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.

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.

Wondering About the Knowledge of Domainers?

There are a lot of mysteries with domaining such as how often expired names sell at places like Snapnames for $60 or more but no sale for $20 before expiration at forums, etc.

However, the oddity which really has me wondering about the knowledge many domainers really have is why I keep on running into health and medical related domains available in .org but already reg’d in other extensions which have far less likelihood of traffic vs dot-org?

I can say based on lots of experience the only 2 tld’s which work nicely with health names are .com and .org. In fact, depending on the name .org can sometimes do as well or even better vs .com in health/disease related names. All the others are poor with very rare typeins.

Just this afternoon I was doing research using Google’s Insights For Search and discovered a real nice 3 word health term which seems like it would get both search and typein traffic.

I figured it would be taken in dot-com and dot-org for sure and maybe even other extensions but upon checking was surprised to see it unregistered in .org but taken in .com .net .biz .info .us and even .eu so I quickly registered the dot-org.

Why is it not better known that dot-org works so well in the health, wellness and disease category? Just one of life’s many mysteries I guess.