The Project Mai Tai Experiment

After months of speculation, I reported last week that yes, the reason my Project Mai Tai domain is banned from Google is that it used to be owned by someone else. That left me with two choices: wait – perhaps more than a year – and hope it gets indexed, or port the pages to a new domain and start over.

And then I had another idea, and so did Bonnie, who posted here:

You know Sapphire, that might be a good study. How well can you do without the goog? I’d be curious to know how that goes and if it’s any harder to achieve what you are hoping to achieve. We all know they aren’t the only source but still, we tend to worry about them. How is the traffic coming with no google recognition?

Let’s find out!

I’ve said for ages that Google is an advantage – an awesome advantage, even – but not a necessity. If your site’s good enough for visitors, and you can get one really traffic-inducing inbound, you’re launched. The problem comes in when webmasters think they shouldn’t link to a site that’s not indexed in Google for fear of some nebulous “guilt by association” penalty. In other words, we webmasters make Google the judge, jury and executioner by playing the Google game – which we don’t even know the rules to.

Does that make sense? I mean, whether you see Google as Darth Search Engine or just a company trying to get their search results tweaked right, the fact is what’s a penalty this week might not be next week, and what’s an asset this week will almost surely be a penalty sooner or later. That’s the only way they can keep the results the way they think they should be. Or torture webmasters – whichever motive you prefer.

Fortunately Mai Tai’s had no problem getting some inbounds from other sites in its niche. That’s driving some traffic. It’s doing as well as other sites I’ve started with a similar amount of posting (not nearly enough) and promotion (zippo!). I have to thank Google for giving me PR4 despite banning me (whatever!) because that made the site good for about $30/month in ad sales right there.

I’ll keep reporting new developments, and we’ll see just how this site fares without Google indexing. The site launched in September of last year, and honestly I haven’t done the work to make it take off (too busy with other sites, plus frustrated with Google). I’m going to start posting regularly, continue to link to other, more established blogs and sites, and see what happens. That’s it – that’s all I’ve done with some of my other sites. This way, we’ll have as even a comparison as possible.

1. Sidebar linking experiment
2. The continuing saga of Project Mai Tai
3. Why would Google ignore Project Mai Tai?
4. Domain Rehabilitation project
5. Project Mai Tai – Adventures in Site Launching

Categories: SEO   |   Tags: Project Mai Tai  |  2 Comments »