Work From Home Online Guide

I’m lucky enough to work from home online. My primary income strategy at the moment is building niche sites running AdSense and attracting targeted organic traffic from the search engines, mainly Google.

It’s a long, tough haul doing all the work it takes to rank for moneymaking keywords so that people start coming to your site. If you follow good Search Engine Optimization techniques (SEO), then inside of a month you could rank at the coveted position #1 on the Search Engine Page Results (SERPs) as long as the keywords you’re trying to rank for don’t have a lot of strong competitors. The problem is that you’d have to do some pretty aggressive backlinking to your site, and Google doesn’t like that sort of thing. If your baby blog doesn’t play nicely with the other blogs, then Google will send it to the sandbox to play by itself–down in position 900 or so in the SERPs.

So even though you have the capability to annihilate your competition, you should refrain from trying to do so during the first three months of your site’s life. In the beginning, you need to woo Google like it’s a reluctant lover who’s playing hard to get. It’s frustrating, because if you’re new to making money online, you’re unsure whether what you’re doing is going to work. If you’re going to avoid sandboxing, then you have to invest a considerable amount of time up front before you know whether what you’re doing is going to pay off for you.

If you have an aged domain, you can be more aggressive with your backlinking strategy–sometimes. An aged domain is one that was originally registered three or more years ago–the older, the better. Google likes older domains because they’re less likely to contain spam or engage in other black hat schemes. Spammers like to register a bunch of cheap domains in bulk, work them for a few weeks until Google shuts them down, and then go out and buy a bunch more. Aged domains cost too much to be of use to black hat site owners.

You can buy aged domains on FreshDrop (a GoDaddy site). Be sure to pick up the coupon code from the top menu bar of the website. They advertise them at $5 each, but there’s a $5.00 service fee too. With the coupon you can get an aged domain for around $9.00. Add private registration (which is a must-have item in my opinion) and the price comes out to around $16.00. Well worth it if it helps you keep the site from sitting in the sandbox for six months to a year.

Things are never black and white with Google. There are rumors that if the site changes owners, Google resets the clock on an aged domain. This doesn’t make sense to me–if Pepsi buys the Aquafina company and takes over ownership of Aquafina’s website, does Aquafina get de-ranked? Not likely.

It’s more likely that a total change in site content might trigger a caution flag with Google. You will be adding lots of new content to the used domain when you buy it–the content doesn’t come with it. Don’t expect to keep any pagerank the used domain currently has–I bought a three-year-old domain a few months ago with a PR3, and within two weeks, it went to PR0.

I’ve also heard rumors that Google stops counting existing backlinks when a site transfers owners. I’m skeptical of this rumor too, but then I don’t look for used sites with backlinks–I can get my own backlinks. What I’m looking for is a registration date of five years ago or more. I’m reading positive accounts of people building new sites on aged domains and adding up to 1,000 backlinks in a month without a sandbox penalty. Do it at your own risk, but if you’re successful with it, please drop me a comment here. We’re all in this together.