Long Term Declines are Likely in Domain Traffic

It appears the great success of Smart Phones combined with the strong impact and heavy usage of Apps has already done considerable damage to typein traffic along with browser-based search traffic too. Things will no doubt get worse as the mobile market expands even more.

In addition, once the new unlimted .tld’s start resolving that too in all likelihood will have a negative impact on traffic going to .com and other extensions since so many large websites will have their own tld and people will start simply typing-in that new tld instead of doing a search or typing in dot-com, etc. A random example is websurfers who will go to LasVegas rather than Lasvegas.com or bother to do a search for other las vegas websites.

This is all very distressing and disturbing news for domainers in general and especially for typein traffic domains and websites (including sites which rely heavily on search-engine traffic). Unfortunately these new development look like generating domain/website traffic from typeins and search is well past its peak of a few years ago and is quickly becoming a long-term bear market.

All of that negativity to traffic/revenue potential combined with ever increasing renewal fess (i.e. just discovered my Moniker account .com renewals went up to a high $8.99 today) makes it quite likely more and more domaine operators will let much of their portfolio expire or possibly even exit the business starting this year.

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?

Why Does Bing Make it Difficult to Submit a Site?

If you own or run a website you realize the high value of getting your site listed well in the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!

Often you simply wait for the search engine to find your site which they normally will do from following links and other ways to find and index your website. That passive approach usually will be adequate in most cases but it’s not assured and sometimes your site may not get indexed as fast as desired.

However, it’s not necessary to wait since you can be more aggressive by submitting your site directly to the search engines yourself by using their Add URL feature.

The becoming popular Bing.com search engine and others require the verification code be read and typed in. Bing in particular seems to make it unusually difficult to submit your URL since they use a verification code you need to type in, which is far from easy to read.

Those verification codes are also known as Captcha Images which can be read by a human but not by a computer or an automated system since the characters have misc fonts and text styles, and be displayed in various font sizes.

The Bing.com Captcha Image appears to be much harder to read compared to other sites which also require a verification code be entered. In fact, the Bing captcha verification seems so difficult that it makes you wonder if perhaps Bing.com does not really want you to submit your website to their search engine!

Take a look yourself. Try submitting any website URL to Bing.com. Click the 1-11-11 image below to access the Add URL to Bing link:

The Saga of Nonsensical Traffic Quality Scores

One of the causes of the big PPC revenue declines appears to be Bing.com with their nonsensical TQ scores, i.e, my Parked.com/Bing TQ score recently fell off the cliff going from an 8 to 1 in a week even though traffic and domains stayed basically the same. My TQ scores have most aways been much better than a very poor 1 and in fact for a while under Yahoo last year TQ hovered at the 9/10 level for some time but now (a few eeks ago) the names and traffic are basically the same but we are at an impossible TQ-1 score.

Support claims Bing looks closer at conversions vs Yahoo but that makes little sense since why would the same traffic from the same names convert so poorly, especially since there are lots of typeins from good keywords. Makes no sense. If these wild gyrations continue and we stay at a level-1 we may be moving my traffic names away from Parked/Bing, which I do not really want to do since the system is extremely good (IMO, the best) in other ways.

However, we really can’t take the TQ BS any longer and am ready to throw in the towel on it. If I did not know my TQ was in fact good it would be easier to accept but I know the truth and my traffic is not anywhere near a ridiculous 1 score.

Interestingly, I wrote the above several weeks ago when I was discussing with parked.com support the absurd claim by Bing that my website traffic quality was only at a level of one. I forgot to post it here at the time but my memory has been now jogged in that I see my TQ score has skyrocketed to the 7 level. That is somewhat reasonable but still a little low since I believe my true TQ should be roughly an 8 or 9, but still an amazing improvement in the TQ achieved by basically the same domains.

The first graph shows the TQ score published by parked.com on Dec 8 2010. The next chart is the TQ score reported by parked.com on Jan 3 2011. FYI, the last 3 date points on the first chart correspond to the first 3 date points on the next graph.

Keep in mind, the traffic and parked domains were basically the same during the entire time frame covered by both TQ charts so the obvious question is how could the TQ fluctuate so wildly? Obviously it can’t. It must be a screw-up by someone, possibly bing.com?

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.

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

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”>