Chris Boggs called me today to chat and we got on the subject of clients who decide that a new domain is an imperative. Rather than stick to their tried and true, older, highly ranking domain, they need to launch new content at a new URL (or even split off content that had been on their old site to make it more marketable for a PR or ad team).
A good example of this phenomenon is Amazon's move with Endless.com. Amazon moved all their shoes and handbags onto a new site, launched with a media blitz and are hoping that consumers will use the new site rather than Amazon when shopping for shoes and handbags. I'm not just unimpressed--I think this move shows a clear lack of understanding for the Internet consumer in addition to a great deal of ignorance about search marketing (though, from their site's construction, they've obviously never grasped that topic well).
So let's say you are registering a new domain, moving content from an old domain to a new domain, or shifting domains altogether - what can you expect?
Moving Content or Shifting from an Old Domain to a New Domain
- Expect 3-6 months before the content's previous rankings are re-achieved at Google
- Expect 1-3 months at Yahoo!
- Expect 1-3 months at MSN
Best Practices for the Process:
- Create single 301 re-directs for all pages from the old site pointing to the proper URLs on the new site
- Change all links on the old site to point to the new site (rather than pointing to the re-directed pages)
- Review your analytics for the top 2-300 domains sending traffic to the old pages and contact as many as possible about changing their links
- Review a Yahoo! Site Explorer command for your site and repeat the process in Step 3 with the top 2-300 results returned (Yahoo! tends to show more important links first)
- Make sure that both the old site and the new site have been verified and have sitemaps submitted at Google's Webmaster Central
- Write a post in the Google Groups Webmaster Central forum indicating your move, why it's being done, and how you hope the Googlers will cut you some slack and recognize the new domain as legitimate
- Launch with a media and online marketing blitz - your goal is to get as many new inbound links pointing quickly to the site and attract a high number of branded search volume for the site
- Monitor your rankings for the content, comparing old to new over time - when the rankings fall (sadly, there's no "if"), post in your thread at Google Groups with an update and specifics
- Monitor your Webmaster Central account for crawl errors and to see how well Google's doing with your 301's
Registering a New Domain
- Expect 20-40 days for indexing at Google
- Expect 6-9 months before competitive rankings can be achieved at Google (longer if you don't get a lot of great inbound links, shorter if you can pull in a ton of phenomenal links very quickly)
- Expect 30-90 days for indexing at Yahoo!
- Expect 2-4 months before competitive rankings can be achieved at Yahoo!
- Expect 15-30 days for indexing at MSN
- Expect 1-2 months before competitive rankings can be achieved at MSN
Best Practices for the Process
- Register the new domain for the maximum period allowed - 10 years
- Register using an identity that owns other prominent, well-respected domains if possible (and use the same contact information)
- Secure reliable hosting on an IP address that hasn't served spam or adult content in the past
- Verify the site with Webmaster Central and submit a sitemap to Google
- Submit sitemaps to Yahoo! Site Submit and MSN (once they support it - sometime this year is the word)
- Launch with a bang - linkbait, viral marketing, media awareness campaigns, etc - the more links and attention the site receives in its first few weeks of operation, the less it is to be overlooked by the search engines (and, in particular, sandboxed by Google)
- In the event that you're launching a site with a tremendous amount of content, it's wise to consider only showing a few hundred pages to the search engines initially and then slowly expanding - the engines have been known to get "overwhelmed" by the amount of content in relation to the newness of a site and its lack of trust, and thus refrain from spidering all of the content - it's better to control which pages are indexed, since you'll know what takes priority.
Any other suggestions for these processes that I've forgotten? Have your experiences been similar?
I think the 301 Redirect component is critical in this strategy. Speaking of 3 past experiences that were similar (purely modifications to URL's on a website and not complete domain changes), 2 incorporated 301 redirects and 1 did not.
