One of the domains I acquired about 3-4 weeks ago has a directory listing from 2001 (original owner paid the couple hundred bucks or so) resulting in about 2% of the 800 uniques a day it gets. The name is adult and actually has pretty nice placement in the directory, near the bottom of page 1 in a popular adult niche category. However, almost all of the rest of the traffic comes from Yahoo Search, where it's amazingly #3 on about 16 different phrases that total low-mid XXX,XXX in OVT. The previous owner of the name did have a site on it, but had it parked for about 5-6 weeks, and I have had it parked since, albeit at various parking programs trying to figure out which pays best. The name gets nada from Google or MSN. I know that I'm in danger of losing the SERPs unless I develop a site on the domain, and am trying to develop a site now for it and merely have it parked while doing so. However, I wanted to see if anyone who knows Yahoo better can shed some light on this. I've noticed the following: - The top 3 and ultimately probably the top 10 and more for the 16 phrases are identical. It's as if Yahoo has a basic phrase and because the others are synonyms of it, they grant the same results. Ironically, other synonymous phrases besides the 16 have different results altogether, though the #1 site for the 16 has some high SERPs for some of the other ones too and is probably overall a popular high traffic site that is SEO'd well. - As much as I think the longtime directory listing is partially why the name has such good SERPs, I bought 2 other names from the same seller that are also listed in the very same category in Yahoo's Directory, one of them being higher on the first page, the other being a few pages back. Neither are getting Yahoo Search traffic quite like the other name. Questions: Is there any chance that the SERPs WON'T change fairly soon? If I put another site on the name, would it be more than likely that I'd lose the SERPs anyways? Is it possible that the Yahoo Directory listing may have grandfathered the name into high SERPs despite the other 2 names not placed well in Yahoo search? For now, I'm riding the lightning and the $50-$60/day the name makes in parkign revenue, but I'm definitely worried about losing the SERPs and thus know I need to get a site up ASAP to start retaining some of the traffic. Note that the name itself is not made up of a very highly searched term, though it is loosely synonymous with the 16 terms.
In my opinion you should set up your site asap and make sure your keyword density is good coz yahoo still gives a lot of weight to keyword density.
Thanks, rep added. I'll keep the keyword density in mind when developing the site. Anything else that would help retain the SERPs?
You should check out the stats for the site. Are there any pages which particularly receive more traffic than the others? If so, try to use the same uri, at least for the time being those pages will receive the hits and could independently become successful based off the page you made and not because of the pages which were there. OR be sure to set up 301s to other pages which do exist, that way your site will still receive the traffic and link value. Just do lots of stat analysis and build pages around that.