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?

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.

Many Websurfers & Users Are Not Internet Savvy

An actual example of how many people are not very internet savvy occurred a few days ago when I asked someone (in-person) to go to a website named Example-Example.com but she typed-in ExampleHyphenExample.com and then announced the website did not work.

Quite surprisingly, she actually spelled and typed the word hyphen instead of using a (-) dash character. Even after I explained that a ‘hyphen’ was a ‘dash’ she seemed a bit confused and still did not understand it.

At another time and involving a different person (on phone) I used the word ‘dash’ meaning Example-Example.com but he typed in ExampleDashExample.com, typing-in the word ‘dash’ instead of the keyboard (-) character.

On a somewhat different subject, it’s also true even today there are lots of people who don’t really know the difference between a browser address box and a search-engine box, especially as far as actual use is concered.

I have several family members who always type the website URL including its domain extension in the Google search box, and do not use the Internet Explorer or Safari browser address window (which is of course where the URL should go). When I told them about it they were not aware they should (or even could for that matter) use the browser window.

On a side-note to our readers who run their own websites and study site visitor data, we believe URL’s typed-in the search box do not count as valuable so called Direct Navigation (a.k.a. typeins) but are considered to be (less valuable) search visitors.

We suspect most website owners (even including some experienced domainers) do not understand or realize their actual direct navigation (typein) numbers are a better percentage than their stats program indicates, something many site owners are overlooking that positive aspect with their website stats software data analysis.

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Overstock.com is rebranding itself as O.CO

Found this on the Overstock.com website this morning. It’s also Super Bowl Sunday, so perhaps not just a coincidence since the .CO extension domain names will be strongly marketed in today’s Super Bowl commercials, making Overstock.com’s announcement real good timing in that regard.

“Shopping at Overstock.com internationally is about to get easier with the O.co domain. Since the company acquired the O.co domain name in July 2010, Overstock.com has been simpler to access by mobile Internet users. Now, to minimize confusion and hassle while translating the word “Overstock” into other languages, Overstock.com is rebranding internationally and will be known as O.co as of Jan. 2011. This guide will address any concerns you may have about Overstock.com’s new domain.

Q. Why will Overstock.com be known as O.co internationally?

A. In July 2010, .co domain names became available for general purchase, and Overstock.com acquired the O.co domain name in order to reinforce the “O” of the Overstock brand and capture customers’ attention with a short, memorable web address. The short .co domain will also solve translation issues and allow Overstock.com to create a universal logo, brand and web domain name that will be recognizable internationally…”

Click the Overtstock.com® woman on the couch picture below to visit the new O.co® website:

DomainKing About Best & Worst Name Extension

Just read a really interesting interview with Domain King Rick Schwartz on the Frager Factor blog, in which Rick was very candid and offered great advice. as always. For example, in the interview, Rick said: “.net is the worst extension on the planet. It’s an orphan……. I think .org is the number 2 extension (behind .com) in the universe…….. and it has its own identity.”

We could not agree more with Rick’s remarks about .com (#1 of course by far in most categories) and .org (by far #2 overall), with .org sometimes as good or even better vs .com, at least in a few categories, i.e. health & wellness), with the normally poor choice .net domain name extension far behind.

Fairly recently we have noticed an obvious and strong trend with potential domain hand registrations in a few categories of interest to me that .com and .org domains are almost always already taken. However, the other popular domain name extensions, such as .net .info .biz and .us for example, are often unregistered and available for new registrations.

Dot-com is most always the #1 domain extension (with our personal second choice being dot-org) and there are other extensions including country-codes such as dot-us as alternatives to .com and .org in value and importance. It is important to note how frequently .com and .org are already taken (especially in several important categories).

Assuming the-domain is available for-sale or new registration, a domain which has a .com or .org extension usually will receive far-and-away the most natural and typein traffic and is typically the most valuable as a result of natural traffic going mostly to .org and .com. As an educated guess, we estimate dot-com and dot-org domain names and websites get at least 95% of all typein traffic vs all the other tld’s.

A big reason .com and .org are so valuable is the billions of dollars of marketing and branding money which has gone into the extensions over many years, including vast numbers of ongoing media and TV commercials.

