MyPR – Hoist by my own Petard

• This will be of interest to my fellow SEO freaks…

On Monday 18 March 2024 I re-established my https://alan.straton.org.za sub domain web site after it was deleted at the beginning of 2023.

Straton.org.za has always been live and open to visits from Search Engine bots and has garnered a solid level of respect from the bots.

I have a series of Google Alerts running and one of them is for any mentions of ‘Alan Straton’ picked up by Google.

And now here is the interesting twist:

I only submitted alan.straton.org.za to the MyPR Directory on 19 March 2024. See: https://mypr.co.za/directory/a/the-write-stuff/

The straton.org.za domain was first registered in 2006 whilst the MyPR domain was first registered in 2012. On that basis alone the older domain should be more trustworthy but my conclusions add a twist to the findings.

AND

Despite the alan.straton.org.za site being well optimised with a ligeral sprinkling of the keyword Alan Straton Google ‘found’ the MyPR Directory entry BEFORE the alan.straton.org.za site.

My Google Alert this morning highlighted the MyPR Directory entry and not the actual web site which should be very powerful as the domain name is actually my name.

My (strictly amateur) findings from this are:

• Despite Google viewing Directories as ‘competition’ they are still powerful in terms of SEO
• In order to stay at the top of the SERPS one needs to be consistent, have no interruption of ‘service’ and post regularly
• Judicious use of social media helps
• It would appear that the bot views a sub domain as ‘new’ and applies those new site rules
• The Google bot ‘trusted’ the MyPR domain over the newly re-established domain name of alan.straton.org.za which supports the domain age theory in that the older your domain the more trustworthy it is seen to be.

What does this mean for you?

Make use of the MyPR Directory and submit your pR or related business for inclusion as MyPR is seen as a trusted domain which, in turn, will give your web site added ‘link juice’ to get to the first page of results.

CLICK HERE to submit your press release to MyPR.co.za.