SEO Theory question

I'm relatively new to SEO and have been reading countless amounts of threads to improve my understanding I've come up with a few questions that I'm not really able to answer effectively from my study and wondered what input I could get here.

Let's say for this hypothetical scenario I know the name of an NFL team(lets call them Florida Red Cats for this example) that will (tomorow/next week) be announced to be joining the league. No one else knows this information and so I go out and and purchase the exact match domain floridaredcats dotcom. My question is given I have no competition what would it take and how long would it take for my site to rank number one in google for the search term florida red cats. My limited understanding says backlinks but how would these be attained, what type and how many? What methods would get me there soonest white hat or black hat? I understand that in order to stay at number for the long term my preference should be white hat back linking.

In addition after the team has been announced to join the league I have competition in google and people now have bought exact match domains .org, .net, .co etc. etc.

How would I maintain my position over this competition and also Is there a hierachy in terms of search engine rank depending on the domain suffix? Would the fact that I own the .com carry more weight than the other domain name suffixes?

further still how would florida-red-cats dotcom match up against my domain name and the other domain names that end in different suffixes but are not hyphenated?

Many questions but hopefully it provokes an insightful discussion thanks in advance for your thoughtful contribution.

If you want the SOONEST ranking, definitely it's black-hat. But black-hat moment your site is penalized, your website will be gone. For long term ranking sustaining, it will be white-hat.

ZestMedia said:

If you want the SOONEST ranking, definitely it's black-hat. But black-hat moment your site is penalized, your website will be gone. For long term ranking sustaining, it will be white-hat.

Click to expand...

just to let you know that even if your site is whitehat, your site will get penalized also if you do it wrong....

btw... does whitehat exist???

Good questions planetadam,

For your first question, it is hard to say how long it will take you to rank number one for your specific keyword. Even though there is no or little competition, it really depends on what you do that will determine how fast the site will rank. Its like asking how fast you can get to the corner store from your house. If we don't know whether you are walking, running or driving a car, the answer will vary.

The other TLDs that you mentioned are pretty much the same as your .com in the eyes of a search engine. The .com does not carry any more weight and neither do the other TLDs. As far as maintaining your rank over them, you just have to keep doing what you are doing and do more than your competition. Be a better source of information than your competitors. Optimize your pages better. Make better content, etc.

Its also hard to answer your last question about hyphenated domain names. Really that kind of stuff is so marginal that you shouldn't be worried about it. If other sites are outranking you it won't be because they had a similar domain name or because one was hyphenated and one wasn't. Outranking your competition means having a better product (in this case content). The better your content is, the more people that will share it and want to link to it. That is what will make the difference.

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Thanks for the response Shawn appreciate the insights you have given. The only question I have regarding your post is what it is that one could do to improve how fast the site would rank. In your opinion for SEO in this kind of scenario what would be the equivalents of walking, running, driving a car etc? What I mean to say is, what are the different ways if any for google to notice and index a website quickly?

Social media seems to work fairly well for indexing things "white hat". Twitter is no-follow, however it seems whenever I retweet an url that's never been backlinked, it's indexed within 1-2 days.

I take the analogy with terms of walking, or running, with regard to content.

Build it up now and tweak it for later so you can trickle it in terms of quantity, as well as high quality. You wouldn't be posting in the white hat section if you wanted a quick churn and burn site, especially since you have a brand that no one is privy to and will be established.

Your website could rank faster with a blackhat method, but you have the risk of getting penalized.