Detecting a dropped domain it’s easy. First of all, if someone decides to setup a web directory, he would probably choose a name suggestive for this niche. Generally something containing: directory, links, submit, addurl, tree, etc.
Let’s take the following domains: pmdip.org, ascia2008.com, icca-2004.org.
What normal person would name his directory like this? So it’s very obvious the domain was used for something else before, then it expired and someone wanted to build a directory because of the Page Rank.
To be sure, you can always use Internet Archive to check what site was on a specific domain years ago.
Now once you detected such directories, avoid listing your site on them, even if they have a high pagerank, it will drop in a few days or weeks anyway.
Sooner or later Google penalizes dropped domains. Of course getting a link or two from such directories ain’t gonna do much harm, but when you get tens or hundreds, your own site may get penalized.
I tried the CPAlead program on a site which had around 200k indexed pages.
The site started to make some extra bucks per day, but in a couple of weeks, the number of indexed pages dropped dramatically and the same did the search engine traffic.
So you should use CPAlead only on private areas of your site, otherwise you risk losing valuable traffic, even the pages are still crawlable by Googlebot, you get some kind of penalty.
There are some months since I removed the CPAlead code from the site, but the traffic is not back yet at the previous rates.
So you got a new site up. Everyone keeps telling that if you put valuable information, people will eventually link to your website. That’s true, but you can do more than just wait. The following simple things will help you get your site indexed by search engines and will also help you get some decent traffic.
- Ask your friends who own websites to put a link to yours. Try not to return them the service or at least avoid reciprocal linking. So if they insist, try to link to a third website.
- Submit to a few free directories like: DMOZ, Pegasus Directory and other that you find when you search google for “free directory”. It’s pointless to make a list here, since many of them turn to paid directories over time. If you got some cash to spend with this, you can go for a directory submission service.
- Use Google Adwords to get some extra traffic, choose the right bids to fit your budget
- Submit to a few paid directories. Look carefully before spending your money: how well the design is, how old the directory is, how clean, what’s the pagerank, etc.
- If you write on some forums, put your site in your signature or at least in your homepage field
- If you participate on blogs or social networks, always leave your website in the homepage/URL field, but never do it in a spammy way.
