I primarily use Moniker for my domain registrations, but I have a few that are registered at Godaddy, and I just realized one advantage of using Godaddy. Domain names that are registered at Godaddy are given free hosting from the company, although they have the ugly banner across the top of the website.
For many people, this ugly banner is a deal breaker, but in reality it shouldn’t be one. I registered a few “throw away” domain names last year with the intention of building very small websites for SEO purposes (just as a test). I only got around to building one single page website that had information and several links to another website of mine I wanted to assist with SEO.
Lo and behold, I came back to the site close to a year after launching it, and I noticed that Google has it ranked PR3. I know that people often debate about the value of Google’s PageRank, but the “website” consists of 3 paragraphs, has no photographs, used a free CSS template, and took about 30 minutes to create.
I know PR3 isn’t exactly hugely impactful, but all things considered, it was a pretty simple back link with no downside.
Domain Discover gives me a free page without a banner. it costs about 50 cents more a year but to me it’s worth it.
@ todaro
I didn’t know that. The only time I’ve used Domain Discover is when I’ve bought names from Buy Domains and immediately transferred them out.
I use their free hosting for over a hundred sites.
The banner is ugly but the cost certainly puts some lipstick on it.
Death to the Yankees. (baseball) not Americans.
@ gary
yep… takes about 10 minutes to set up and create a page. I suppose you could do the same type of thing on Blogger.com or TypePad.com, but I like the fact that you can do it on a domain name you control.
Why put up with ads on your sites? Use Moniker or Name, set your default settings to a cheap shared hosting account and simply add the domain to the account.
Then go to the free CSS template sites, download a pretty one, write three paragraphs, upload, and there!
That takes 5 minutes at most!
@ Dan
I used it on a 2 word .org that I wouldn’t have paid to host. I don’t know how much Moniker or Name charge, but I was doing it to see if it would get any traction in Google, and it did.
How much does it cost to have a link on the homepage of a PR3 site? Maybe a few hundred a year? Now I have it to one of my sites for $7.50/year – just the cost of a domain renewal.
A one page PR3 site on GoDaddy’s free hosting w/o a link building campaign? I call bs.
Here’s what I think happened – the domain you purchased already had considerable “link love” when you bought it. The benefit of the links weren’t harvested when the domain was just parked – Google doesn’t give PR to parked pages.
Once you published a “real” website, you got the benefit of the old in-bound links.
Just wanted to mention that so folks don’t think they can just buy any old domain, use GoDaddy free hosting to build a one page website, go away for x amount of time, and come back to a PR3 website.
As they say – Ain’t gonna happen.
@ Creating a URL
Would you like to place a wager on it?? I hand registered the domain name, built a one page website using a free css template and set it and left it.
I will put up 5x what you put up, and you can donate my winnings to a non-profit helping Haiti.
**Edit**
In retrospect, I suppose it would be possible that there was a back-link or other back links that I didn’t know about. I haven’t checked that, but my post was based on the fact that it was a hand registered name without PR when I got it.
Great tip re: Godaddy’s free hosting. Thanks Elliot!
Elliot, would you mind listng the domain?
@ John Doe
I am not revealing the domain name. Someone gave me some pointers in private on SEO/link building with the type of site I built, and I don’t want to reveal something that would upset this person.
Elliot, Love your blog. I apologize if my comment came across as challenging or aggressive. It wasn’t meant that way.
Having said that, I wish I could take you up on the bet. Say dinner in NYC (not 5 star, just dinner – it’s always good to make/meet other contacts)? But, alas there can’t be a bet if you prefer to keep the domain private.
Cheers.
@ url
And I apologize if I came off overly defensive 🙂
After posting what I did, I realized there would be no way to bet since it couldn’t be confirmed either way. LOL
However, the only inbound links I found on Yahoo Site Explorer from Yahoo Local pages, but I don’t even see the actual links in the source code. Strange.
Actually, what Elliot described happens all the time! I have a number of domains at Godaddy that I simply didn’t have the time to develop and since I didn’t want them just collecting dust, I put up some content and added a few BLs and low and behold, ALL of the sites developed PR based solely on what Godaddy did.
free hosting is not available to customers registered after jan2011.