Jan 16 2008
Buying Up Local Domains
I met a guy in Manila who described himself as a web marketer and of course I had to find out more. I think his idea is an interesting one and something I hadn’t thought of or heard of anyone else doing.
His plan is to register lots of local domain names for various services. So for example, torontodentist.com, hamiltondentist.com, niagarafallsdentist.com etc. The options are limitless really because you could focus on any sort of small business and any location.
He was in The Philippines because he had just employed four locals to work making cold calls back to cities in the US. His plan was to get to the top of Google for whatever keywords the domain was focused on and then to call around to related businesses to see if they would be interested in renting the top spot from him for $200 a month.
He doesn’t actually know anything about SEO beyond that it exists and plans to pay people to optimise all of this sites to get them to the top. Because he’s focused locally, he doesn’t seem to think he’ll have any problems ranking in the top spot for all of his domains. He’s aiming to sell 500 this year and at $200 each a month he’ll be rolling in it if he can pull it off.
What do you think of this idea? I think it’s quite creative and I can see why a business would want to rent it because if they don’t, their competition might. I think he might have a harder time than he thinks getting the domains to the top, especially without any good content on the site, but he seems confident.
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go.
I think the guy is living in cuckoo land
“He doesn’t actually know anything about SEO beyond that it exists”
Then how does he know what it takes to get to the top of page 1
“Major City & Dentist” is a hard ass term to rank for.
“getting the domains to the top, especially without any good content on the site” Is impossible parked domains do not do well
“His plan is to register lots of local domain names for various services.”
All the good ones are gone. Domainers have software to check all major cities with the word “dentist” for example
I could go on
The strategy is not a bad one. You could possibly do just as well though using subdomains. I have heard of someone buying up all of these domains in the industry they worked in and later sold some of the places he wasn’t interested in for a nice profit.
Not terribly creative, I read about schemes like this years ago on webmasterworld and webproworld. Think he should make a test run with perhaps a dozen sites before he goes for hundreds and hundreds.
You could argue the guy is cyber squatting as well and then holding local businesses to ransom?
Not quite the same as buying the domain name of a newly formed company but where do you draw the line?
I once toured an operation like this that had tens of thousands of domains in one niche. They had teams of content writers, and sales people calling businesses. I think it involves a good sales pitch more than SEO.
I don’t think it provides much value to businesses because he is probably just going to rank the sites for a very small set of keywords.