I have a new domain going live tonight, the first custom web site we have done for a real estate listing built as a weblog instead of a static web site. When we talked about this before, Free the Drones wondered if custom web sites might get lost for a span of time in the postulated Google sandbox, a place where Google, at least hypothetically, exiles new domains to make sure they are not spam, scams, who knows what.
The weblog is far from being finished, but I have results to report. I registered the domain on Sunday, but, because of a MySQL problem, didn’t install WordPress until Monday. The first new post on the weblog showed up at blogsearch.google.com in less than hour. I blogrolled from the new weblog to BloodhoundBlog, but this was the only thing I did in the way of an outbound link — or anything else of a proactive SEO nature. That link showed up in Technorati within a few hours. I’ve been wrestling with content engines, so the weblog has bascially sat around doing nothing since Monday.
This morning it showed up on the main Google search engine, along with its own pet splog!
Three days from registration, two days from going live as a WordPress weblog, in a painfully retarded form. Free the Drones would argue that the Sandbox would keep this weblog from scoring high on searches, but the only searches people are likely to make will turn up this weblog, given that it’s there. And: I don’t know if a static web site would have become available as quickly.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate marketing
kevin says:
The secret sauce, I think, is the Bloodhound Blog itself. One week after moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress and registering it with Google and Technorati, the only sign of life of my new blog at Google is the link from Bloodhound! No other articles appear to have been indexed, despite having submitted a sitemap. You should start charging folks for kick-starting the Google search process! 🙂
October 11, 2006 — 5:24 pm
Greg Swann says:
But I deliberately didn’t link back to the new domain! Plus: “Three Oceans Real Estate” is getting 611 hits right now.
October 11, 2006 — 5:29 pm
Dave Barnes says:
I think (as a professional webmaster) that you should have target=”_self” in the right-hand menu and not target=”_blank”.
I think that the menu should be on the left. See http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/3W/web_object.htm for the data.
I would use Arial and not Verdana as my heading font. Verdana (with its subdued serifs) is OK for body text, but really quite ugly for headings.
http://www.214south122ndav.com/Flyer.pdf is a 404 error. Bad.
Another 404. http://www.214south122ndav.com/Listing.pdf
And, another. http://www.214south122ndav.com/floorplan.php
The MOST important piece of info is missing. How much is this tract home POS?
,dave
October 11, 2006 — 7:32 pm
Greg Swann says:
404’s — It’s not done. I said so. I was talking about its findability.
October 11, 2006 — 7:52 pm
Kevin says:
But very few of the hits for “Three Oceans Real Estate” actually refer to the site 3oceansrealestate.com They’re mostly for other sites that link back to mine.
October 11, 2006 — 10:12 pm
Dave Barnes says:
Greg,
The plural of 404 is 404s, not 404’s.
,dave
October 12, 2006 — 8:41 pm
REBlogGirl says:
That is called the Sandbox Phenomenon. Google tries to index a site when it first appears and you can score relatively well with a decent page rank for the first weeks/month while google figures out if it likes the direction of your site. So, you can land in the SERPs and see a good PR. Then you dissappear for the rest of your 3 or so month stay in the sandbox. You can find documentation of this phenomenon on SEOmoz. I’ve had that happen to me and it unfortunately gets clients all excited for no reason.
check out my article on the sandbox:
http://www.rsspieces.com/2006/10/14/the-google-sandbox
October 14, 2006 — 9:13 am
Paul Chaney says:
I want to comment on a couple of aspects. First, the idea of creating blogs for individual listings is brilliant. Our company has been giving this consideration for some time. I know there are companies who create websites for individual listings, but doing such using a blog just makes good sense.
Regarding the earlier comment regarding the use of target=”_blank”, I agree with the commenter. I see no reason to open each page in a new window.
November 28, 2006 — 9:39 am
Greg Swann says:
> I see no reason to open each page in a new window.
The next time we do one, we’re going to put all the sub-pages in an iframe — one AJAX-y page, total.
November 28, 2006 — 9:46 am