For the 2 sites that utilized 301 redirects: The higher ranking website took approximately 3 weeks to resolve the new URL's in search results - and did not lose any keyword rankings. The second website took a little over a month (if my memory stands correct) with similar results.
The website that did not incorporate 301 redirects lost almost all of their keyword rankings and they are still not ranking (over 5 months). The site was comparable to the higher rankings site I spoke of in the last paragraph.
Great post - and I feel that this entire issue often goes unidentified by website owners.
My experience with MSN/Yahoo is very different than this article's description. I've never completely recovered positions in either engine.
Yahoo is particularly bad: I've had old, properly 301'd domains stick around in Yahoo for a year or more, usually with positions at or better than the new domain (yes, that's right - both domains always seem to appear in the results). They just don't be able to figure out that permenantly redirected means permanently redirected. Not even a complete sitemap seems to help. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Yahoo a 3.
MSN does seem to update their index fairly quickly, but I have never recovered 100% of my positions when switching domains. I'd give them a 6/10.
Google is hands down the winner of the Big 3 in handling redirects. You will not regain all of your positions in Google either, but at least their index is current and their tools are empowering (and actually work!). I'd give Google 8/10.
To elaborate on this slightly, in all cases I witnessed this behavior the domain redirects were from a small-ish site (under 100 pages) with a focused topic (i.e. LASIK) incorporated into a larger site (over 1000 pages) with a more broadly related topic (i.e. Health).
The quality of the structure and content of pages on the redirected domain greatly improved during the move, but it really had no bearing. The more complex the redirect (no matter how perfectly executed) and the more domains that are involved will almost always result in decreasing returns on success.
When moving to a new domain, how about ...
- putting the content online on the new domain and getting it indexed (as far as possible) before adding the 301's?
- 301'ing the detail pages first, slowly working up to the root pages (the first 301 that is caught otherwise is the root page; when it is moved, it will break the value-flow to the detail pages, dropping their crawler priority, perhaps moving them into the supp-index -- meaning their 301 will take much longer to be found)
Regarding IP's - don't forget the bogons; if you're going to check everything.
PS have you ever been in the Google Webmaster groups? I don't think any Googler would notice (and follow up on) a "please index my new / moved site" posting :-)
You'd be surprised regarding the webmaster groups - quite a few well known (and pobably several not so well known) Googlers frequent those boards, and while not every question may get answered directly by them there is quite a good chance of them getting read and therefore acted upon (providing its a reasonable, sensible request).
Hi, My old site is www.creativewebsols.com
and am planning to shift it to www.creativemall.com
Your basic processing content is alright. But I disaaprove with linkbait and link swap. Google filters those sites for backlinks in terms of page ranks.
Expect 20-40 days for indexing at Google?
Not to sure about that. My new domain's content was indexed in a couple of days after adding Google Sitemaps. I think having Adsense on the site also made the process quicker
How many pages did they index? Usually with new domains, we'll see full indexing of 500-1000 pages take, at a minimum, 3 weeks.
It took around 4 weeks for my entire site to get indexed in google after moving domains. I didn't submit a sitemap though, maybe that would have sped things up. I kept track, here were my numbers for Calwineries.
week 1: 702 pages week 2: 1659 pages week 3: 2900 pages week 4: 4060 pages
RFujiu - that experience mimics many of the ones we've seen very closely. Thanks for sharing.
They pretty much indexed the full 1200 pages in under a week.
I am stunned by agencies' ignorance of the issues surrounding page and domain movements. Even if they're not versed in the arcane details of reindexing and canonization, how can they leave at 5 o'clock knowing they just killed every intra-site bookmark (the best kind!) their website ever had?
thanks , one of my site selling too many unrelated service. I have launced a new domain to separate some service. This article will be great guide for me.
Hi Rand,
thank your for this really helpful post!