There are also other major reasons dot-com and dot-org are by far the best possible top level domain extensions. For example, when a web-surfer goes online looking for a product, service, business or name they will typically be thinking about dot-com or dot-org as part of the keyword term and type the keyword name plus .com or .org into their internet-browser, but rarely other extensions (exceptions being certain popular country codes, like Germany and its popular dot-de for example).

With that said, search engines do not necessarily play favorites so any extension with a targeted keyword name and a keyword targeted site, with relevant content, incoming links and search optimization done can achieve a high search-engine ranking.

Nevertheless, .org and .com enjoy a huge advantage over the others in that they can easily get natural and typein traffic by virtue of having targeted keyword quality, plus the com/org tld extension and thus do not need to rely almost completely and exclusively on SEO work as the others do.

Any reviews or comments you have about domain names and their extensions would be most appreciated, which feedback we could also add to our site since we are looking for domaining personal feedback to expand the blog. You can visit our Internet Entrepreneur website by clicking-on the domain-king picture below. Thank you.

What This Site is About: The Categories & Subjects

Some of our site visitors may be wondering or asking what this website is about? We try to cover as many categories as possible instead of concentrating on just one subject as many blogs often do. Even though the categories we write about and cover are very broad we still manage to keep it within our own experience and knowledge base too.

At this time, there may not necessarily be targeted articles or comments about some of these subjects found within this blog, but with that said, we do run a diverse number of websites which are highly targeted to every keyword subject in each broad category. To locate the relevant sites with well targeted content about all the subjects, you can do a Webtrading Network search…

These are the 8 broad keyword categories covered by this blog and the sites in our Webtrading Network, with a widely covered and featured subject in each category highlighted in bold:

1. Health and Wellness, Medical Conditions, Illness, Disease Prevention & Cures;
2. Commodity Trading, Forex, Daytrading, Futures Markets, Options, Stocks & Investing;
3. Female Beauty & Personal Care, Body and Skin Care, Female Names & Accessories;
4. Site Development, SEO, Domains, Featured Sites, Domain/Website Buying & Selling;
5. Internet Marketing, Online Products and Services, Blogs & Making Money on the Web;
6. Real Estate, Realtor, FSBO, Flat-Fee Multiple Listing Service & Flat-Rate MLS Listings;
7. Business, Communications, Financial Service, Certificates, Gov, Geo & Uncategorized;
8. Foods, Diet, Exercise, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Live Apps & Social Networks;

Please contact us with any questions you may have or submit a short article (and get a free link to you) for publication if you have knowledge about any of the specific subjects within the eight general categories.

Comparative Value of Google Search Rankings

How likely is your URL to get a visitor click based on its keyword(s) search-terms Google ranking?

Click based on Google Rank #1: 42%
Click based on Google Rank #2: 12%
Click based on Google Rank #3: 9%
Click based on Google Rank #4: 7%
Click based on Google Rank #5: 5%
Click based on Google Rank #6: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #7: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #8: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #9: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #10: 3%

Your website url when found on Google’s 1st page of ten search-term rankings (as broken-down above):
Likelihood of a click: 90%

Your website url when found on Google’s 2nd page of ten search-term rankings:
Likelihood of a click: 10%

Note: Data is recently published and courtesy of a reliable source. All figures are rounded to the nearest percentage.

Green Couches & Eco-Friendly Furniture: 7-11-10

Today is July 11, 2010, or 7-11-10 which is an extremely lucky date what with the 7-11 good luck aspect, combined with the year ending in 10 and 10 considered to be the best possible natural number.

To celebrate 7-11-10 we have made a new website about green couches, green chairs and other green furniture and home furnishings, which are not necessarily always green in color. A green couch and other green furniture is also environmentally friendly, green friendly, eco-friendly and nature friendly. Buying green-friendly home products helps the planet and also promotes the use of green sources of energy.

Green-friendly and eco-friendly home furnishings may be a green color but can also be done in other colors in addition to green, and preferably made from green-friendly and non-toxic furniture manufacturing methods.

GreenCouches.com would greatly appreciate any relevant feedback or comments you may have about green couches, green chairs or any other green-friendly home products which we could also add to the website since we are looking for green home products and green freindly furniture opinions to expand the new site, which you can visit by going to GreenCouches.com now by clicking the picture below:

Do Websites & Traffic Add Major Value to Prices?

