weeks I set out to do this, I saw some improvements in how Google was listing this domain in the SERPs. I increased the sales value of the domain from a handshake to several hundred dollars by the most conservative metric. The improvements in Bing and Yahoo stuck, but the ones in Google dwindled – somewhat. Not enough to complain, but enough to make me go “hmm.” Then I figured it out.

Content, content, content

For the first couple of weeks, I was writing new, link-worthy articles and posting them every four days. Some were about rehabilitating the domain, others were about dealing with sploggers, yet others identified sploggers I had found stealing my content so that any of you who have SEO blogs could check them out and make sure your content wasn’t being stolen as well.

While I was putting out that content, Google was ranking me a little better, even though Webmaster Tools still shows a lot of pages I removed about a month ago, and lots of html mistakes I fixed weeks ago. Despite Google not updating all that, it was ranking me better and sending me more traffic.

All of this suggests one thing: that while Bing and Yahoo liked the SEO improvements, Google was more impressed with the new content. Google takes a very long time to recognize SEO improvements, possibly because they can be so superficial. This also explains why some sites rank highly even though they’re violating Google’s webmaster rules: because they keep pumping out content.

It’ll be a long time before I have good new inbounds and better pagerank. In a lot of ways, rebuilding a domain is harder than just starting over with a new domain. But the value of rehabilitating domains rather than just buying new ones is the age of the domain, which still gives you an advantage over competitors, all other things being equal.

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