Note: If you are unaware of The Project topic, please read the previous parts: The project: In the beginning (pt1)
So, the Ringtone-Search.net blog has been online for few weeks and I have more or less miraculously managed to write 11 posts, mainly about long-tail/niche topics. As for linkage I’ve been a lazy boy and done only few directory submissions. As expected, the site has managed to receive few 100% natural links from PR4/5 blogs – the value of good content/copywriting is something you can’t beat. Hopefully it will receive some organic backlink-love in future also.
To summarize the spreadsheet below:
- Google: sandboxed… Comparing to other SE results I would say this site is definitely sandboxed. If so, the sandbox is related to age of incoming links and age of single pages, not age of domain (as domain is over 1 years old). Because the front page “dummy version” was indexed light years before any real content, I would put my money on link aging before page age . IMO an issue worth discussing…
- MSN… As expected, the site rocks in UK but is M.I.A in msn.com. Interestingly, the site has relative good starting points also in Finland (and other European MSN interfaces). So MSN is extremely heavy on favouring server location and domain name. It will be extremely interesting what happens when I start writing stuff with some medium and high competition keywords like “mobile accessories” and “Nokia ringtones” – will it success or not?
- Yahoo… seems to be a mixture of MSN and Google. IMO there is pretty clear geotargeting and also some level of dampening factors.
The traffic… So far it seems to be approx. 50 unique visitors/day which is IMO not bad regarding the age of site, niche topic and limited promotion. So where are the visitors coming from:
#1 our main site (we have a small, graphical rel=no-follow banner on article pages)
#2 seomoz (thanks for visiting)
#3 digg
#4 directories and minor tag based search engines
#5 trackbacks from other blogs
#6 technorati
#7Google and MSN (with even numbers)
And finally indexing… IMO nothing out of the ordinary in here: msnbot (237 requests), slurp (184 requests), Mediapartners-Google/2.1 (80 requests) and and googlebot (68 requests). MSN is by far the fastest to crawl and show results, Yahoo and Google seem to take at least 3-5 days between crawling and visible results.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts and comments.
