Diablo 3 Strategy Guide #
About the Project #
In the 7th grade, I discovered what it means to have a played a truly epic game. Diablo 2 came out at that time, and since I opened the package I was consumed in battling the minions of Hell. So when the opportunity came, over 10 years later, to help create a strategy guide for Diablo 3, you bet your buttons I jumped at the opportunity.
The Strategy of Our Strategy…Guide #
One of my co-workers had the foresight to grab “diablo3strategyguide.com” back in 2007. Given that it was such a targeted domain name, it seemed like a pristine opportunity to take advantage of the weight that search engines gave domain names.
Our approach to creating the content and getting people to pay for our elite knowledge was to offer the majority of the content for free. This would help us with the organic search results in Google, along with building trust with those who enter our site. Only the people that wanted the ultra-secret tricks would have to pay for the guide.
Outcome #
Unfortunately, there were three things that happened that ensured that we would get no visibility from search engines.
The first was that Google began to seriously devalue the weight of exact and partial match domain names. Having the exact match of Diablo3StrategyGuide.com didn’t matter to related queries so much anymore.
The second thing that happened was that Google now began to penalize websites that appeared to be trying to game their Pagerank system. In the past, they merely counted any superfluous or shady links as a zero. Around the time we launched, they began to count those negatively towards your domain authority.
The third, and most critically sucky thing that happened was that we got “porn-blasted.” This is where someone (a competitor) pays someone else to link to our domain from literally hundreds of porn sites. All the links also had the anchor text of “Diablo 3 Strategy Guide.” So when Google saw these links they thought we were trying to game the system and penalized our domain authority, which they previously would have just counted as zero.
There was little we could do. When the game launched, you would not find our site in the first 50 pages of Google for anything related to “Diablo 3 Strategy.” We stuck it out, made a little bit of money, but the possible success we could of had was gone forever. Either way, it was a fun project to work on.