There has been discussion on domain-name forums and blogs about developed websites adding significant value to domain names, and also making the domains easier to sell plus sell for a higher price. Agree to a degree, a developed web site with traffic is of high overall value. However, with that said, based on hands-on experience, I can say end-users rarely if ever care about the traffic your domain or its website gets, and in fact don’t ask for any statistics. Even if you offer them your stats, they don’t want to see it.

In view if the above I am unfortunately somewhat dubious about a developed website (with good traffic and typeins too) being more appealing to end-user buyers and the price they will pay for the domain, at least much beyond intrinsic value. Potential end-user buyers may actually be a bit negative about an existing web site and as a result its pre-branding.

Please note that my comments do not indicate I am negative about developed websites, or do not greatly value traffic. The exact opposite is true, since I have a number of developed sites which I am very happy with, most of which get good search-engine traffic, enjoy the benefits of high SEO rankings, plus receive natural typeins (from Internet users like President Barack Obama, pictured below, likely looking at a health website)…

Is It Still Possible to Register Domains with Value?

Is it possible to freshly register domain names of value (which may not necessarily make you rich) but have some value, and can make you at least a bit of money?

Rarely a week passes where we do not stumble upon at least a few unreg’d names which I am sure would get natural traffic plus search traffic too. We can’t possibly register them all (there are simply too many good ones) but when we do register the available domains there are often typein visitors to the temporary webpage right away.

Anyone else run across good targeted keyword unregistered domains lately?

Been Busy on Site Development i.e. Crows Feet

Unfortunately, we have not been posting much this month due to being extra active and busy on website development, with a bunch of new web properties freshly developed over the past few weeks.

An example of a small (but we feel a good one) website which we finished recently is crow’s feet wrinkles which is about the common eye area wrinkles widely known as crow’s feet. Having facial wrinkles skin condition is viewed as a real serious issue, and is especially disturbing for women who of course don’t enjoy looking older.

Any comments and opinions about Crow’s Feet (both women and men get it) and our new CrowsFeetWrinkles.com site are always welcome. Please click-on the worried woman below to see the site. Thanks.

Newly Developed Family Child Center Website

This week we completed a new small web site about child-care and family child care centers. Getting good and responsible child care for your kids is very important to both the children and parents.

By the way, we need more content for this new website. Do you have anything to contribute about child care, kids, rasing kids, children’s entertainmen, etc, (possibly family experience with childcare) that we could publish on the site for everyone’s benefit?

A content contribution would be greatly appreciated. If you choose to contribute some general knowledge to the site it does not need to be professionally written. Either long or short is ok. You name may be used or not published if you wish.

You can review the new site by clicking-on the image:

Can Alzheimer’s be Prevented or Less Severe?

We just finished a new small website about alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Alzheimer’s is both a very serious and sad medical condition which dementia can even cause your closest friends and relatives to not reognize you, as the condition becomes worse.

An aspirin regimen to help Alzheiner’s is a little known and rarely discussed health and wellness subject. We personally believe a low-dose baby aspirin regimen can in our opinion help stop alzheimer’s disease onset and also perhaps lessen its severity (or even reverse the condition) once alzheimer’s is underway.

A reason we say that is based on both personal experience with a long-term aspirin regimen combined with lots of research about low dose aspirin therapy and its great potential health benefits.

More information is at the new site Moderate Alzheimers.com

By the way, we need more content for that website. Do you have anything about Alzheimer’s prevention, cures or treatment options (or possibly a family experience with dementia) we could republish on the site for everyone’s benefit? A content contribution would be greatly appreciated.

Real-Time Example of Page Title Keyword Value

There has been an ongoing discussion for years about the SEO value of having important keywords in the webpage title. Some SEO experts tend to downplay its value to a degree, while many others say it is of high value. Personally, I have always talked about its great value.

As an experiment I picked a more or less randomly chosen basic word, the word is ‘make’ and then did a Google search for “make.” The search shows out of 100 top search results the keyword was in the web-page title 95 times (95% of the total).

I think that is pretty strong evidence of its significant SEO value. In fact, it would appear the keyword in page title may even be of equal or greater value than the website content (at least on some of the search-result sites I looked at). This is all quite interesting if this seo research is in fact valid.

Here is the search: click-here for Google Search

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