Tuesday, May 8, 2012

A Domain Empire Isn't Built In a Day

I first got into the internet back in 1996, and taught myself HTML to make a variety of really crappy websites, most of which were fan sites (tapping into already existing audiences). Some of them were fairly successful though, and I took part in many ad display network programs to earn myself a few hundred dollars a month. I was 14 when I started doing that, and I got a good grasp of the basics of search engine optimization while doing so.

I ended up pretty much abandoning the scene when I joined the Army at 17, and when I got out I wandered around for years trying to figure out exactly what to do with my life. So by the time I realized I wanted to be a film-maker and focus on video streaming as my method of distribution, pretty much all of the really great domain names were taken. 

However, I have managed to secure a few domain names I consider to be pretty good (based on how often the related keywords are searched for on Google)



As you can see by clicking on this screenshot, the keyword "rpg" has low competition but a hell of a lot of global and local monthly searches. This is good for me because my show is called 'The RPG Fanatic'. 

What isn't so good is that almost every domain involving 'rpg' is taken because I'm not the only one who can use the Google keyword tool. 

Despite this challenge, these are the domains I've acquired over the years,

rpgfanatic.net (Currently used as the domain for my roleplaying video game database community website)

therpgfanatic.com (Currently re-directing to my roleplaying videogame reviews Youtube channel)

therpgfanatics.com (not used for anything right now)

rpg.us.com (redirecting to my tumblr rpg blog)

rpgs.mobi (currently used for a google site that is set to be my mobile phone compatible rpg website)


I was also able to obtain some domains which were selected to capitalize on multiple keyword searches.

For example,



rpgsworld.com (I imagine this is because there was an old very popular webcomic called 'RPG World', but it hasn't updated in years. I haven't yet used this domain for anything)



rpgvideoreviews.com (used for my tumblr blog where I embed my Youtube roleplaying game videos)

rpgvideoreviews.net (used for the blogger version of my Youtube roleplaying game reviews videos blog)



therpggame.com (not used yet)

So I have some good domains that, in theory, are positioned to best capitalize on search traffic. 

The problem is I'm unsure how to best use them. I can't just make a network of blogs that have identical content because search engines now penalize content mirroring. And I don't have massive amounts of free time to five or six completely different versions of an article.

I also can't just have the un-used domains redirect to one or two blogs, because search engines don't actually pay any attention to redirect URLs. So the ones currently re-directing to other sites are never going to appear on Google, and that makes them useless for search engine optimizing (I need to do something else with www.rpg.us.com)


I'm open to suggestions. One of the ideas I'm kicking around is making a subreddit but I'm unsure how to best handle that.

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