Yahoo: All .US Country Code Names Poor Quality!

A very interesting subject on the-web is that ALL .US extension domains are banned by the Yahoo feed under the title of Quality Block. Several pay-per-click parking firms who use the Yahoo PPC feed have confirmed that to be correct, and said yes, Yahoo thinks every single .us domain must be poor quality and thus are banned. Isn’t that an incredible wide-ranging assumption to make!

It’s been an issue for at least 2 or 3 years from what we understand. It appears both Yahoo and some of the parking firms who have been given our .us domains to monetize using the Yahoo feed in-effect keep it a secret and allegedly simply assumed we would not notice the fact we always get zero income from our dot-us country code domains.

It’s amazing there has been basically no discussion we have seen about this serious issue. It would seem like a major internet player like Yahoo allegedly hating its own country-code domain extension to such a degree as to ban them all from pay-per-click revenue should be major news and discussed at length in the media. Instead, it appears to be stonewalled with nothing but silence from most everyone, including the media, other domain blogs and the forums.

What is the SEO Value of No Anchor Text in Links?

This is regarding anchor text in a link. Of course, website owners and html programmers realize the importance of having “anchor text” in a link which appears on the page before the closing tag but the issue is regarding the effect of “not” using any visible anchor text.

For example, on many blogs and websites there are often images which are clickable and go to a linked site since the clickable-link is in the code. However, the image is often there mostly for its graphical impact and also acts as a link when clicked. However, there is no indication to the site visitor to click-on the link and in fact the visitor may not realize they can click on the image to visit a linked website.

The question is does the fact there may be NO visible anchor text detract or even eliminate the link value in the search engines and if the answer is yes, to what degree does it negate or dilute the value of the link?

An example of this question is the picture of the anchor below. When clicked-on the link goes to the home-page of this website but what is the effect (if any) of there being no visible anchor text on the page?

Property.com/Properties.com vs Buying a New TLD

Breaking News: Rick Schwartz sells Property.com & Properties.com for $4 million plus stock. Of course, congrats to Rick on his latest amazing domain sales.

That great domain name sale got me seriously thinking about something I have been dwelling on for a long time, which is the potential impact of the new gtlds, which will be coming online as soon as 2012.

What I mean by that is that since the .property and .properties tld extensions can be purchased for $185,000 each (plus other fees and expenses) it makes the 185k cost look like a great bargain (at least to me), compared to spending millions on the dot-com domains.

Think about this for a minute, would you prefer to own property.com at a cost of a few million dollars, or buy your very own ‘property’ extension for less than 10% of the dot-com price? At this time, some of you may say property.com is best but I feel that view is mostly because so few realize the great impact the new extensions will have in the future. In fact, I predict they will eventually dominate over other tld extensions.

A reason I say that is I am sure most all large and possibly mid-size corporations (maybe even some wealthy individuals) will buy their own extension. After a while I feel it is likely they will decide to brand under their own extension instead of the dot-com.

For example, assuming Ford buys .ford and also owns ford.com, don’t you believe one day they will switch their online brand to .ford and simply redirect ford.com to .ford? Keep in mind, dot-ford should be able to resolve stand-alone, depending on the server dns setup, so you can just typein “ford” to your browser and it will resolve. Same is true for “property” and “properties.”

So again, why spend millions buying the dot-com when you can buy the word without the .com to the right of the dot for 185k? Also, keep in mind, that cost is expected to drop sharply in a few years, well below 185k.

An excellent example of the benefit of going right-of-the-dot vs left-of-the-dot is the acronym domain-name “POS.COM” (a somewhat obscure acronym intended to mean “Point Of Sale”) which has me wondering why anyone today would offer almost a million dollars for pos.com when for “only” 185k they can as an alternative possibly purchase the .POS extension.

Another example is cars.net which sold for a staggering $170,000 last month according to dnjournal.com. The reason I say ‘staggering’ is since it’s a .net extension it will lose a good share of its traffic to .com from typeins. That’s a big reason dot-net is considered to be such a poor choice for a business and branding is difficult.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense for the buyer of cars.net to spend just 10% more and apply for the ‘cars’ tld? Can you imagine the powerful value of owning .cars tld vs cars.net! There really is no comparison when you consider how a business could easily brand themselves as ‘cars’ and tell everyone just typein the word ‘cars’ (and forget about adding .com or .net).

One more example is “StockBrokers.com” that recently sold for $185,000, which by coincidence is the exact same price as buying .stockbrokers extension.

Think seriously about this, wouldn’t you really prefer to tell websurfers to just typein “stockbrokers” to reach your website vs the longer “stockbrokers.com” There are many other examples where the cost of buying their own tld extension would have a lower cost vs buying the high-priced dot-com domain, and also make more sense for overall branding purposes.

