If you check out my previous post on Praying to Google for Higher Pagerank, you can note that I’m trying to figure out a nice cost-effective scheme to boost website pagerank. I’ve been thinking all day long on how much money it will cost me to open 23 web directories and make full scale web promotion with directory submissions and paid blogging in order to make them reach PR4. The basic idea was that when they reach pr4 I’m going to offer paid directory submissions to all the directories until I return my investment and then sell them to cover the expenses for their development, but now I turned my head to one other possibility which seems more flexible and could earn quite more money than by selling directories.

My primary calculations for the promotion costs on each directory in order to reach pr4 was around $90 to $120 UDS, but in reality when I sell them I won’t get better price than $200 for each and that’s not very nice return of investment. Therefore I’m going to make one interesting experiment to see if this will bring more pr and help me earn double, and maybe even triple.

Instead of opening 23 directories, I will open 23 blogs. Those blogs will cost me around $90-$120 (same as directory) to promote to PR4, but a blog can have also a directory as Sub-Domain, and therefore I will spend another $90-$120 in promotion of the Sub-Directory. This will total in around $180-$240 per blog…

Using both domain and sub-domain promotion my primary domain should be able to reach PR5, and the sub-domain should be stable PR4. Having PR5 blog, I can sell links, blog posts, reviews and much more. This should be able to help me earn somewhere around $50-$100 per month (and this is without too much effort from my side) and also if I sell directory listings from the sub-domain I should be able to earn around $20-$60 per month. In total the income margins should be around $70-$160 per month. This basically will cover my expenses in about 3 – 4 months at most and from that point I will have pure profit.

Also we have to note that if I try to sell those blogs, they can be easily sold on prices around $300-$600 dollars each which leads me to the idea that building blogs instead of directories is quite more profitable.

Currently I’m not 100% sure that this idea will work, but I’m almost certain that even if it doesn’t bring me that much profit at least is going to cover my expenses and bring me some stable $40-$50 per month income from link sales. This will be a nice experiment, and I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.

Now let‘s say a few words about this directory experiment, because I got too far from the main topic. The situation is the following. I just paid for 1000 directory submissions on my subdomain directory to my website and the test will show the following very interesting statistics. 1st how many directories will actually accept to list a brand new/empty website directory; 2nd Will Google show my subdomain links to the primary domain as inbound links from external page or will count them as internal linking. Most of the SEOs that I know claim that a subdomain is treated as separate website and therefore should show the links as external. That would be nice to see if the new algorithms threat it as internal or external.

In the best scenario, Google will threat my directory links as separate website and list them in external inbound links which will boost up my PageRank. Also submitting to 1000 directories should help the sub-domain gain some nice PR and therefore will boost quite well my primary domain.

I suppose within a month this test should show some results and on next Google PR update we will most definitely see what strategy worked the best. I‘m starting to think that if there is a reasonable acceptance rate of subdomain links with directory submissions (for me acceptable rate is more than 50%) then this will most definitely help with the PR and rankings for our keywords because even if Google does not count the subdomain links as separate domain it will still bring some value for internal linking purposes and that will be a win-win situation.

UPDATE: June 21 2007

Last weekend, Google finally updated the Google Webmaster Tools backlink count and this showed up some interesting results. It happened so that Google does take subdomain links as Internal Links, but I‘m not sure what the PR value passed will be until the PR update comes (I assume that will be in about month or at most two). Then I can give some better information on the experiment. Actually the fact that most of my subdomain directory pages are indexed is really good, but the bad thing is that they all ended up in the supplemental index and this will most probably mean that they won‘t pass any good PR until I put them out. I‘ll soon device some strategy to put some unique content in them, but that will be different experiment that will be done pretty soon when I have the proper time to fool around with the SEO Website CMS directory.