Question: we are planning to both change our corporate-website URL and at the same time move products/content to already existing or new domains. For all new domains we will probably work with already existing content but mix that with new pages/section. To make it clearer some examples:
www.e-[company].com --> www.[company].com AND www.e-[company].com --> www.[company]-[product].com etc.Â
Is there anything in specific to think about? Does it make sense to do the changes all at once or split over a certain time period?Â
Thanks, carmon
I realise that this is a very old thread now, but was hoping for any thoughts people might have.
I'd normally always recommend a good old fashioned 301 when moving to a new domain (in fact I'd recommend not moving domain, but as Rand say, some people won't be told!)
However, let's pretend that client A has a site at url www.madeup.com but also owns www.reallymadeup.com, with the 2nd URL currently 301ing to the 1st.
For whatever reason, they now want to move to a new site design at the 2nd URL (www.reallymadeup.com) - are they likely to avoid some of the aging penalty due to the fact that the URL has been in existence for some time, even if it was only as a redirect?
Or are they going to have to suck up the punishment like everyone else? And is there any more feedback on Scottie Claiborne's article about using a 302?
I have two questions for my brother’s and sister’s here at SEOmoz.
1. How long should you leave the 301's going before you phase out the old site?
2. How long does it take for Google to pass over the PR rating?Â
In my case Google has already re-indexed the new site (1000 pages). It has not passed over any PR juice. The old site was a PR5. I have switched many of the links to the new site. However I lost lots of them, because webmaster did not want to be bothered, which I fully understand.Â
PS. This guild was very helpful, I followed it to a "T". Thanks again for all the help in advance.
Good post and I can say from my own experience that what you stated matched my own observations. Most of the stuff is common sense, but a lot of people forget important things that are obvious because they are so busy with the move. It's a lot of work already, without thinking about search engines. The items mentioned should be put on the "to-do" list or action plan for the site move project that it is not forgotten.
You might want to mention that the original pages will end up in the supplemental index and that you should NOT block urls from your old site via robots.txt etc. I also noticed that the pages on the new site often ended up in the supplemental index first and then moved up to the main index. This usually coincides with the old pages dropping into the supplemental index.
There is another project I am thinking about which involves the move of content to several new SUBDOMAINS of the existing site. The content of the site is authored by multiple people and the actions of one can cause long-term and irreversible damage, e.g ban from digg, wikipedia black list etc. Those kind of things would not affect the site and community as a whole, if the content is broken up into individual sub domains.
Does anybody have experience with that and some tips?
I believe that most of the tips regarding the move to a whole new domain can be applied here as well, but there might be differences since the domain itself is a very old and trusted domain and the move does not happen to a completely new top level domain.
Thanks.
Can You give me an example of 301 website. i am bit confused.
Nisha,
Type in your browser address bar https://www.trip2orlando.com, when the page loads, your address bar will be changed to https://www.trip2orlandousa.com.
The domain that you typed in has been redirected (301) to the new domain.
I hope this helps.
Slightly complicated twist on this. Â We're thinking about moving some very recently created content posted at foo.com to foobar.com. Â This content (blog posts) have been indexed by google at foo.com, however they haven't benefitted from any external links. Â If we simply transfer the posts over to foobar.com and delete the originals, will that cause a problem? Â
We are going through the domain name change for our reasonably popular small business blog now.
Old site: https://www.smallbusiness20.com
New site: https://www.smallbusinesshub.com
We've followed just about all of the advice on this thread (thanks for the help!). Will be interesting to see how things pan out over time.
One weird thing I've already see. Within 48 hours of the domain switch, Google crawled the new site and showed entries in its cache. But, now, the new site has no pages in the cache. Not sure if we're sandboxed or what.
To get yourself listed in google for free simply follow the trick"Google Apps" >
click on begin free trial and then follow the procedure.
This way you will be listed in google within 2 or 3 odd days
This is really worthy and it lists your domain very fast in google.
