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Personal Loans on Google
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March 23rd, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
I was talking with Frank Schilling of Name Administration earlier this month and he reported an odd behavior of Google. If a user types his domain Personal Loans.com directly into Google, it will not even show one result for his website PersonalLoans.com. I can understand if he had typed the keywords for the domain, but he used no spaces and completed it with a .COM at the end. So there should only be one match for his domain, right? Nope. Instead the user will see an Australian website Personal Loans.com.au as the first result. This other site shows up because it has the same string as him but has the .AU on the end.
I decided to study the situation more. I have a good background in SEO but I never consulted for another company. This analyzation is purely for fun and Mr Shilling doesn’t know I am doing it. Shilling is doing alright with type-in traffic, however he is loosing eyeballs when it comes to the search engines - they pretend he doesn’t exist. You know you are blacklisted when a user types your domain name into Google and nothing about it appears.
Here is a screenshot of the Google results:
PersonalLoans.com can’t be found at all since it is blacklisted at the moment. I am less concerned about the blacklist status and more concerned about the health of his organic traffic. Lets talk about getting the domain back into Google, but not just in - in the first ten results for Shilling’s keywords “Personal Loans”. Type-in traffic is alright but organic traffic is Gold.
- First, I would move the domain away from the group of 44,555 other domains sitting on the same server.
- Second, I would concentrate on content. He has done a good job at building out the site with useful information, however it looks like a parking wolf in website’s clothing. Can Google see that? Yes. We need to add more content and decrease the ads. Less ads can actually result in more income.
- Third, after the content is added, the hard job is getting some links to the site. Perhaps he could start a Personal Loans blog and talk about the personal loans process. The blog could interview authors of books and other blogs on the loan process. By actively engaging the readers of the site, it would draw in those much needed links.
- Fourth, Google is temporal. Sites that never change or get all their links at once don’t do very well. A site needs a track record of growth. Devote a few hours a week to looking at the site and figuring out ways to improving it.
- Fifth, link bait with some features. Offer charts, graphs or interactive calculators. People bookmark these and come back, so also add social network bookmarking widgets to each page. This enables users without websites or blogs to create backward links to the site.
A website is like a person- you know if they have a good soul in the first 2 seconds you meet them. I would say Google is very good at judging the character of a site and knows if it should be included. Google will continue to keep judging a site and will change its view over time. For example, DomainTools two years ago was a PR0 (the lowest page rank possible) and pointed to a porn site. I bought the domain and turned it around. Before beginning the project, Shilling needs to examine what makes the other sites in the top results rank so well. What are they doing that he could be doing better. The best way to beat the competition is to chart them out and see how beatable they are.
| Domain | Serp Rank | Back links | PR | Domains on same IP |
SEO Score | Compete Rank | Alexa | Yahoo Dir | Dmoz | Domain Expires | Blog | Links on page | Pages |
| Direct Lending Solutions.com | #1 | 183 | 6 | Dedicated | 98% | #64,862 | #294,622 | Yes | No | 2013 | Yes | 93 (Internal: 81, Outbound: 12) | 91 |
| Thrifty Scot.co.uk | #2 | 132 | 5 | N/A | 93% | #167,969 | #185,717 | Yes | No | 2008 | Yes | 35 (Internal: 35, Outbound: 0) | 956 |
| Bank Rate.com | #3 | 4,610 | 7 | 462 | 88% | #505 | #2,700 | Yes(4) | Yes (22) | 2007 | Yes | 126 (Internal: 115, Outbound: 2) | 345,000 |
| NEAmb.com | #4 | 456 | 6 | Dedicated | 70% | #28,813 | #642,798 | No | No | 2009 | No | 83 (Internal: 78, Outbound: 5) | 1,860 |
| e Loan.com | $5 | 819 | 5 | 3 | 87% | #2,420 | #23,952 | Yes(5) | Yes | 2010 | No | 157 (Internal: 154, Outbound: 2) | 260 |
| Wells Fargo.com | #6 | 3,830 | 8 | Dedicated | 88% | #86 | #12,177 | Yes(27) | Yes(9) | 2013 | No | 58 (Internal: 54, Outbound: 4) | 9,770 |
| Personal Cash Advance.com | #7 | 1,620 | 6 | Dedicated | 93% | #162,625 | #172,390 | Yes | No | 2009 | No | 21 (Internal: 20, Outbound: 1) | 42 |
| HSBC usa.com | #8 | 1,000 | 6 | 20 | 91% | #1,398 | #24,892 | Yes | No | 2007 | No | 102 (Internal: 74, Outbound: 26) | 1,300 |
| Citi Financial.com | #9 | 87 | 6 | Dedicated | 64% | #7,271 | #129,588 | Yes | Yes | 2008 | No | 42 (Internal: 36, Outbound: 6) | 271 |
| i Seek Loans.com | #10 | 22 | 4 | Dedicated | 93% | #691,951 | #286,351 | No | No | 2009 | No | 98 (Internal: 82, Outbound: 13) | 130 |
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| Personal Loans.com | N/A | 0 | 0 | 44,556 | 65% | #314,695 | #3,654,639 | No | No | 2008 | No | 84 (Internal: 82, Outbound: 1) | 0 |
PersonalLoans.com has a lot of potential and it needs more inbound links and more attention. I like that it is two words - generic one word domains are often harder to help. The more words in the domain name and the most specific the phrase is, the easier it is to help a site.
