Oliver_Henniges - 12:02 pm on Apr 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

I tried to find a more recent thread on this issue to hook in, but I found none, so allow me to start a new one. It seems to me this topic should be brought to top every six months or so.

A couple of months ago there was this guy in a german forum: He proudly claimed to have registered a huge (?) network of almost 10000 domain-names, all made up of terms of widgets, widget-groups and branches related to a broad but concise market. I investigated some, and found them on a fairly narrow IP-pool.

The older central domains, from which he obviously started, do indeed offer some valuable services and products for the visitors and got a TBPR of 3 and 4, but the majority of the domains, the way he interconnected them via link-anchor-text and the noun-phrases he stuffed, are pure spam at its best.

I concede: As a linguist, I somewhat admire the way he automated to organize the semantic clouds;)

I was pretty sure, then, that he would tank with the whole structure within a relatively short timespan. I thought the whole approach was already outdated in 1999, and particularly the IP-trap would make googlebot rolling on the floor laughing. But today I took a brief look and the opposite is the case: Most of those domains, which got assigned a TBPR of at least "1" rank fairly well on each relevant keyword.

I have a relatively old webshop and I present my product-groups a la http://example.com/widgets.html, which, I think, is the way it is supposed to be. Being in a niche market, most of these landing-pages rank #1 without any effort. But from time to time a clever guy comes up shifting me to #2 simply by registering widgets.com. BTW: that guy is not a competitor of mine. He's in a completely different market.

I never "optimised" my site, just tried to make it "good" and do no evil. So far I survived all updates, and within everflux for many broader key-phrases other sites seem to oscillate around my own stable #2-#3.

But for the first time, this thing makes me a bit sceptical...

What do you think?

[edited by: tedster at 12:07 pm (utc) on April 17, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]