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Now I am running a serious business like many others here in the forum, and I've also got a couple of employees who deliver the goods we sell on the site.
What we are doing is not really something I can put on hundreds of "spam websites" with UPPERCASE terms like "limited time offer order before tomorrow and get three toothbrushes extra and free white glove delivery" - I am not mentioning this because I believe people here are of this type, but because somehow this was always my feeling with thinking about hundreds of domains and about cloaking in my very limited time. We run a online store selling some sort of products. And in this field, we are not even doing bad, also with good rankings at google.
All the domain names I have were collected throughout the years, when I had ideas, products with that name or of that type, or just general domains which were abandoned by their first registrants.
I am forwarding all of those domain names to our main site, with a small referrer code in the URL so that I can see whats going on and which ones bring traffic, and sales. Not a lot is happening.
I seriously consider now to get started with cloaking through those domain names, but by reading through the forums I found that I shouldn't use our main site/domain to do that, since this could be very risky (and indeed it would be fatal to get banned on google, people would even loose their job).
I also saw that I shouldn’t use the same IP, as this can probably will be seen by Google and co.
Is it really worth doing this all, or should I just keep parking my domains as they are right now?
Are there any famous cloaking sites, and reports about them where I can see what others did, why they succeeded or failed?
What would you do in my shoes, spend some time and BOOST the business with cloaking, or better concentrate on more important things like the daily business?
PS: One problem I always had during the years is that I simply cannot find out which KW are good and relevant to us. We have thousands of products, and every months there are new hot ones. And the umbrella term for what we are selling is not really what the people use to search for our products.
Keywords:
www.wordtracker.com/
h*ttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Just cloaking on its own will do you no favours, you still need link popularity.
Having different domain names pointing in can be good if you wish to track different marketing campaigns but on there own will be usless unless you have sex.com or something major.
>>Is it really worth doing this all, or should
>>I just keep parking my domains as they are right now
You coul dsell em or produce websites for each or get someone to do it for you. Build link popularity and content and each domain will have more worth to you.
I suggest you hire some muscle and make small infomercial sites, 1-5 pages for eahc product that you havea nice domain for. and then refer them to the main site for buying or detailed info. Write a few short focuse pages hittign directly on good keywords and answerign the important questions. Pre-filter your leads to make sure your main page recieves visitors with credit card in hand.
Moving all my affilaite links from the "XYZ Info" page to a "Buy XYZ" page increased my CTR to over 70% ;) and gave me top5 rankings for those all important "Buy XYZ" searches.
Anyways, USE the domains, don't WASTE them.
Mind you, don't do cut and paste or simple doorway pages, taht won'T help you at all. MAke thse mini sites for the visitors...
Always remember: "Googlebot doesn't carry a credit card".
SN
Free yourself from this thought. Cloaking is a technical thing and NOT a marketing / business thing. It's not a BOOST guarantee (or did you meen BOOT? :P). There's no need to cloak at all if you have enough content and the skills to build more content to run more domains / sites. Carefully check if cloaking is the right approach for your business. If it is, use different ip adresses, different (anonymous) whois / dns etc. ...
>I simply cannot find out which KW are good and relevant to us
You won't solve this problem though cloaking. If you cloak, you should at least know for what keywords/phrases/products. ;)
I guess I will just leave it then. Seems that all the domains and IP I have are no real use for cloaking, as I would have to use our main site since it's pupular and gets visited by Googlebot and the others all the time. However, the risk just seems too high for our main business/site.
About adding content to my domains, that's a good idea but the problem is just that I don't have the time. Hiring a muscle as you suggested would be a solution and I will have to think about this and how to get people who understand what I am talking about without spending too much of my own time. If I build the right content on those "mini sites" on many of my domains, I won't need cloaking I guess. Then maybe somebody actually linking to my sites (to get them recognized by googlebot and others (= popularity)) seems more important then.
Maybe I should just cloak a test page, or two. To see the effect by myself. Once I am that far, I can also better understand how this would integrate into our normal business.
Truly sorry,
SN
I also saw that I shouldn’t use the same IP, as this can probably will be seen by Google and co.
Yes, but what's the worst that could happen here? If you use the same IP for your "new" cloaking domain (same with your old established and brandable domain) - does that mean tha GoogleBot will arrest them both? Can it really arrest all sites carrying the same IP address with the spammy cloaking site?
In other words, if I get this right, if you decide to go for cloaking - you need to use a separate server (or at least virtual private server)?
Yes! Since the question ...
>Can it really arrest all sites carrying the same IP address with the spammy cloaking site?
... can only get answered by Google.
There have been a lot of discussions about shared vs. dedicated hosting. My strong believe is that at least G doesn't penalize ip's but pages or sites. However, that's my believe, my personal opinion. Again, only Google can answer this.
Virtual Hosting vs. Dedicated [google.com]
No fright.