As a cool monetary benefit, and option, you will also be able to sell to the left-of-the-dot names for extra income to enable other brokers to buy a domain such as TopBroker.StockBrokers.com, for example, plus you can sell unlimited numbers of other domains to the left-of-the-dot since you own the right-of-the-dot. Isn’t that interesting!

Does Domain Development Help Domain Value?

Assuming a minisite page and ad content is targeted to the domain keywords I don’t believe a minisite will be an overall negative. With that said, a site will also likely not increase the domain value. However, a benefit to the minisite is your domain can slowly grow its traffic thanks to SEO work but a parked page will not.

As far as domain revenue goes, a parked page should perform better but that assumes the domain get the same traffic numbers and the parked page also gets organic and typein traffic. If not, site development is much better. As a side note, we have never had an end-use (a non-domainer) potential domain buyer ever ask about its website, revenue or traffic stats. Even if we offered to give that information the buyers did not want to look at it. It appears only domainers and resellers ask those kind of questions.

A major negative and significant issue with potential sales of developed websites (even a very small site i.e. 1 or 2 pages) is when a potential domain buyer goes to the URL and sees an active website he may assume since it is a site it’s likely not for sale (but it sometimes is for sale). Therefore, the possible buyer (end-users in particular) may think why bother inquiring, and quickly exit the web-page to go looking for a different domain, or try hand registering an alternative extension, or going with a slight name variation.

For those working on developing all their names thinking development will help sales, this may come as a surprise. Stephen Douglas earlier had said “Maybe, the “DOMAIN FOR SALE” link needs to be double-sized and bold!. Oh no, now you got me paranoid! Thanks a lot, David.”

However, there is still a problem Stephen because an obvious Domain Name For Sale announcement can make the visitor a bit uncomfortable seeing it and also may be an overall negative regarding potential PPC clicks too (and have an even greater impact on any product sales a site may be hoping to get).

CeilingVent.com common home product domain

A ceiling vent and fan is found in bathrooms and kitchens in most all homes and offices.

Sometimes they need replacing and people search the web to buy a ceiling vent.

You can make an offer or buy CeilingVent.com now by clicking-on the picture below:

Category defining: CorporateCommunications.com

The category defining name to own if you are in the corporate communications business. Owned since 1999. Sharp price reduction: For more details and to possibly buy or make an offer please click-on the picture below…

This name was verbally valued at approxiamtely 500k to 600k by a domain broker in 2009 who now works as a broker for a major domain firm.

Major Dilution to Existing .tld extensions i.e. .net

We have been writing for some time about the massive dilution to the current major domain name extensions which will be caused by the anticipated vast number of new gtld’s expected to be introduced starting in 2012.

As an example of dilution, we will discuss the long-time well known dot-net extension. It’s always played 2nd fiddle to the vastly superior dot-com however .net will soon have lots of competitors competing with it and causing general overall dilution to all extensions and to dot-net in particular.

The initial high Icann cost of $185k to buy your own extension will no doubt result in mostly the top brands or keywords being purchased at this time. However, we are sure the cost will drop a lot and more and more mid-size or non-famous brands and keywords will eventually have their own extension.

Using dot-net direct competition as an example it’s likely extentions such as .met (dating?), .let (EU rentals?), .pet (pets?), .wet (water/pools?), .bet (gambling?), .get (search?), .jet (jet sales?), .vet (veterans?), plus longer ones like .mynet .enet .inet .netgear and the real obvious .network will be taken in the future.

With so many similar potential domain name extensions all competing for Internet traffic and marketing themselves it would seem after a few years the direct dilution just to the old dot-net extension will result in many people saying ‘dot-who’ about dot-net. Therefore, we can predict the already low value .net domains will decline even more in general value.

Major Bear Market Expected for Geo Domains

Starting next year unlimited numbers of new domain extensions are scheduled to be sold and some will be up and running. We always assumed major brands such as .sears .apple .microsoft .hp .godaddy .ibm and many others would want to own their own extension, not necessarily to sell domains but for their own product, use and branding.

Now I am hearing many reports about large U.S. and international cities including the cities of .tokyo .sydney .london .newyork .sandiego .la .vegas and others planning to also buy their very domain extension. At an initial cost of $185k it may seem high to you or me but to a large corporation or big city it is not too significant a cost.

Having heard about many major cities with plans to buy their own extensions it would seem logical the end-effect will be to greatly devalue the domainer or investor owned geo dot com’s, including mid-size city dot-coms. The smaller or mid-size cities may not want to invest now or be able to budget $185k but they will likely do so as the ICANN price drops (and I am sure the fee will decline rather quickly and dramatically within a few years).

At that time I believe you will also see many mid-size cities such as Palm Springs, Bethesda, Burbank and Scottsdale for example, getting their own extensions. It’s also possible they may not wait for lower costs and instead apply soon, agreeing to pay the 185k ICANN fee.