I tried this for my website "COLORUM" and noticed the results
Rand,
 Great post. Have you noticed that Google is ranking new domains more quickly? We launched a new domain April 1 07 with incorrect 301's. (I wasn't involved at this point). Some of the 301's were corrected in May and the rest of them were corrected in June. The site started ranking well within three weeks but has not recaptured original rankings for all their terms.
They are now changing their URL's (ARG!) and we are going to 301 redirect the original domain to the changed URL's and submit new sitemaps to Google and YAHOO - feedback anyone? (They're launching a new CMS system)
Gladstein - I've used 302's in the past when changing URL's within a domain. The old URL's slowly sank while the new URL's surfaced, but that was pre bigdaddy with better duplicate content filtering. The end result was the site lost more traffic than other domains in the same industry where we applied 301's right from the get go, it was just slower. I would suggest 302's if a migration has to take place during a peak business cycle and apply 301's as soon as possible - otherwise 301's have worked best for me. Post big daddy I would be concerned that the duplicate filtering would prevent either the new site or the old site from surfacing.
This is a fantastic post, Rand. Thank you very much. I have just implemented number 6 (the Google Webmaster forums) and wish I had realized sooner that I could do that.
With number 1, are you saying that, for a WordPress blog, I should have individual 301 redirects for each title and category and page, such asÂ
301 for oldURL/2007/05/04/post-title, and similar for all post titles, along with
301 for oldURL/category/
etc
rather than using a generic redirect that (theoretically) redirects all the entries?
Sorry for being dense on it.
Great article. I heard something on a podcast about networksolutions holding onto a domain for 5 days after you check it's availablility, preventing you from registering it somehwere else, at a cheaper price.
Where do you recommend search for avaiable domain names, that is, considering i want to brainstorm using their 'search for a domain' tool..?
The podcast I heard recommended not search a domains name unless you were ready to buy at that every moment, suggesting that the site being used may used it against you somehow. Thoughts?
Redirection, that's sounds like the no man's land of theories and experiences ! Here's an idea I just think about when doing one redirection :
So why not revert the process from aliases to make a OLD/NEW domain redirection ? transparent, fast, clean. Explanations :
No 301,302'ing and every links are followed (files and folde, OLD/file.php go to NEW/file.php), this solution works
But the question is : what's about with Ranks on SEO ? Anybody already tried this solution with positive feedback ? Â
I would like to learn how moving and redirects affect Google Analytics reports.Any ideas?
Thanks.
i am about to launch a website with round about 2500 pages, i am bit concern about leaving it once, but as you said i had this website register for ten years and top of that i had one page online from last two year which has a page rank 2 as well. i am also using PPC for my website, could you tell me what is best? should i show all the pages to search engines and start PPC at same time as well. I had about 400+ ppc compaign ready to go..
Great post, cheers.
 We've just changed our company name and so changed our hosting and domain. We switched from a normal wordpress install to an install using thesis, then used the 301 Redirection plugin to get our old links matching up. We've lost our page rank3 naturally but we managed to get our most powerful links to switch over.
 I'm not sure whether the Redirection plugin is sufficient or whether I should just do individual 301s in the htaccess.
 The new domain is https://www.ivideoproduction.co.uk
Any thoughts?
 Many thanks,
 Alex
Hi!Â
I just took over our companies online cart. I have a backgournd in web development and some experience with seo. Recently my online catalog (that had been online for the past 4 years) was updated by the developers Dec. 5. Without my knowlege, they changed every page name from the dynamic string to a text string reflecting the content of the page. They didn't even use hyphens between the words. The PR on all of the pages (around 200-300 pages) is no longer visible. They used 301 redirects to the new page names. The content has not changed. Â
My question:
How will this effect the traffic flow to my site? Will the change be helpful or harmful? Should I have them change all pages back to their orginal name or leave it the way it is?
Also, what is the deal between using .htm vs. .html. I know that the 3 character extension was more compatible in the past. Does it matter anymore? Â
Hi!
