I’m continually surprised by the poor quality of information published by the mainstream media in relation to search marketing. It appears that major publications, particularly those owned by Fairfax, will publish just about anything particularly the inflammatory without so much as consulting a second source.
A recent article published by the Sydney Morning Herald titled How To Get A Page One Google Ranking For Under $100.
To the uninitiated this article (which is more like an adversarial) sounds like an opportunity to cut that pricey SEO or SEM company loose and get unlimited rankings for target terms for next to nothing. The fact is that the Domain Name Optimisation game is steadily loosing its effectiveness ageist site authority and page quality. The author of the strategy (which is being sold for the low price of $8) is asserting that buy purchasing domain names containing target terms, one can bypass the requirement for creation of quality content, site structure and generating valuable links. And to some degree he is right, someone looking to rank for the term Lawnmower Business in Ipswich may be able to generate a page one ranking for that term by simply buying the exact match domain and populating it with a little content.
What the author forgets to mention is that the search volumes (the number of people using those terms) is likely to be extremely low, perhaps a couple of searches per month. In order to build and sustain a worthwhile business from this technique one would need to own potentially hundreds of keyword rich domain names in the hopes of ranking in all relevant service/area terms. This could rapidly become an expensive route for a small business, particularly as Google is decreasing the value of exact match domains. In SEOMoz’s 2011 survey of SEO ranking factors only about 3% felt that Google would increase the value of exact match domains compared to over 70% who felt this was a ranking factor in decline.
The author seems to have latched onto a declining ranking factor, hastily produced a low quality ebook and somehow convinced SMH to provide him some media coverage.
I’m more than happy to eat my words if the author can show some evidence that his strategy is useful beyond low search volume service/location type keywords. A good indication would be generating some traffic for terms like Personal Injury Lawyers ($27/click) or Life Insurance ($54/click).
