Before I write anything further, I need to tell you this: Building an authority website, with or without WordPress, takes time. Time is not the only factor, but it’s the primary factor. Building RTCX.NET into an authority website is no different. My goal with this installment, however, is to show you some of the steps I’ve taken to help mitigate the time factor.
Time is of the Essence
Not really, but it sounds cute. It’s a general consensus that Google, as the world’s leading search engine, doesn’t pay much attention to websites that aren’t popular for the first two years. Yes, I said two years.
There are a whole bunch of signals that the main search algorithm looks at and one of them is the domain name’s age. Another is when the domain name will expire. If you buy an aged domain name from someone else, over two years old, and it’s still being indexed by Google, you get to skip that signal. If you want to skip the second signal, you need to make sure it expires in more than one year. Five years would be a good bet. Only a few domain registrars let you register for more than a single year, so you have to shop around.
Building Content
Building new, unique, original content is hard. It is, however, the only way to guarantee success. It’s extremely important to be passionate about what your website is supposed to be about. In my case, I’m passionate about programming projects and building websites, without the emphasis on programming. I believe you should always use the best tool for the job and if it already exists, it doesn’t need to be reinvented.
Google has been ruffling its feathers about fat pipes, whatever that means. I do know they use Pubsubhubub as a feed something or other and it’s a good idea to publish your content to it and there’s a WordPress plugin for that. I’m using it. Somewhere along the line they said it identifies original content, you know, the first post. That’s important because it tells them that if it’s published anywhere else, it’s duplicate content and shouldn’t rank over yours.
I only put original content, even if it isn’t awesome content, on my eventual authority website. I won’t be accepting guest articles or anything of that nature either. It will be purely me.
Microsites
It may sound like something you don’t care about, but microsites are merely independent websites that serve a specific purpose and reference your main, authority website, in one way or another.
Feel free to take a look at one microsite I built, my JavaScript Encryption Demo. If you look closely, you’ll see two or three links, including the footer link, pointing back to RTCX.NET.
Okay, so it’s sitting on a subdomain of rtcx.net and I say so what? Google and all the other search engines treat subdomains as independent domains. Subdomains can work as microsites just as well as any other domains. In fact, I’m building another microsite that will be a bit bigger than the one I’ve built so far and it’s going to be a simple forum. I’m taking my time with it, of course, since I just recently created my development environment with Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP.
Links, Backlinks, whatever
One of things I started in the beginning, when RTCX.NET was just a placeholder, was to point links back to it from other websites, websites under my control in one way or another. RTCX.NET has over 22,000 links pointing to it and some of them are of my own doing. I have multiple domains on my server and only a few are mine. In the footer of mine and in the footer of those that I administer for someone else, I have a single link pointing back to RTCX.NET. By the way, it’s proof that footer links don’t carry any real weight with Google.
Other than that, I’ve linked to it from only here and my microsite. Anything from anywhere else is organic. Wait, I think I pointed forty-something directory links to the domain name using Directory Maximizer, but they didn’t seem to do anything, at least not yet. Since I receive affiliate payments from those guys, I just turn around and use those payments to get more links. I’m not doing that right now because my PayPal account is kind of on the barren side of things.
Oh wait. I stopped using www.untwistedvortex.com as my URL when I comment on other websites and now I use rtcx.net. I won’t hold my breath to figure out the value of doing that, but it might get me a visit or two.
Metrics, who cares?
I only use metrics as measuring sticks. I like to see how I improve in them but I don’t care about them. For example, the last time I checked my Alexa rank it was at 798,902. It’s now at 598,169. Meh.
I checked the domain at Google Webmaster Tools and I looked at the traffic on Google Analytics and I’m getting what I consider a trickle of visitors. It’s what I expect at this point. I’m more concerned about getting content on the site than anything else right now, so it doesn’t bother me in the least.
Right now, I know only one thing. If I continue to build the content and continue doing the things I’m doing. RTCX.NET will eventually rise to the top of the search engines for multiple keywords.
The End Goal
The goal post I’m trying to reach is to simply get 100 visitors or more per day to my “new” site. And that’s just so I can carve out another tiny slice of online income. After all, the reason I’m doing this is make money online in the first place, right?
Eventually, and it all depends on other factors of course, I want to build that domain and the subdomains of it into a supersite, with multiple revenue streams. I think I can do it.
Please don’t expect to be updated on RTCX.NET any time soon. Unless something major happens, I’ll probably write an update in a month or so.
Update – January 15, 2013
It’s been quite a few months since I wrote this article. I am no longer attempting to turn RTCX.NET into an authority site. The reason is simple: I just don’t care enough to keep it going. In fact, I’m going to move some of the better articles over here and then turn it into what a blog (weblog) was originally designed for — a chronological record of events.
So you’re going to write all the content on rtcx. But you built *this* site into an authority by using lots of outside content. Maybe you could touch upon just why you’re going a different route on the new site.
Sure. It’s because of the subject matter. I doubt I’ll get offers of outside content (guest articles) that fall in line with the subjects I intend to write about. I could, of course, change my mind if I start getting offers like that.