I just took over our companies online cart. I have a backgournd in web development and some experience with seo. Recently my online catalog (that had been online for the past 4 years) was updated by the developers Dec. 5. Without my knowlege, they changed every page name from the dynamic string to a text string reflecting the content of the page. They didn't even use hyphens between the words. The PR on all of the pages (around 200-300 pages) is no longer visible. They used 301 redirects to the new page names. The content has not changed.
My question:
How will this effect the traffic flow to my site? Will the change be helpful or harmful? Should I have them change all pages back to their orginal name or leave it the way it is?
Most Importantly ... will this effect our status in the SERPs???
Also, what is the deal between using .htm vs. .html. I know that the 3 character extension was more compatible in the past. Does it matter anymore?
Thanks.
I went through ur blog nice one i got an idea abot Google indexing
thanksss
https://www.mastercomputech.com
Again, I know that this is an old post but I thought I maybe able to get an answer regarding #7 of best practices. When launching a large site with lots of content is the best way of slowing feeding content is to slowly allow via robot.txt and releasing sections over time or not posting certain content at all?
Thanks in advance.
My Company just went through the same problems when doing new changes for our main site: All the url's where renamed and we lost rankings for our main keywords, generate a whole lot of broken links, we even lost our page rank, due to my boss's stubornness. Now we corrected it and we hope to get back to normal now as soon as G.... starts crawling our site. Great information, thanks.
Has anyone experiemented with a shorter TTL?
Rand,
Thanks for the great information. I think that it is easier to get crawled and indexed for your domain earlier with Sitemaps and SiteExplorer, but to start showing up for relevant search terms, it does take time. I imagine it will take longer for verticals that are more competitive.
I recently moved off of the blogspot domain to my own. I was indexed within a 24 hour period in Google, Yahoo took almost 5 days. I am still posting at the same rate on my new blog, but I am not getting crawled at the same rate my old blog was. Maybe this info will help out, maybe not.
Rand Thanks for the check list. I recently had to shift from an Old Domain to a New Domain. Damn name changes....
Anyways, do you really think writing a post over at the Google Groups Webmaster Central will help?
hehe Rand glad that I didn't mention the client name. :p Seriously though thanks so much for putting this great overview in place. There has been lots of talk about this issue in the past, and as we agreed yesterday the majority of your suggestions above are consensus feelings among the people we read and run with.
To me one of the main areas to focus on for the Webmaster central team at Google this year is how to help sites that feel the urge to do this, especially if they are very well trafficked and "household names," as is the case with the particular client we are worried about. It would be great if Google would work with us or any other webmasters when dealing with something like this that defies SEO common sense but made great sense in other planning.
The site has tons of great content, but they decided that a lot of traffic goes to a particular section of the site that provides, for the sake of example, recipes and reviews of grocery stores. (Note this is far from the real situation, for you sleuths out there).
So for the established brands that want to shift some of their high-performing content to a new domain, should Google and others make an exception? Should the Webmaster Central team possibly allow for Sitemap updates that include shifting whole sections to a new URL, and give them the benefit of the previously established trust and inlinks to the whole old domain? This would be all I want for Christmas (2006). :)
Based on your suggestion, I am also adding something about this to Google Groups…d'oh sceduuled maintenance today keeping me out! :p
I would say three words: YES YES YES!
I agree, if sites are so reliant on their existing indexing and Google has gained trust in the site, then something with Sitemaps that would "give them the benefit of the previously established trust and inlinks to the whole domain" would make so much sense, on a case-by-case (application) basis.
Maybe the new concept wouldn't require much change from what happens today, but you would hope that more types of control/communication could be given to site owners via Sitemaps / Webmaster Central over time.
Hey Rand, great post!
I think you can get away with a little more than a few hundred pages but not more than 1,000 based upon my experinces with that particular issue.
funny I happened to find this in Technorati: https://www.dunsh.org/2007/01/16/domain-transf...
