.Club Reports Credit.Club on Page 1

The story about how Bruce Marler got Credit.Club is interesting, and it has been covered in a variety of news outlets, blogs, and forums. Marler already built a website on the domain name, and it appears to be doing well in Google already.

According to a tweet from .Club Registry CEO Colin Campbell, the Credit.Club website “hits first page of Google after only two weeks for term credit club.”

I did a Google search for that term, and I see that the website is currently ranked in the top 10 results.

Although it is always good to see a website get ranked right away by Google, I think there is still a lot of work to be done to make money on this website. I don’t know how regularly “credit club” is searched, but my gut tells me it’s not a whole lot (perhaps aside from people searching for a Canadian company called Credit Club).

My assumption is that all the news articles and links helped make Google aware of the website quickly. The real challenge will be to continue to grow the website’s Google presence. I presume credit related keyword rankings are competitive, and it will likely be a challenge to get the site ranked for important traffic bearing keywords. I understand that Bruce Marler does web development and marketing  for a living, so I am sure it’s a challenge he is ready to fully embrace.

I don’t believe the ranking necessarily means anything special about how Google treats new gTLD extensions. I think it shows exactly what has been said about Google before. These extensions aren’t treated differently than existing extensions. It could have been CreditClub.com or BruceMarlersCreditClub.org, and if it has authoratative links to it, Google will rank it accordingly.

I think it was a good decision for the .Club Registry to not clawback the domain name. That surely would have changed the story into a negative one. I suppose the Registry is lucky that other domain names weren’t hand registered when this glitch occurred.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. The term is not really all that competitive. It shows 590 average monthly searches and medium competition in Google keyword planner.

    Also, it is well known that newer websites can start with a higher rank, then get lowered. Matt Cutts said the following about this –

    “Matt explains that sometimes, Google has a hard time figuring out the original source of a new piece of content. But over time, i.e., days, weeks, months, Google is better able to figure out the most relevant result for a query due to indexing more signals over time. Thus, over time, the search results may settle down to a particular state; but early on, new pages may rank high and lose their rankings over time.”

    Brad

  2. Google sometimes shows extra love to new sites, and it is a low competition term to begin with. There are only a little over 50k pages on the entire internet using this phrase. Couple that with that fact that he probably got a lot of back links from the news surrounding the registration, and you have the perfect storm for good rankings. Not much to be said for coming in 4th in a race that nobody is trying to win though.

    The interesting takeaway is even more confirmation that Google considers the extension when matching the search phrase. See how “club” is bold in the domain? Some people were speculating that Google would only look before the dot to truly not consider the extension, and that you would need something like creditclub.club for Google to see “credit club” in your URL. Obviously that isn’t the case.

  3. It will do its Google dance as every new site does.

    Not sure what the hoopla is about the domain. I know you have to take Estibot with a grain of salt, but CreditClub.com gets a $1,700 valuation. So that makes this domain worth about $10 so he paid right on point.

    It is funny that because the .club registry say they valued it at $100k that he now got the deal of the year in the headlines.

    • ESTIBOT.com appraisals are jokes. Nobody take them serious. If you take the most expensive domain sales you will see many domains appraised under $1K when they where sold for over $1 million.

    • I sold a credit related domain in 2007 for 1.6 million. The estibot appraisal has never been even close, once as low as $3k. In fact, Estibot has been low on every domain I’ve ever sold, except one.

      The benefit of estibot isn’t the appraisal number but the comparable sales (when those sales are actually comparable).

  4. I have to agree that the term Credit Club has a low search volume and would need to be built into a brand for it to get serious traffic.
    The more I read about this case the more I believe there had to be some collusion between registry and Marler and the longer they deny it the more they look like rogues.
    What are the chances that one of the 700 attendees at Namescon is the person who registered Credit.Club out of the millions of people in this world. The numbers are staggering.
    Although there is a lot of information on the website, the overall look of the website is very plain and ugly especially being built by a WordPress expert and teacher. I think its a bad advert for his WordPress website business especially with the eyes of the world on it.
    I know you will say he didnt have much time but any WordPress epert worth their salt could have found a beautiful responsive theme to use quiclky and easily and it would have been a great advert to his Dot Sauce business.

  5. This was a total smokescreen play, .club didn’t realize they lost a $200K asset which was listed on startup.club for $200,000 for almost two weeks.

    When somebody pulled up a screenshot of the startup.club ad, all the sudden .club started an investigation. You have a Jeff Sass coming out, and saying it was a legit registration, these guys don’t know a $200,000 name from a $10 one.

    This whole thing seems engineered to keep the hype going, 163,000 registrations? While they said 1M during first month. .club is bleeding cash, and all the good GTLDs are still to be released.

    Not buying the BS guys. .rip

  6. If dotClub says it’s a 100k or 200k domain, would they buy it back for 90k? 50k? It’s still a nice sounding domain and the keyword goes good with the extension, and for a $10 reg there is little downside to making a go of it. Would be great to put a real business behind it like Coffee.club.

  7. Exact Match
    book club – 8,100
    wine club – 12,100
    cookie club – 2,900
    credit club – 50

    See where we’re going with this? I’ve never heard of credit club in my life. It’s not hard to rank for stuff nobody is actually searching for or with very low search volume.

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