New Project. Fake News. Doxing. Domain Question.

[voLdie]

Hey guys,

I started a new project 3 days ago. I already have 9 articles live and 2 have gone pretty fucking viral due to manufacturing a shit storm on social media.

Half of my posts are social bait and the other half are tailored for organic search. The domain I have been using is brand new but well branded.

My question is should i grab an aged domain and swap it over? If so any resources on that its been a few years since grabbing a drop or should I stick with my new domain and if so how long will that hold me back comparatively?

I due already have some in article links to the new one from massive players in the space and a fortune 100 company.

Also, for consideration I may have gone to hard on some fake news and could be at risk of doxing so it would be a plus to switch from that perspective. While consequences are not legal ones but could be personally smeared in the media.

Thank you!

 

[JamaicanMoose]

301 the expired domain to an inner-page on your existing site. If you get dox'd, then switch everything over to the expired domain.

 

[voLdie]

To be clear I don't have an expired domain at this point. I am figuring being so early in though it couldn't hurt to setup a "new" expired domain as the main then 301 the current domain to the expired one. Confusing wording on my part apologies.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you're attracting links of the value you're talking about, the last thing I'd do is start 301-ing around. I'd ride it out.

Typically an SEO project might take a year to see the throttle released:

But with virality and authoritative links coming in you can absolutely break out of that holding pattern earlier. Google isn't going to ignore your site which is extremely relevant at the moment just because it's new.

The old game used to be to try to fake this process out using spam and link velocity. If you're doing it for real with actual sites with contextual links and not bogus spam, you'll be fine.

Or you can get greedy by counting chickens before they hatch and switch domains and end up having to wait a year.

If you're going to keep pumping out fake news then yeah, you probably want to protect yourself, even if that means risking delaying progress (even aged domains take time to kick in). If you're done with that marketing tactic then it'll fade out of memory within a few days and you'll have nothing to worry about, I reckon. News cycles are happening at ever increasing speed, usually less than 24 hours now, timewave zero style.

 

[voLdie]

Yea, I have a knack at this point for spurring things to go viral mostly by pissing off two strongly opposing sides and letting them go at it.

I have several sock puppet accounts I use to try and drag influencers in and someone made a connection back to the money website. OPSEC lesson for sure.

It seams to be passing; probably getting about 5k - 7k uniques today from Twitter but thats way less than yesterday. My skin is pretty thick so even if I did get doxed by some big boys in the industry your sentiment about the 24 hour news cycle is correct. Fuck em'.

Going to continue holding out and stick with this brand. I made some slight edits to the article to make it less incendiary and news worthy to help quiet this as well.

Thanks for the reassurance and advice @Ryuzaki

 

[Darth]

Strange question maybe - but how can they dox you? Isn't that easy enough to protect against?

 

[voLdie]

For the sake of learning I'll expand.

One of my sock puppet accounts posted my sites article on Twitter, with a spurring comment, which was retweeted with a comment by the celebrity it was about.

The sock pupped accounts website in the Twitter profile led to a website that had my real name with a picture in the past. So with archive.org someone could get my real identity.

Someone in the tweets comments called me out and said the IP's were the same at some point for both sites and found a reddit account loosely connected where I had posted in my local towns subreddit. Saying shit about how he knows where I live etc etc.

Things have died down now and his info didn't pick up to much attention because most people related to the article are not super technical.

I received a fuck ton of social signals and some nice links so all in all a positive outcome.