Looked familiar, so I hit the G translator and this is what I got to start: Chris Boggs together today and I decided to talk about how to handle the opening of the new domain name customers, This set of rules. For the past tried and true existence of a domain name with a high ranking. These clients need to display the new URL of the new content, or need Resolution original website content, That is more conducive to sales, and was ranked advertisements.
I know off topic but an interesting example of why people say you should translate something then translate it back to see how close you are to the original...
Rand, what a great post. Glad to finally hear someone's actual take on the value of Webmaster Central and Site Submit, and also a detailed answer on how long before you can expect legitimate rankings in Google. Great information to pass along clients who are just starting out.
"...or even split off content that had been on their old site to make it more marketable for a PR or ad team."
Exhibit A: eBay Express. Nobody knows exactly what it's for or why they should shop there over eBay. It was developed to try and mimic the format, feel, and search functions at Amazon.
According to the metrics posted by store owners at the eBay stores forums, traffic to eBay Express has been in the basement - much lower than eBay's expectations. eBay says they're going to give it time to catch on, but that's just prolonging the inevitable.
This is very troubling.
I had thought that simply making sure the 301s were done correctly would be sufficient to migrate content to a new domain. We are faced with this issue now with one of our blog sites.
Does this only apply to larger sites (more than 1,000 pages) or equally to everyone? It it an issue of new content not being indexed, or is the "link love" of inbound links impacted as well?
Lol, rand I just inquired about this in a forum, I suppose I got my question answered. Thank you very much.
Number 7 on the best practices sounds like something that I may try with the next site I work on. I do know that it's taken a good length of time to get one of the sites I'm working with to over 150k pages indexed.
In the case of Moving Content or Shifting from an Old Domain to a New Domain, what do you think about using 302 re-directs from the old pages to the corresponding new URLs while #3 and #4 are done and some equity is built up before switching to 301?
I've done this and it works in preserving the traffic, but ultimiately delays the transfer of trust and other link factors you get from a 301.
I think Amazon.com thinks about search ... they have been, after all, rewriting URLs for years. And they have reaped the rewards - they are all over page 1 on Google
Any sense in spreading the 301's out over time? I've gone that route when redoing/reorganizing pages within a site, but never thought about it for moving pages to a new domain before. Always scared of a full-on change and upsetting the Almighty G . . . I don't know Jason Isaksen, but now he's been mentioned 6 times.
Have you read Scottie Claiborne's article in which she suggests that using a 302 works better than a 301 in cases like this? The idea here is that with a 302, your users are redirected, but you keep your rankings. While you wait out the aging delay on getting the new domain to show up, you can work on getting as many of your backlinks as possible switched to the new URL. After all that, you replace the 302 with a 301.
I haven't tried it myself, as none of my clients have ever moved to a new domain, but I wonder what you think of the idea.
Getting your old PR back (or some new PR) is the bi*ch.
:-(
It really is much more practical to keep BOTH Domains!!!!
Keep one site - because of its rankings - and produce another site that should focus primarily on any new objective.
You can even do so far as create a site that is more focused on getting high on the SERPs, but still user friendly to the Humans who visit........ and create another site that is more focused on users who are lured by flash, hi resolution images, web 2.0 content, and fancy writing styles - and submit those types of sites to Directories - Pr Firms etc.
There is nothing wrong with having two sites that accomplish your objectives - as opposed to making one site a panacea, and throwing all your eggs in one basket.
In fact, it is even acceptable to create a site geared towards Google's Algos - then create a separate site for Yahoo and MSN Algos. Just do not duplicate the content.
3 sites? Either those sites are small (which is feasible) or you're talking about some very large clients, because most websites don't even come close to fully developing their single web property. With so much competition for the competitive search terms, It will be alot easier to concrete rankings and outdo competitors with one EXCELLENT site, instead of three average ones.
