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.

Good News! FTC Launches Investigation of Google

IT’S ABOUT TIME!

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to serve Google with legal subpoenas, starting a major antitrust investigation of Google.

The U.S. FTC will be investigating if Google has abused its dominating market position to suppress competition. The new FTC investigation of Google is likely setting off serious alarm bells at Google due to its wide-ranging potential and scope.

This new investigation of Google involves their two key revenue areas of search and advertising. Other internet players have been complaining for years how Google’s search algorithm appears to be designed to drive web-surfers more to Google’s own services than their websites.

A major new concern for Google is that it’s widely alleged Google’s dominating position in online-advertising gives them far too much control over a businesses success or its failure. We wish the FTC the best of luck and succcess in its well deserved Google investigation which is so extremely negative to consumers and other online businesses.

Mo doubt about it, Google has become far too big and powerful. Would not be too surprised to see Google’s brand in your local supermarket soon on food products like Tomato Ketchup!

You can file a consumer complaint against Google by clicking-on the picture below:

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

Kids Are Searching for Surprising Things

Kids search for surprising things online. A report from Symantec and its Norton OnlineFamily service, which allows parents to monitor and manage their kids’ online activities, including Internet searches. The Norton service tracks and reports the children’s Internet activities in real-time so parents can learn about online-content their kids should not be reading or seeing on the-web.

Here are the top-10 search-terms from kids over a recent 6-month period:

P.S. No, search-terms 4, 6, 28 and 89 are not April Fool’s jokes as you may be thinking!

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. MySpace
6. Porn
7. Yahoo
8. Michael Jackson
9. Fred
10. eBay

Other search-terms making the top-100 search-terms include Wikipedia (14), Webkinz (16), games (17), Boobs (28), the Jonas Brothers (47), Playboy (89), iTunes (89b) and and swine flu (93). Who is Fred? He is a made-up character whose YouTube channel has become big with kids.

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.

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.

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?

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

Websurfers are Typing-in their Search-Terms

A forum member posted about how he believes people are using the search engines less, with less searches being done in his opinion.

I don’t necessarily agree about search declining. However, web-surfers are in all likelihood realizing most every keyword phrase, product, service and search-term now resolves to an active website so as time goes by they are more inclined to typein with more and more frequency the keywords they are looking for directly into the internet browser window or entering the same term (without spaces, with domain extension) in the search box. They do that by entering the search term, most iften followed by .com extension, with .org being next in typein popularity, i.e. Word1Word2.com or Word1Word2Word3.org. etc…

Coming Events Cast Shadows in Search-Terms

Our server has two excellent stats program running which tells us most everything possible about how visitors arrive at this website, including the search terms used in the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.

The popularity of the beautiful Alexis DelChiaro (photo above) as far as search results coming from our server stats program is quite surprising. Upon checking our statistics today we see Alexis DelChiaro is the most searched term. Making that more surprising is the fact most of the searches relate to the possibility of Alexis and husband (Chicago Cubs pitcher) Sean Marshall being separated or divorced, with 15 of 20 looking for information about Alexis and 12 of 15 regarding separation or divorce.

Here are the top-20 search terms (non-Alexis search terms are not shown):

alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro
alexis delchiaro separated
alexis del chiaro separated
is alexis del chiaro divorced
sean marshall divorced
is sean marshall divorced
is alexis delchiaro divorced
alexis delchiaro age
alexis delchiaro divorce from sean marshall
alexis delchiaro sean marshall separated
did alexis delchiaro get divorced
alexis del chiaro
alexis del chiaro fox news separated from sean
alexis delchiaro and divorced

As discussed before in this blog, “coming events cast their shadows” which indicates to me it’s very likely Alexis is at a bare minimum having problems with her marriage and separation or divorce is likely. After all, why would these search terms be so common unless there was some truth to it?

As a side note, there was a popular old article with a series of comments published here about Alexis Delchiato which I believe are indexed in the search engines so I am sure that is at least one of the reasons some of the separaton or divorce search-terms end up being referred to this blog.

Please note, personally I am not interested in this or care about this subject at all, and only reporting about this as far as my strong interest goes in search engines, web site traffic and search term statistics.

Google Claims an English Website is Spanish?

I went to a webpage which is clearly written in English by a U.S. based publisher and has always been in English and a mysterious white bar appeared with an odd message saying “this page is in Catalan (Spain). Do I want to translate it using Google Toolbar? This is clearly a bug. Anyone else expereince this?

