I thought I was the only one facing this problem, but it seems to be widespread. If your revenues do not increase whatever you do, it is time to move on. This year I spent a lot of money on domains experimenting. Many things did not work out as expected, but I have managed to develop alternate sources of revenue (not from domain parking). For other revenue sources, the income increases in proportion to the effort and time. There will also not be much competition also since not everyone can afford to spend so much initially to learn from their mistakes.

The PR update is going on, and it seems the earlier formula for getting PR is no longer valid. The author has correctly pointed out that if everyone is doing something, people feel it is correct, but that is not necessarily true.

Some of my websites have lost PR , some have gained PR . I have many websites and I don’t buy text links, so I think the criteria for assigning PR has changed. Till the market for links/traffic stabilises, I don’t think I will buy any more GTLD domains and concentrate on adding content.

Getting good content for a website takes a lot of time and effort, but atleast when I need some information in future, I know where I can find it online.

It is better to buy a large number of not so valuable domain names.Though the renewal fees will be higher, few will waste their time stealing the domain names, which can only be sold for a few dollars more than their registration fee.

Till October last year, I was getting a lot of traffic for my websites from Google, since then the traffic from Google has almost disappeared. Visitors to my websites who have found them useful, often post a link to them on forums and message boards, so I was wondering what was wrong. 

 I had specifically asked whether it was possible for a third party to get your site removed on Webmasterworld but a Google Representative said that it was almost impossible for a third party to remove a website. Now my worst fears have been confirmed, some one has been systematically removing all my websites from Google’s index.

I often check my sites AWstats and I know that there are some people tracking many of my websites (may be just to see how effective they have been in getting my websites removed). I suppose they have spent a lot of time getting my websites removed from Search Engines, they have nothing better to do. This website has also been removed from Google’s index, though I never break any rules.  

I see this happening all the time this year, you develop a good content website, it ranks in Search engines. Your competitors who fill their websites with keyword rich junk, get your site removed from the search engine and you wonder what is wrong. SEO is a complete waste of time for Google.  

Search engines are manipulated so easily to give junk results, in a few years some one will definitely develop a better way to find useful information on the internet.  

Having one large popular website may be easier to handle, but you are more likely to be targetted by competitors, who will spend a lot of time ensuring that you are removed from search engines.

If you have thousands of ( thousandsof is a nice domain name) websites, your traffic and income remains more consistent.

If you own a lot of domains, developing websites is the best option.  Search engines like Google are useful for certain kinds of  information, they are not useful for finding reliable information.  For example, for the term “work at home” , the 3rd website has a lot more credibility than the first 2. For  “work at home India” , most of websites returned by Google are scams. People find the better work at home websites only from references. So there is a definite need for more reliable search results .

A lot of Adsense publishers have been affected, but the amounts they are making are fairly substantial – 20K to 70K USD (or even more). I don’t spend much money on Adwords, but it seems to be a cleanup. I wish people would add more useful content to their websites, you wil not find information online on simple things like estimating waterproofing costs or fixing a ceiling fan.

I had decided I should learn some thing new and diversify my sources of income, so I have been experimenting with domains for the past few months. Unlike Adsense, where investment is minimal, with domains you learn only from your costly mistakes. Now I am relieved, I tried, putting all your eggs in one basket is very risky.

Reselling domains is very time consuming, there are very few buyers and most of the good domains are very expensive. But if you select good domains for development, you can make some money from the websites for a long time. It is also very time consuming I manually analyse atleast 50-60 domains before registering one or two. And the domain tasters like DomainDoorman, Domainsite, PocketDomain are always picking up domains, so you have to be quick. Maybe in a few months I will figure out the “formula” .

I suppose .mobi websites will become popular for products and services which people who spend a lot of time travelling use (and have high end mobile phones), but currently most of the domain names are purchased by domain investors. Since this is a new tld, the parking revenue is almost nil for most .mobi domain names.

When a new TLD is introduced, domain investors grab all the good domain names, recover their money by making a few high value sales. For .in, many good names have dropped recently, some have decent traffic.

.com’s continue to be the best best, received payment for my first sale on Sedo, more than 15 characters long. They were very prompt with the payment, I received it even before I was notified that the domain was transferred away. The transfer itself took more than 40 days, because the domain name could not be transferred away to another registrar within 60 days of registration.

With long domain names,while registering a domain, you feel it is good name, after a few weeks you wonder why you bought it. There is a limited supply of shorter domain names and people are less likely to make mistakes typing out the names. But for .mobi like most other gTLDs, most good short names are already purchased by domain investors. 

I have a fairly large number of  .info and .org domains and I will have to renew them by September like the .com and the .net. Have to keep a big budget and compare prices. 

Unlike .com domains, most .info domains take a long time to get established, but making information sites is simpler. In 2-3 months, I will get a clear picture.