Search Experiments blog » General information http://www.search-experiments.com/blog Explaining and recording details of the SEO experiments on this site Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:19:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Type-in and optimisation http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/08/27/type-in-and-optimisation/ http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/08/27/type-in-and-optimisation/#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:41:26 +0000 henrypuk http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/?p=52 The other night, I found myself idly pursuing one of my low-energy hobbies, that of checking domain names for availability. Following the release from a Vietnamese prison of disgraced former glam rock star Gary Glitter, who was a big star in the UK in my youth, I wondered who owned the domain. 

Well, the non-hyphenated version has been sat on by Internetters, one of the big domain services, but the hyphenated version – www.gary-glitter.com – was available.

I bought it and pointed it initially on to a page on this site, without linking to it from anywhere, and put a header and holding text on it.

In three days it had 38 page views, 28 uniques and 27 entrances. Three or four of those would have come from my showing people that I owned the domain, but the rest would have been type-ins by third parties. To be honest, I’m not sure whether I think this is a high number or not. I don’t know anyone who just types domains to see what is there, and I have a suspicion that most of the money that is made from type-in is from misspelled domains.

However, the man wasn’t out of the news for those days and remains all over the redtops at time of writing, which might lead you to expect more.

The domain is no longer redirected to this site, and has a holding page with ads, and a linked blog.

]]> http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/08/27/type-in-and-optimisation/feed/ 0 Using Google tools http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/using-google-tools/ http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/using-google-tools/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:55:07 +0000 henrypuk http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/?p=12 As part of the “how little can I do and still get indexed” experiment, I’ve added both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to the site, to see if these alone will inspire the big G to index them. 

Expected outcome: not in the index

Next steps: Use the Google “Add URL” tool. I’m going to give this a couple of days though. 

Incidentally, if anyone thinks that a couple of days is not enough time to wait, I’m pretty confident that I could get indexed in 24 hours if I was in a rush – I will need to have this site indexed for other experiments in future, so I’m not prepared to wait indefinitely…

]]> http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/using-google-tools/feed/ 0 Valid! http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/valid/ http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/valid/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:29:38 +0000 henrypuk http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/?p=7 OK, it’s probably pretty easy when you are writing the code by hand, but I have now ensured that all pages of the site, except for those where I have deliberately screwed things up as part of an experiment, are W3C-compliant.

This is something that I intend to maintain. How hard can it be?

]]> http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/23/valid/feed/ 0 Welcome to my site http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/22/hello-world/ http://www.search-experiments.com/blog/2008/07/22/hello-world/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:30:35 +0000 henrypuk http://search-experiments.com/blog/?p=1 Welcome to the blog for search-experiments.com. I don’t think you’ll find anything of too much interest here at present; it’s a newly created scratchpad for me to mess around without doing too much harm.

The first experiment is already live, but I’m also running a “meta-experiment” to see what it takes to get the domain noticed by Google.

Note that I’m not trying to get it indexed at present – I know just how I could do that quite easily if I wanted to. No, what I’m doing is seeing how little I have to do to get it indexed.

At present, this consists of creating a few pages for the site, and adding this blog. No URL submission, no external links, no Google Analytics on the page, no Google Webmaster tools account, no XML sitemap.

Oh, the only other thing that I’ve done which might give Google a clue as to the existence of this site is to search it for the domain name. Also, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have accessed the site with a browser equipped with the Google Toolbar.

I don’t expect to be successfully indexed now. Probably the next step will be to set up Google Analytics and maybe Webmaster Tools, as I will want to access those in the near future.

 

Edit: Added link (29/07/08)

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