Google said this about it when I clicked-on Learn More: When you visit a webpage in a different language than your Toolbar, Toolbar will display the translation bar near the top of your browser window and ask you if you’d like to translate the page. Click Translate to translate the page, or click Translate on your Toolbar. Click Show original or the x icon to close the translation bar and view the original webpage. If you change your preferred translation language, Toolbar will remember your language preferences and use them when translating pages in the future. If you use Translate often, you can choose to translate pages automatically. For example, click Translate French automatically while on a French page and Toolbar will automatically translate all French pages you visit in the future by sending page content to Google. You can update your automatic translation preferences in the Toolbar Options window by clicking the wrench.

Do Regular Changes to a Website Improve Traffic?

A member of one of the forums has posted about how her traffic and revenue had recently spiked-up without obvious reason. There has been talk on that board about that subject and conjecture by the members where they believe changes to website content and possibly changing the nameservers too may be responsible for sudden and unexplained traffic/revenue spikes.

The jury is out on that issue however assuming that is valid it would seem like someone could develop a script which automatically substitutes the index page on a regular basis (i.e. weekly schedule)? It appears that could be accomplished based on two different home-page versions with diverse content in the folder (i.e. index1.html & index2.html) and proceeds to rename one or the other index.html. In addition, the script could access the domain registration account and modify the nameservers on the same schedule (i.e. alternating between NS1. Example1.com & NS1.Example2.com).

Every ‘X’ number of days (i.e. weekly) the script could rename the index pages on a rotating basis.  Next the script automatically goes into the domain registration account and change the nameservers too on the same rotating schedule. It would seem like a fairly easy script to have programmed and implemented but who knows for sure? The end-results would certainly be interesting and the search engine and traffic improvement theory may or may not be proven valid and could turn-out to be little more than urban legend.

Importance of Domain Name in Search Engines

A keyword rich domain name is of little doubt a major importance with the search-engine ranking algorithm used by the major search engines. Most domain name and web site experts tend to downplay the value of the domain name in the URL. However, we believe it is a much more major factor than many search experts and guros realize or believe.

For example, in the Bing search results below for lemon juice you will find LemoinJuice.org ranked a very high #4 out of a significant 13,000,000 search results (even higher by ranking #3 with quotes used in the search). The LemonJuice.org web site is a nice little web site with some good relevant (but limited) content, nevertheless, the site itself is comparatively small, especially compared to many other much larger websites which rank below it.

Making its high-ranking even more impressive is the fact the three sites ranking above lemonjuice.org are extremely important and huge websites (Wikipedia and EzineArticles) with many 1000s of content pages and 1000s of links.

The fact LemonJuice.org ranks so impressively goes a long way in confirming the high value of the two keywords ‘Lemon Juice’ being in the websites URL address (view the live search results by clicking below):

Bing.com results – lemon juice without quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemon+juice&go=&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>

Bing.com results – “lemon juice” using quotes: >http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22lemon+juice%22&form=QBRE&qs=n target=”_blank”>

P.S. Even ranks #1 when searched without a space: > http://www.bing.com/search?q=lemonjuice&form=QBLH&qs=n” target=”_blank”>

Going to Websites via Web-Browser or Search Box

At one of the domain forum boards one of the well-known forum moderators Biggedon was talking about so called “direct navigation” which he said is “mostly used when you know or think you know the exact url of a website which has the product or service you want.” He went on to say “however, I see many of my co-workers who type their search into their “web browsers” search box, rather than using the browsers address bar window, then they click from a list of links the SE produces. The culture of “address bar searchers” is fading fast to those who use the browser window to search, especially with the search-engine companies urging you to search thru their service saying Google this, Yahoo that, Ask this, Bing…

Agree to what Don said above to a good degree. In addition, I don’t believe the likely scenario of web-surfers migrating somewhat from web-browser typeins to search box type-ins is really much of a negative since a search window type-in (assuming the relevant domain extension is added) is in my opinion still considered to be a typein and almost as valuable (though some experts may not completely agree).

My family members are good examples as they most always typein full url’s including the extension (usually either .com or .org) into the search box instead of the browser url window. In fact, I sometimes do that too and do it even more lately. With that said, not really the whole story because the most valuable and best part of the story is that if you typein the full url in the Google search box to a large degree and much of the time your site immediately resolves.

However, occasionally for some odd reason (perhaps if was recently indexed or maybe ranked very low) the url will be listed in the search results instead of instantly resolving (still OK because the web siite url will be on the clickable list, frequently shown in #1 position, or ranked high). I believe for these 2 scenarios to work the url needs to in fact be at least indexed in the SE.

That is why you should not always rely on the search-engines finding you but should also submit your URL direct to the search engines. Yahoo makes it difficult to submit URL’s since you need to first have a Yahoo! account. However, Bing and Google make is real easy to submit your URL’s (no account required). Here is the link for Google URL Submission, and a link so you may also submit URL to Bing.com

Type-in address in to web browser