I have been following the Candy.com domain name since its $3 Million dollar purchase and how it was ranking in search engines since the development of the website and launch. The domain name was purchased in early June 2009 and the site actually launched in July of 2009 by G&J Holdings.

In less than 1 year, Candy.com now ranks naturally on the first page of Google.com for the matching search term candy. As of at least today, the page 1 ranking has taken place and currently Candy.com ranks in the # 3 spot on Google in my region.

The last time I wrote about the Candy.com domain ranking in search engines was back in February 2010 and at that time Candy.com was stuck on page 2 of Google for the candy search term. Please keep in mind that search engine traffic is only one form of website traffic, as Direct Navigation is another vital one that ONLY the domain owner gets. The direct navigation traffic to Candy.com is extremely targeted and valuable to the domain name owners. This is hard to track for somebody other than the domain name owner, so that is the reason I put more focus on the search engine rankings.

Recap for Ranking on Google.com

On Aug 12th 2009 I had reported that Candy.com ranked #2 on Page #4 for the search term candy.

By September 14, 2009 Candy.com continued to climb in the natural search engine rankings for the search term candy. On Google.com, Candy.com then ranked on Page 2, # 7!

By November 14, 2009 it seemed that Candy.com had hit a little bump in the road and dropped one spot on Google to Page 2, # 8!

By February 17, 2010 Candy.com was still stuck on page 2 at Google and even dropped another spot to Page 2, # 9! If it had dropped 2 spots total, it would have end up on Page 3!

As of today, June 7, 2010 Candy.com has made a HUGE leap to not only hit page 1 of Google for the matching search term candy, they are now in the top 3 natural ranking sites getting ever so close to # 1!

Ranking on Bing and Yahoo

September 14, 2009 Candy.com held a page 2, # 5 spot for the candy search term.

November 14, 2009 Candy.com has dropped off the map on Bing.com . After digging 8 pages in, I did find the sub-domain, blog.candy.com

February 17, 2010 and Candy.com still is no place to be found but the sub-domain blog.candy.com climbed to a Page 3, # 3 listing just below two listings for Candy.org.

June 7, 2010 and Yahoo is still showing little to no love to Candy.com . I stopped looking at going 8 pages deep on Yahoo.com and didn’t see a single natural listing for Candy.com . At Bing.com on the other hand, Candy.com is getting a little more love and is currently displayed #1 natural listing but on page # 2 for the matching search term candy.

Social Media

Candy.com is pretty active on both Facebook.com and Twitter.com. Back in February 2010 Candy.com had the following followers:

• Twitter.com : 375 Followers
• Facebook.com : 2,281 fans

As of today, June 7, 2010 those numbers have increased to:

• Twitter.com : 404
• Facebook.com : 5,738

Clearly a lot more love is coming from the Facebook community but I also think Facebook has a much cleaner user interface and a larger following. Tweets are so easily missed on Twitter but are easily found on FB.  At least daily updates take place via the Candy.com Twitter account and appears the same for the Facebook fan page.

Little things that still nag me!

The ugly ass "candy blog" which is still run on a standard WordPress theme. Pay a designer $100 to match the theme on the Candy.com site already!!!!

No cross linking in blog posts back to Candy.com (HUGE MISTAKE)! One tiny link in upper right hand corner linking back to Candy.com is in no way enough. Pay a blogger to blog for you who knows SEO, Linking etc. This can REALLY help out the site!

Update, update, update. It appears they have gone away with blogging at blog.candy.com as the last update was in March and this is also a mistake. An active blog is very important IMO and easily allows you to stay connected with customers to them let know what is going on at the business! The blog should be as active as the Facebook fan page is!

Overall

It took Candy.com less than 1 year to show the power of generic domain names helping them to rank on the first page of Google naturally. With a bit more SEO work, the site would have likely ranked faster and also would likely be #1 on Google now. These things are never a for sure thing but just how I feel. The current # 3 natural ranking for candy will GREATLY increase the traffic to the site. Climbing those last two spots will not be easy but with each one gained, traffic will increase even more!

The site could do a little better job with staying connected to its customers on the site directly, which would also help the site via search engines and traffic to the site using the blog.

Clearly Candy.com ranks for many more search terms other than candy itself but those are a lot harder for me to keep track of and a pain in the ass to do all the searches th. These type of searches also likely bring a large portion of traffic. Using the blog, they could hit heavy on these type of terms with content… so they may consider using the power of a blog (and cross linking) to help them with this.

I’m sure the Melville Candy company is pretty excited about this # 3 ranking on Google, as they should be!