Thread: Smallest Thing You Did to Increase Rankings?

Originally Posted by bhartzer

What is the smallest thing that you have done recently that has made the biggest impact on your website's search engine rankings?

For me, I can tell you that I added a few outgoing links to authority websites in the body of the content: and that improved rankings.

What is the smallest thing that you have done that has increased your rankings?

1) add a simple Logo

2) add a favicon

3) renew for couple of yrs

4) link out to similar sites

5) take out unnecessary plugin's in wp

6) add related posts plug in

7) good server

8) change the theme .....

many more small changes had good effects on my sites, I did all at different times to come to conclusion.

started to rank after some 5+ Year Renewals

The real question here, though, is whether it has to be 5 years or not. Have you tested it with 4 years or 3 years? Is the "magic number" 5 years or more?

Wrote an article about the S510 food bill long before it made headlines. Before I knew it, forums and bloggers were linking to my article as reference when they started realizing what was brewing. Made #2 in Google for the term and for a couple of weeks the traffic was pretty insane.

Originally Posted by bhartzer

The real question here, though, is whether it has to be 5 years or not. Have you tested it with 4 years or 3 years? Is the "magic number" 5 years or more?

Well, I've done it for 3,4,5 and 10 years (in fact I have some domains expiring in 2020 now ) and the effect was more or less the same, so I'd say that 3 years should do the trick.

I think one additional year is enough. Basically Google considers less than 12 months old sites as potential link farms or other low quality automated sites with no other purpose than boosting other sites or collecting pennies. Typically .info is used for this, as it is cheap to register ($0.5 even), and the owner can just let it die after a year. If they didn't, they would need to pay $7+ for renewal. That's very costly if you have 10k .info's used as link farms, but not so costly to buy and set them up for an initial $5k. That's the reason why I think one additional year is enough to prove your "good intentions". However the more is the better for sure, I have also renewed the biggest projects for 10 years. Not only because I expected any effect, but just to secure them (whatever happens to me, my credit card, paypal, notifications, they will not drop).

Originally Posted by tetrapak

but just to secure them (whatever happens to me, my credit card, paypal, notifications, they will not drop).

Future price increases, etc.

3 years should do the trick

Thanks for the info, I'm now going to go register my more important domains for 3 years and see if that helps.

I tend to register domains for just 1 year now to keep costs down and so that I don't waste too much money on ideas that don't pan out, or I later realized that it was a dumb idea. A year is not so long, and if you build a good site during the year, then it is good to renew the domain name for another year.

But if you are not so impulsive as me, you may be better off registering your domain for 2+ years to begin with.

I just read this:

Matt Cutts put this idea to rest in a recent Webmaster Video. Many people have thought the time you register your site for is a ranking factor to Google. It isn't.

Over at: SEOmoz | YOUmoz - The Five Least Important Ranking Factors

Interesting..

Try to replicate your competitors online presence.