I’ve always tended to “follow the croud” with this one, sticking to .co.uk and .org.uk domains for my affiliates sites (and one .net which is an experiment at ranking for USA rather than UK), however after spending a bit of time looking at a few keywords I noticed a couple of .me.uk domains still available. Every other extension for these had gone, including .info, .me, .co, .tv etc etc however the me.uk was still available.
First thing I thought was “thats because their rubbish”. Second thing I thought was “says who?”. I snapped up both of the domains, chucked them on my hosting with a quick wordpress install and 500 words of unique content. Each site is still using the standard wordpress theme, no plugins, no pages, just a 500 word post on each domain. I had originally planned on doing a bit of split testing with a couple of different networks with these 2 domains, but instead decided to use the same network for each.
Site 1 gets 9,800 searches per month according to Google and site 2 gets around 12,100 searches per month. I have a site in a similar area and know these are about right (maybe a little on the high side). Each site would have an average order value of around £100 giving an average commission of £10-15.
I submitted a spun unique article for each of the sites to the network and let it start syndicating. The next day both the sites where indexed in Google, Site 1 ranking 185th and site 2 at 199th. I left it for another 2 weeks before checking again. Site 1 moved up to 54th and site 2 moved up to 92nd. I then submitted another 2 articles to the same network and left it for another week, which brings us to today.
The current ranks are site 1 at 22nd and site 2 and 43rd. Thats pretty good considering these are brand new domains, with extensions that appearently “dont work” and no real link building or content. I then thought it would be interesting to see where the .org.uk and .co.uk domains where ranking. I have checked and all were developed when I bought the .me.uk domains.
Keyword1.co.uk – 12 years old – 67 Links – PR 0
Keyword1.org.uk – 2 years old – 36 Links – PR 0
Keyword1.me.uk – 3 weeks old – 18 Links – PR NA
Keyword2.co.uk – - 13 years old – 3 Links – PR 0 (has since had the site deleted from it, so no longer developed)
Keyword2.org.uk – 5 years old – 160 Links – PR1
Keyword3.me.uk – 3 weeks old – 12 Links – PR NA
And the rankings for each of the keywords is as follows:
Keyword 1: me.uk: 22nd | .org.uk: 58th | .co.uk: 152nd
Keyword 2: me.uk: 43rd | .org.uk: 64th | .co.uk: NOT RANKING
So my 3 week old me.uk domains are outranking aged domains with more (granted, not many more) backlinks and higher page rank on supposedly “better” domains.
Next time you are looking for a domain and you want an exact match domain, dont forget to check for a me.uk if the org.uk and co.uk are both gone!
EDIT – The sites are still climbing in the rankings. Just the day after posting this post Site 1 is now 16th and site 2 is now 35th!
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