Ahhh behold the power of a great domain name and the first page of Google

• Chris Guthrie
• Forums, My Sites
• January 24th, 2008
• 7 Comments

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Let me preface this post by saying that if you don’t already know by now I’m a huge gamer. I love playing video games and most of the websites I run are focused on the video games genre. So naturally I was looking to start another website about XBLA games (Xbox Live Arcade) and this lead me to purchase XboxLiveArcade.org on Dec 30th 2006. I held onto the domain for a few months while I waited to launch the forum.

At the time, the .com and .net were already taken by someone that just used it as a parked page. On a whim, a couple weeks after I purchased the .org I thought I’d just look to see if the .com was available because I remembered that when I first checked it was set to expire soon. I knew not to get my hopes up as most people renew their domains at the end of the year cycle automatically or at least near to it. However, to my delight, after entering my search I was staring at a GoDaddy screen that stated XboxLiveArcade.com was available! I couldn’t believe it dropped and no one picked it up.

For those of you that don’t own an Xbox 360 or follow video games that much – Xbox Live Arcade is the platform that small less expensive games are released on. You can download trials for every game to test them out or purchase them right from your Xbox dashboard for varying prices. So because of the fact that Microsoft never bothered to buy the domain and it was held by a domain parker for so long I couldn’t believe that I was able to get it for the cost of a new domain fee.

I launched the forum a few months later and I immediately linked to XboxLiveArcade.com from my other game sites using the anchor text “Xbox Live Arcade.” I’ve also shared links with other websites and the site currently sits at the number 5 slot on the front page of Google. Now I do need to make some alterations so that the description reads something like “Xbox Live Arcade Game Reviews, News and Forums,” but I haven’t gotten around to doing this. Anyway, because of the fact that the domain name is XboxLiveArcade.com and I’ve used “Xbox Live Arcade” as the anchor text it was really for the site to make it onto the front page of Google. Obviously the greatest thing about being on the front page for a highly relevant search term is the targeted traffic it’s been sending me. Check out this screenshot from Google Analytics:

This is less than half of the traffic the site receives from search engines too

Now the only thing I have to worry about is Microsoft’s lawyers coming after me for it someday…

Are you on the front page of Google for your key search terms? If so, how long did it take you to get there?

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