Overoptimization? No, Stupidity!

by 32 replies
39
I loved this gem of a story. If you people do not
read the real online IM news, you really are missing
out on the real world.

Anyway, here's my recap.

This guy owns a nut business. Online. Has the domain
nutsonline.com and had made quite an authority site.
Business was booming. He loved the thousands of free
visitors that buy from google search. His site was rocking.

Get this. It was a multimillion dollar business of seeling
nuts online.

But, the guy was not happy that he did not have the domain
nuts.com. In fact, it drove him nuts for years. Even trying to
track the person that owned it and was probably going to have
to pay $1 million or so for it.

He just could not live without nuts.com, thinking it would take
his million$ business to the even greater heights.

He gets nuts.com. Probably pays up the ying yang. But man
is he salivating the new traffic! SEO experts told him it would.
They said google would love it. That the type in traffic alone
would be worth it.

So what does he do? Something that even the most basic
warrior should NOT do. Obliterates his baby nutsonline.com
and transfers it over to nuts.com.

Can you guess the rest of the story?

Quote from the story:
Sadly, the real truth is revealed by a real seo expert in the last paragraph:
I could just hear someone in the background saying, "Nuts to you!"

Hope you enjoyed that story, folks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/bu...ffer.html?_r=1

Paul
#search engine optimization #overoptimization #stupidity
  • Now, that's what I call "Over Optimized Stupidity"!
    • [1] reply
    • Easy to call something stupid without thinking it through long term. I bet the name will pay for itself in no time. the annual revenue of the company is 20 million. Branding changes to an easier to remember name can easily pay for itself over years as a sound investment. It makes all other advertising much more efficient too. The name is much more memorable and will get more type in traffic. Further the whole debacle just gave him some sweet exposure. the site has already moved up in the search rankings and will probably move up the more the story makes it around the net.

      For the keyword its number one on bing and number two on Google - and no paul if you read here you will see there was nothing stupid about it. They did the 301 redirect just as Google advised

      Google Groups

      In fact they made a few other mistakes so it may not have even had anything to do with the name change perse.
      • [3] replies
  • Banned
    I preach it all the time, If you have a ranked page/URL leave it alone.

    I hope this Warrior Forum member reads this thread, before they obliterate their business by messing with a lot of URLs on their old site.

    http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...k-traffic.html

    Buying new domains isn't the problem, the problem is people want to destroy the old domains, crazy stuff.

    Live & learn...
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • crazy, but i think he would of learned his lesson

    i made this mistake a couple of years ago and i lost the traffic but not as much as this guy, he must be livid

    paul
  • Banned
    Lol, Wikipedia is ranking an internal page at #1 in Google SERPs for the keyword nuts.
  • Greed does crazy things to people. I admire him for not being satisfied with what he was currently making (step one to making more!), but a failing grade for getting rid of all the groundwork laid by nutsonline.com.

    Kevin
  • It's easy to call him stupid, but I think he made the right move. Just for whatever reason, the transition didn't go off. I've 301'd sites before, following all the best practise and I know from experience that sometimes it goes off flawlessly and other times you wonder what the hell. Sometimes it's just how Google feels about the site in question. And that there is the problem.

    With the exposure he gets in the NYT, I hope Google takes a look at his case.
    • [1] reply
    • No need to the site is doing well according to compete. If you look at the graph you will see before the Christmas season (before his niche generally sees increased traffic) the site hovered at around 300,000 and in 2011 was doing about 246.000 in March

      nutsonline.com UVs for March 2012 | Compete

      This year with the new domain its hit 360,000 then 422,000 in March.

      nuts.com UVs for March 2012 | Compete

      ummmm... yeah 160,000+ over last year and a better more memorable name sure makes them stupid :rolleyes:
  • Banned
    Looking at their current sales pages, they need to take their breadcrumb out of that ordered list, the current breadcrumb html code is useless as far as the SERPs.

    No breadcrumbs in the SERPs:
    site:nuts.com

    If done correctly they could have the exact same user experiance on the site + thousands of breadcrumb keyword/anchor-text links in the SERPs.

    I can fix that.
  • Banned
    What?

    I didn't create the thread or thread title.

    You ok, lol?
  • Yeah. It's true the big G just slapped my two money sites down hard but they are both #1 in Bing and Yahoo for a ton of long tails so I still get 300 unique visitors a day. No need to nuke those sites, IMO. I will just create completely new websites in the same niche with similar content but less optimized.

    I think its best to leave your site alone if it still earns money, even if its no longer the best so I won't do any funny redirects.
  • Dont know what all the fuss is about.

    The sites ranking 2nd and 3rd for the term 'nuts'
  • Oh, and another thing.

    Since when is buyng a one word exact match domain an act of stupidity? :rolleyes:
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • yes, I was think to buy two domain names. Most probably i will but I will use redirect my country domain to other domain which i bought from name.com for redirects. Sometimes country government could take that domain... So i will not upload a single file on my country domain! It's the basic to keep my business alive.....

    The above situation was not occured by country domain. But just to let other webmasters know I have shared what I am going to do...

    This is really a sad story I have read.... This site owner made a mistake and gave a very big price..... One mistake can make you poor in this virtual world.... I am getting it clearly after surfing many forums for long....
  • It's okay, he will be back in the game
  • It's interesting how in the PPC section of WF that there are a couple of people who seem to gloat at others mistakes or assume they are the bees knees (google it).

    Still, it helps draw out some discussion points...
  • The guy is smart. Now he's got viral attention and backlinks coming in to Nuts.com because of the story in the New York Times. He'll come out of this just fine.
    • [1] reply
    • Most of you are missing the point.

      If you really read the article, he wanted the domain to
      get some of the juice of type in traffic and EMD. Dumb.
      He obliterated the content and the dynamics of a whole
      site. You don't 301 a complete site like that. You work
      with it over time.

      This is his paranoia, like I've seen some warriors have:
      Leading to this:
      This is not about an EMD. This is not about the value of the new EMD.

      This is about moving a site the wrong way. And paranoia.

      Paul
      • [1] reply
  • You would think at that level of business he would of had correct advice presented to him on the issue before making a decision, almost hard to believe....
  • Thank you Mike for spanking Paul. He really needs it

    It must be tough trying to be the 'shock jock'
  • Give me a website with 20m turnover and you can call me stupid any day of the week!
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
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