I was so inspired by a boilerplate product comparison site I saw for sale in the Sitepoint Marketplace that I decided to create one myself. Purely for experimentation, you understand. When I say product comparison site, I mean one that displays a product comparison table in a particular niche,  the table being peppered with affiliate links. My chosen subject was registry cleaners, so naturally the site would be about registry cleaner reviews.

Buying A Registry Cleaner Review Site

I went searching on Google  for sites related to spyware. My plan was to contact the owners of sites that met the following criteria with a proposition to buy their site:

• The site had PR > 3
• The site seemed to be abandoned. Website owners who haven't updated their sites for a while are more likely to sell at a cheaper price than those with currently active sites
• The subject of the site was related to spyware, registry cleaners, malware removal etc

I contacted several owners of anti-spyware sites, and one replied saying that his site was not for sale. However, he gave me a list of domains that he was prepared to sell.

3 domains were no hopers, but there was one that was one that possessed the following qualities:

• Pagerank: it was PR3
• Inbound links: Yahoo Site Explorer showed a good set of inbound links from a variety of sources
• Age: the domain was registered in 2002
• Traffic: the site was receiving 26,000 uniques per month. I was very skeptical of these figures.

The site was well established in the downloads niche, and some downloads were for spyware removal software. Downloads sites aren't a million miles away from registry cleaner sites. Although the site was established and operational, the design broke in Firefox so that was a concern. In the end, I decided to buy this site for $500. I doubted that the traffic numbers were accurate (I didn't ask for proof), but the strength of the site's other properties more than compensated for that. If it turned out that the site got this amount of traffic - bonus!

The content was of no use to me for content's sake, but I thought I'd leave the pages there for internal linking benefits.

The Plan For My Registry Cleaner Review Site

The plan is a current one as I'm still working on this project and is broken down into the following steps:

• leave all existing pages on the site. There are over 1,000 pages, all adding some SEO value via internal linking.
• install Wordpress on the root. The new Wordpress home page will benefit directly from the old 1,000 + pages all linking back to it. The new design will look a whole lot better than the old design.
• create a few pages on the subject of registry cleaners.
• the new pages, of course, won't benefit from internal links from the old pages and it is too much work to add 1,000 + links to them manually. For this reason, I will:
• Identify the old pages on the existing site that have the highest PR and put internal links on them back to the new Wordpress registry cleaner pages, using my targeted search phrases as anchor text.
• Identify all 404 not found URLs using Google Webmaster Tools. I will then 301 redirect these 404s back to the home page so that any links to them will confer their SEO value back to the home page. The alternative is to create a brand new page for those missing 404s but that's too much work for a lazy arse business man like me.
• You know what? If it turns out that this traffic magnet does attract the alleged number of visitors, I'm going to prostitute my values and just slap adsense on some pages. I'll need to wait maybe a month to figure out from my web analytics software which pages are the most popular and add it to those. I'm not hand coding adsense on 1,000 + pages.

My Progress To Date

I was supposed to be waiting for the previous owner to send me a cd with the 30,000 files that comprise the site but I got excited and couldn't wait. Instead, I used WinHTTrack to copy the entire site to my hard drive and once I had control of the domain, uploaded those files to my server. I'm still waiting for the now redundant cd.

The site worked OK once uploaded so I installed Wordpress on the root, leaving all existing 90s retro style pages intact. The new Wordpress homepage now took the place of the old style home page, and all 1,000 old style pages now link back to it.

Using Google Webmaster Tools, I found all my 404's and redirected them back to the home page in my htaccess file. There were 54 404s but making 54 entries in htaccess took far less time and effort than creating 54 brand new pages.

I've found 11 PR2 pages that I plan to put links on to my (currently) 3 new pages.

So here is my registry cleaner reviews site and here is my regcure review page.

This is just the first part of my registry cleaner shenanegans. Stay tuned for more episodes that present mistakes that could be avoided and abominably  misinformed decisions. You know I'm capable of it.