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Posted in Frank Schilling, Google, Name Administration, SEO |
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
The Google Toolbar seems to penalize domain owners like Frank even further. Because the toolbar has such a “presence” on the browser, many folks use it instead of the address bar. In that specific instance Google is giving the user exactly what they do NOT want. I suppose there needs to be a balance between peoples’ behavior that causes them to add “.com” to the end of terms which are intended as a search and those of folks who intend on reaching a specific destination but are using the wrong entry point (toolbar versus address bar).
If one had the users’ interests in mind, I would think an error in favor of the exact matching domain name would be in order. In this type of case, I think Google is making an error and serving their customers badly.
March 24th, 2007 at 4:26 am
That’s all very important information. But if a site is fully banned then there are some very different things that need to be looked at and fixed first.
Ask here for more information: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/topics
March 24th, 2007 at 6:02 am
That’s the problem with a significant percentage of domains purchased in the aftermarket:
They are banned or with a strong Google penalty.
When you pay dozen thousands a premium names and discover this fact after, you would like to cry!
It happen to me a pair of times, now I do the checking before buy.
Well, all above is very nice to try get Google rankings but have does not help when a domain is banned, the unique and only solution is a manual removal of the penalty by the Google folks.
I have been searching last year for reputable SEO companies having a contact at Google for reinclusion of a very expensive domain I purchased a year ago. I found one that charge me $1,500 - One week after the domain was no longer banner and even better after 3 months it’s first for his domain term. I ask them to do the same for a long serie of banned domains I purchased and they said no, as they did not want to burn their Google contact.
Before the reinclusion I did all waht can be done to be indexed again, like the suggested plan above, plus links from sites with strong PR, plus related links pointing to the domain, for months …Plus email Google for reinclusion a pir of times, … Nothing worked!
As I say when banned, the only and unique solution:
GOOGLE physical person that remove it!
…
March 24th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Maybe the domain was getting too much traffic without the appropriate amount of backlinks and therefore, in Google’s eyes, it was a spam site?
March 24th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Great article! I will now be more diligent on research before I buy an after market domain. The funny thing is, at the time of this post, Your blog is number 1,2 and 4 in search results on google with personalloans.com. Very clever!
March 25th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Definitely ask the Google group for help. If they are delisted, Google has a reason for it. Google’s Matt Cutts (www.mattcutts.com/blog) has addressed these issues directly in the past.
Further, I would register the site with Google’s Webmaster Tools to see if there are any warning indicators for the reason why the site is not being listed in Google’s organic results.
Yes, I would be concerned for the organic traffic of this site, but there are plenty of places that Frank can go to seek out assistance. Best of luck to him.
March 25th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Great information Jay.
When I type personalloans.com into my Google toolbar I get Frank’s page. I don’t get it when I type it directly at Google.com though.
Why the difference?
September 4th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
The thing that works in favour of personal loans is its quick processing time. If the lender is satisfied with your credit score, then the final documentation hardly takes any time. In fact, the loan can be sanctioned within 2-3 days of applying for the loan.
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September 5th, 2007 at 1:04 am
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July 8th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
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