I agree that registering for 10 years doesn't make much difference. Does that really prove to the search engines that you're much more legitimate?
And what about private registration? Do search engines frown upon this?
Any word on submitting to directories or any other sites aside from Site Explorer and Google Sitemaps? That seems like a condensed list for a brand new launch.
I had pages indexed for my site (blog) within weeks in Google, and since then was showing up in the top 10 for many keywords for very competitive material. I did buy links in a variety of directories such as MSN small business and submit to every blog directory I could find, but I will still impressed with the speed of Google.
Yahoo however has been MIA when it comes to my site. I've found it by doing long tail searches, but none of my keywords found on Google and MSN are anywhere in the SERPs for Yahoo.
Little side note, everyone I know seems to read the SERPs more closely these days. (except the less savvy like my father) A lot of people skip over ads and slowly parse through results to find what they're looking for. I think it's common that most web surfers find the search results decent at best, and take it upon themselves to find what they're looking for. One exception is when someone is making a purchase or looking for an image. First come first served in that case usually.
Nice post though.
"1. Register the new domain for the maximum period allowed - 10 years"
Does this really help to speed up rankings? I always thought it was more of a trick used by some web hosting companies.
What surprises me most in this type of discussions is that nobody reacts to comments like the one from nickrivers. I started a new domain 6 weeks ago. Within 1 week it was listed in Google at position 9 out of 481.000, with Yahoo in 2 weeks at 1 and with MSN in 2 weeks at 1 for the search term I made the site for. All this with links from only 2 other sites. These 2 sides are old sites with a high ranking (one is 3 out of 6.300.000 with Google) and both sites haven been in the Google directory for some 4 years. I am convinced that being in Google directory is most important.
That's pretty dead on to what I've experienced. I made the mistake once of not insisting that the client do a huge launch campaign, and needless to say -- the site just sat there for months. It was painful.
I have tried the redirect for 301 is working fine. My website is https://www.velsom.com   thanks.
I monitored a site that ranked number 1 for "boats for sale" on Google. They changed urls and then next day the site was gone and the brand new site was number 1 for "boats for sale" on Google and never moved.
They lost long tail traffic as the old urls were not all 301'ed but the main terms were unchanged.
i too tried redirection my old domain to web development company mumbai . Its working fine.
Nice Posting. :)
Thanks
I don't know about moving a domain, but I registered a new domain last fall and I was in Google within days. I had always wondered about how true the sandbox theory was, but I found that it didn't apply to me in this case. I launched the site, submitted it to Sitemaps and within a few days I was on the second page of results and the limited number of pages I had were all indexed. I really just had one good inbound link (from a very popular blog) and a few others from forum signatures. Yahoo did take longer (can't remember exactly how long) but I was pretty surprised how fast Google was.
By the way, the site I started was fireschottenheimer.com, so I can't say I was ranking for competitive terms, but I was still surprised.
Your comments on launching new domains are accurate and I agree with you compleetly, but it is my opinion that you have left out a few very important details on the subject. The best source of information that I have have come across lately, on the topic of launching new domains, is an article that was writen by someone named Jason Ryan Isaksen and it has proven to be a very helpfull resource to myself and others who are looking for legitimate information on this subject. If it would be allowed, I would like to provide your guests with a copy of his article on your web site, I have a copy of it and I would like to hear some of your opinions on Jason Ryan Isaksen or on his strategies and techniques if any. Has anyone ever dealt with Jason Ryan Isaksen or read any of his informational reports? Or if there is anyone who might be familiar with his services, I would be very happy to hear of your opinion on them. I have read many reviews on Jason Isaksen on quite a few other web sites and this guy seems to me to be extreemly knowledgable in the area of launching domains, and when it comes to any sort domain strategies in general he is influencing the way people go about setting up their individual sites, in a positive way. Any legitimate opinions on Jason Isaksens techniques or any of the informational articles he has published on the domain topic would be greatly appreciated.
Barbara Q