Amish Gokarts and Mini Bike Furniture
On yesterday’s Rockstar show, Todd and I were chatting with Stuntdubl about the ins-and-outs of acquiring older sites/domains for SEO purposes. One of the pre-show questions posted on Stuntdubl’s blog asked about what to do with old links when you purchase a domain.
That’s a great question, because I don’t think most webmasters truly understand the impact (both negative and positive) pre-existing links can have on a project. I mentioned an example of how things can go very wrong if you don’t understand the power of anchor text, but we weren’t able to spend a great deal of time on it, so I thought I’d post it here as well.
Go to Google and search for amish furniture.
Do you see the Gokart site sitting towards the top? That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention to pre-existing anchor text.
It turns out that the domain amishfurnitureandcrafts.com, which is listed in the ODP, now resolves to the same IP as gokartsusa.com. It’s hard to say whether or not this was done intentionally, because the hosting location and registration information is completely different for the two domains. That means there’s a chance that the owner of the gokart site has no idea this has happened. (competitive sabotage??…)
Regardless of who is responsible, the end result is the same. The gokart site gets hosed. Google has determined both domains point to a single site, and that has caused the anchor text of the two separate domains to be combined. Now that really wouldn’t be so bad if you still were able to rank for the phrase combinations from each individual domain. I know if I sold gokarts and mini bikes, I wouldn’t mind the occasional email asking why I show up for amish furniture as long as I ranked well for my core phrases.
But that’s not typically what happens. When you inherit a bunch of off-topic anchor text, more often than not you just end up ranking for a bunch stupid phrases that no one actually searches for. Things like amish gokarts and mini bike furniture….
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4 Responses to “ Amish Gokarts and Mini Bike Furniture ”
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You have a very good, and important, point here, Greg! I have always done a great deal of backlinking checks on the many expired domains I have booked and always try to match the old theme as well as possible. And it works. It really do
We try to disambiguate as best we can, but if a webhost messes up on virtual hosting or DNS and returns the wrong content, that’s tough. The fact that both are on 69.20.96.165 makes me lean toward some DNS/vhost mistake by the webhost.
Let’s see. [site:amishfurnitureandcrafts.com go kart] returns results at Y, M, and Ask too. If all 4 search engines think your Amish site has go kart pages, maybe the answer lies with your webhost.
I don’t think it’s a virtual hosting issue. The amish domain is registered to a company using Rackspace dns servers. The gokart domain is a MonsterCommerce store. That means someone entered a MonsterCommerce IP into a Rackspace dns server. I guess it’s possible that someone made a typo, but I doubt it. To me, it looks a lot more like a deliberate act.
OK, I’ll admit that there is a certain level of confusion across all the engines, but I think you’re stretching a bit if you are implying that the way Google reacts to a situation like this isn’t any different than its competitors.
First off, no other engine returns the gokart site for the search “amish furniture”. I would guess that they don’t because there isn’t a single occurrence of the phrase anywhere on the page.
There is also a big difference in the number of reported backlinks. Yahoo and MSN return much different counts for each domain. Google returns the same number for both. Clearly, Google has decided it is one single site, whereas the two domains seem to have a bit more separation at the other two engines.
Another good example of this is how the other engines return results when you use search phrases that contain a combination of amish and gokart phrases. On MSN, if you search for “amish gokarts” it returns the site using the amish domain. If you search for gokart only phrases, they return the site using the gokart domain. Google doesn’t do that. No matter how you search, you always get the gokart domain.
But the bigger question is whether or not the introduction of a large volume of off-topic anchor text has a negative impact on a site’s ability to rank for its core terms? I’m not sure you can draw a firm conclusion from this example, but it does seem like it can.
I guess it’s time to go do a little testing….
Matt proceeding with the idea that it is indeed a “problem” with the host, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/google-domain-hijacking-dns-poisoning-or-something-else/
how do site owners identify and prevent problems like that from happening?