Think about this scenario; A visitor (or resident) in Scottsdale Arizona knows many cities now own their own domain so would he be more inclined to typein to a search box or the browser window “Scottsdale.com” or the word “Scottsdale” without an extension? In our opinion there is little doubt as time goes by the word Scottsdale will prevail as the most popular choice, relegating Scottsdale.com to 2nd tier status, which dot-com decline would be ongoing and the scottsdale.com down-trend be more pronounced as time goes by.

In our opinion, this news marks the beginning of a very significant and long term bear market (a likely permanent major drop in geo domain values), impacting mid to large city Geo domains in particular. I would expect a number of them to go on the auction block soon before they decline more in value.

Google Antitrust Hearing Invitations

Senate wants top Google executives CEO Larry Page and/or Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to testify and are invited to participate in the upcoming antitrust hearings.

Massive Dilution caused by New Domain Extensions

We have been saying for years (starting when the new extension plan was first announced a long time ago) the new domain-name extensions will bring about massive dilution in the name space and overall negativity to the value of the current major domain extensions.

In a few years the cost of buying your own extension could easily decline significantly belowr the current high cost of almost 200k, possibly all the way down to the 3 figure range where most individuals and small businesses could also afford to buy their own domain extension.

A huge benefit to owning your own domain name extension is only the extension could be typed-in (depending on how the DNS is setup) and the visitor would go right to that website based on the extension only. A few examples are by typing in Ebay you would not need to typein Ebay.com, or typein FreeMLSlisting and no need to typein FreeMLSlisting.com (and potentially zillions of others too).

Suspended RSS Feeds are Welcome to Reapply

The Afternic.com blog and popular blog DomainGang.com were suspended for ongoing spamming of our non-commercial and advertising-free DomainingRoulette.com RSS News Feed.

They are welcome to contact us if they would like to be unsuspended.

Eric Borgos Interview by Michael Cyger

We can highly recommend this interesting and educational interview with Eric Borgos conducted by DomainSherpa.com and expert interviewer Michael Cyger: Eric Borgos interview

RSS Feed Spam with Repetitive Duplicate Articles

We have noticed more and more RSS Feed spamming by publishing repetitive and duplicate articles. In fact, one well known blog appears to have published at least 17 RSS articles today to our feed, of which 16 appear to be duplicates of earlier published articles from his feed. In addition, that blog has been spamming DomainingRoulette.com domain headline news aggregator for many days and even more frequently recently.

Domaining Roulette will not allow more spamming and will not hesitate banning any RSS-feed who does that regardless of who they are. For example, the RSS Feed of Afternic.com was recently suspended for ongoing spam.

RunningShoes.com: from $150 to 700k in 5 yrs

DNjournal.com reports that RunningShoes.com sold for $700,000 making it the year’s biggest sale.

To add to the news reported by Ron Jackson, this blog can report the domain name sold for a measly $150 in 2005. Isn’t that amazing!

From low 3 figures to high 6 figures!

How is Local News Related to Your Success?

Watching the local news, that’s a great use of your time, presented in a one hundred percent problem format.

No one watching the news cares your sale numbers are up, or that Wendy got a promotion, or that Jordan got straight A’s on his report card. Good news does not sell; therefore it’s omitted.

Rather, what you get is distorted, negative information about two or three percent of the people affecting those who view it in the worst way. If you watch an hour a day of problems, everyday for years, you become problem oriented.

Do you think local news adds or detracts from your sales skills? How about your business skills? How about your life skills? The news is popular because most people that watch it lack focus or direction, or are miserable and looking for something or someone more miserable than they are – I guess to make them feel better.

Still think the local news is important, How many of you can look in the mirror and say “I’m successful today, I am where I am today , because of the local news.”

Here’s a wakeup call: Let’s say you have been watching the news for half hour a day for the past year. That’s 7.5 full 24 hour days you spent watching problems. In five years that’s 38 full 24 hour days . In terms of a 40 hour work week, that’s 23 weeks every five years.

Now imagine the possibilities if you diverted that energy in a positive direction. Imagine what you could do with that time, and accomplish in that time, if you put it to productive use.

As a quick example, if you instead spent just 15-minutes a day reading and learning about a topic of interest, in one-year you could be an expert in that topic and help your business, or family.

Which do you think is a more powerful use of your time: Watching other people’s problems or investing in yourself and creating plans and solutions for you or your business.

The next time you say “I don’t have enough time” substitute the phrase with “I don’t choose to spend my time in that manner.” It’s closer to the truth. The real truth is you’re not investing your time in the most important people in the world – You and your family or your own business.

Take your hour a day and convert it into a positive action or learning for yourself, your job, your business and your family. At the end of the year, you will have captured more than 15 full 24-hour days building your future.

Reprinted with permission of Adam Dicker

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