I have been following the Candy.com website launch ever since the domain name sold for $3 Million USD (+ 2% royalties) to watch the category killer domain name climb the ranks in search engines. Since the domain was a parking page before being sold, I thought it would be interesting to watch the site climb in search engines with the killer domain Candy.com but having a full website with it.

When Candy.com launched in July of 2009, the site really didn’t exist in SE’s. It was indexed but not any place where people could actually find it by searching for what people search for when buying candy online! Since the start, I have put the focus on the specific exact match keyword candy as the search term and how it ranks.

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!

As of Today, February 17, 2010 Candy.com is still stuck on page 2 at Google and even dropped another spot to Page 2, # 9! If it drops 2 spots total, it will end up on Page 3!

The current trend appears the domain is going the wrong way for its peak Page 2, # 7 spot. Not far clearly, but positive gains are always better.

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.

Yahoo.com has never been kind to Candy.com since I have been tracking it. I have often looked 7+ pages deep and never found Candy.com ranking for the search term candy. Today, February 17, 2010 is no different. I dug some 7+ pages and no rankings for Candy.com what so ever.

Social Media for Candy.com

Candy.com does promote its site with Twitter.com and Facebook.com . They do update each account a fair amount but the following is very poor IMO! The twitter account for Candy.com (candydotcom) has a tiny following of 375 people at time of posting and they only follow 14. The Candy.com Facebook fan page has a little better following of 2,281 fans at posting.

Getting people to TALK about Candy.com is important and using social media is a way to do it inexpensively, so I think more focus needs to be put on this! Growing traffic to the site will help it rank better in search engines! The sites main source of traffic is likely the direct navigation, Facebook fan page,  the page 2 rank for the search term candy and the search term candy.com, social media, paid advertising with Google Adwords and the affiliate program with CJ.com.

I see no reason why Candy.com can’t rank at least in the Top 5 of P1 on Google for the matching search term of its domain name but really has not moved since back in September 2009, actually dropping 2 spots. It still has only been 5 months since ranking on Page 2 at Google, but each passing day is important, let alone months! According to Google’s Adwords tool, globally the exact term candy is searched for over 1.2 Million times Per Month! Not ranking high for that term is a Big Deal, because a lot of traffic is going to the P1 listings (mainly the top 5).

Candy.com may want to consider hiring a professional SEO company and maybe try some different tactics on the Social Media side to help a little bit. They are currently using a default Wordpress theme that looks nothing like Candy.com and when viewing it, looks pretty unprofessional IMO. Nothing really "links back" to Candy.com from the "blog" which doesn’t help either. One small link on the upper right sidebar was all that I could see, so this doesn’t help drive traffic TO Candy.com. That is the reason behind the blog and promoting with it on social networking sites! Since the blog is used to promote things via Social Networking, not allowing people to easily click over to Candy.com and buy your products, doesn’t make sense to me! The blog is a good idea, it just needs to be used better and look like Candy.com.

Clearly a lot of people still use Yahoo and Bing, so putting some focus on those search engines as well as getting that P1 on Google could greatly help. The traffic surge and likely sales will grow drastically if Candy.com can grab a top 3-5 spot on Google for the candy search term IMO.

The site is still young but it needs to prevent the dropping of SERP’s it already has.