Had one of those “why oh why didn’t I think of that?” moments today coming across Project Word. I reckon it stands as good a chance of being an overnight internet sensation as Million Dollar Home Page.
How does it work? Put simply, it’s a way for businesses to market themselves online. Simply buy a keyword (£1 a pop, and you can buy as many as you want) that best sums up what you do or are trying to sell. You then own that word and can link your site to that word, which is permanently displayed on the site.
It’s only a month or two old and yet they’ve already sold over 5,000 words, and with a bit more publicity I can see it taking off very easily. It’s probably open to a little bit of sabotage but all in all I reckon the youthful folks behind it are on to a winner.
I for one am not going to sit around to find out - I’ve already bought ‘onlinepr’, ‘digitalpr’ and ‘onlinepublicrelations’, and if people start clicking through, I’ll be back for more!
Harry Bailey
September 29th, 2008
David,
The people who have created the site are on to a winner. Those likely to buy the keywords are those who don’t fully understand search engine optimisation or whether buying up words on the project word site will actually be of any benefit to them. They are likely buying them ‘just incase’ and ‘to stop someone else getting there first’.
If you look at the code of the site you see that they are using rel=”nofollow” in all the link tags. This tells search engines not to rank the site that the link points to and so there is no benefit to search engine placement.
As far as people finding businesses using the project word site, I would trust a search engine with ‘plumber manchester’ infinitely more than I would trust the project word site with ‘plumbermanchester’ or ‘manchester plumber’
They site creators will still make a packet though. Noone cares about £1 a time for a word, but they all add up.
Harry
David Prior
September 29th, 2008
Interesting thoughts Harry… I have to say I’m definitely in the ‘just in case’ camp, although the site’s already directing a few visitors my way.