Which is another way for ICANN and the powers that be at internet registries to extort a few hundred more dollars from big companies and to enable typo-squatting domainers to make great money off popular .com domain typos.

For the landrush period, they’re requiring a Colombian trademark. I suppose  the FARC will get Cocaine.co ?

What are you going to do about it?

One thing some people are curious about is how .co domain names affect SEO. Should you buy one? Only if you want to rank in Colombia or for local searches pertaining to it.

For more on why most people should not buy a .co domain name for SEO, watch this video. Then add my RSS feed to your reader or get new posts of mine sent to you by email (same link).

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Is where fools rush away their gold for domain names.

Hello, and welcome to scratchpad! This is my completely irregular, unreliably scheduled column on whatever streams through my head. We used to call this silliness, but on the web today it’s valued as “transparency.”

Seriously though, I do believe in transparency, so here’s some food for thought:

1 – Last year, I spent hundreds of dollars on domain names. I’m letting many of them drop this year. Why? 2 reasons.

- Focus: You can’t be successful by doing a million projects at once.

- Trademark issues: I was a little aggressive in buying some domain names. While I was not quite squatting, the domains would probably be taken away if I ranked them and turned them into any kind of commercially successful sites. Oops!

2 – Focusing on providing great value can be a superior way to accumulating gold, as opposed to domain name speculation and praying for a greater fool to show up. Here are some great items of value I’ve found online:

Local Search Ranking Factors | Google & Yahoo Local SEO Best Practices – 2009

- RescueTime Solo: Free Time Management Software | RescueTime

10 Questions to Ask a New Link Marketing Client | Wiep.net

Better Coda Slider

Wordstream keyword management software

Getting started with landing page management – Post-Click Marketing Blog

3 landing page management metrics – Post-Click Marketing Blog

36 landing page management secrets for post-click marketing – Post-Click Marketing Blog

For Every Optimization, There’s a Pyramid, So Get Started | FutureNow’s GrokDotCom

Dilbert Teaches Reputation Management

Turn your stories into profits | The Total Package

The Daily Beatings Will Continue Until Response Improves | The Total Package

userfly — Web usability testing made easy.

The Link Builder’s Guide To Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities

Setting up a New WordPress Blog for SEO | Internet Business Pro by Joe Perez

Hiding Content in Your RSS Feed

4 Video Optimization Experts Dish Killer Tips » aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Six Habits of Highly Effective PPC Managers

Aaron Bradley has had his own SEO blog for about 7 months now, though I just found out recently. Add his rss to your readers – you won’t regret it!

And if you liked this post, add my feed to your reader!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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by detritus My friend Gyutae Park recently blogged about making money by tasting domain names based on Google Hot Trends. It’s a neat idea, but there are some caveats you should know.

Tasting domain names is the practice of buying them with the intent to return them during the 5 day grace period, while profiting off the typein traffic the domains get during those 5 days. It’s the web equivalent of buying a prom dress for prom then returning it. Google Hot Trends, for those who don’t know, shows you the 100 keywords with the greatest change in search volume in the past 24 hours.

Anyways, trendy domaining is something I’ve done in the past. From personal experience, I can confirm that there is money there to be made … but very little, if you’re not automating things. That’s because:

1. First, because mainstream domainers are already doing this, automatically. So most of the hot keywords’ domain name equivalents get taken as soon as Google Hot Trends refreshes.
2. Second, you need to look for keywords where there’s an intent that you can monetize without much thought, using adsense for domains. Otherwise, you won’t earn much, if anything. I’ve had 2 cent clicks before, on domain name parking, I kid you not.
3. Third, this raises a problem particular to Hot Trends keywords, which is that they’re often news-related. The intent isn’t commercial, then – the intent is to get information. So you’d have to either (i) figure out a filter to eliminate these domain names from consideration or (ii) figure out how to monetize news traffic. In case you didn’t know, mainstream news media are getting less than 1 cent per pageview on much of their CPM deals. So you could try working out a CPM deal where you show your banner ads above framed news sites, but you’d better have MASSIVE volume, if you want to make money.
4. Fourth, you need to consider what you’ll make per hour. Suppose it just takes you 10 minutes to find a hot phrase whose .com isn’t yet registered. You buy it. That takes another 2-3 minutes. So let’s say you can find and buy 4 – 5 domain names in an hour. Even some of the hottest terms on Google Trends don’t get that much type-in traffic to the domains, so you can only expect a handful of clicks, from my experience. Remember: Those aren’t terms with a lot of volume, necessarily, they’re terms with lots of CHANGE in volume. E.g. 1000% more than normal or whatever. But 50 -> 500 searches still isn’t many type-ins you’re gonna get.

Note: You can also only do this for an hour a day with Google Trends, because after that there’s no more words to mine. So doing this manually doesn’t scale really well anyways.

by monkeyc.net So when I did it, I got $2 worth of clicks. I was trying out domain tasting at the same time, and got a refund (minus I think a 50 cent charge bc Godaddy is weird, if memory serves?) on the domain so I was $1.50 ahead. Supposing you made $10-$15 a day on this… that’s still a lot of work for little ROI.

Plus it’s not just the hour spent finding and buying the names – you still have to return them afterwards! So you’re probably coming out with, at best, $15 for an hour and a half of work, which amounts to $10/hour. At worst, it’s $10 for 1.5 hours, meaning you’re making $6.66/hour. Here in Montreal, that’s actually less than minimum wage. Can you not make more money online than working a minimum wage job?

(That’s a rhetorical question – people with web skills can make great money. Start out reading everything in the Problogger.net archives, then learn SEO from yours truly .)

Therefore, automation is key to making money off tasting Hot-Trends-keyword domain names. That way you can

• get enough domains,
• pick the right domains, namely those whose typein traffic has value to advertisers
• before other domainers snap them up,
• measure traffic levels and earnings
• create rules on when to either drop them within the 5 day refund period, or keep them for the rest of the year on the assumption you can make more than regfee off the remaining typeins you’ll get in the next few days.

And if you automate all that, it’s enough to make, maybe, $50/day – there’s still the other domainers to compete with. Fair money, but still a lot of work for an incertain ROI. Most intermediate+ internet marketers can create projects that are more profitable in the medium-long term… especially those with the programming skills to automate the above and refine it.

Sometime soon I’ll either post my spreadsheet I use to forecast new projects’ SEO ROI here, or make it available only to subscribers… So add my rss feed to your reader already !

p.s. Gyutae is the first blogger I know of who has written on domain name buying based on Google Hot Trends, and has been producing other awesome content generally, so you should subscribe to his feed, imho.

p.p.s. Speaking of Hot Trends, I got several hundred visitors today, April 1st, from ranking this post for April Fool’s Email and variations on that. I checked the domain name aprilfoolsemail.com last night and it was available, for those of you want to try this.

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Toys

by Patrick Q Toys’R'Us just bought Toys.com for $5.1 million. And it was a genius domain name buy, too. Here’s why.

Well, look at the keyword ‘toys’. Toys.com ranks right up there in position 4. That gets you about 6% of visitors, guessing from memory of the AOL leaked data on clickthrough rates for top spots?

Adwords indicates 24,900,000 monthly searches for toys. Multiply by 6% and then by 12 months.

The value of ranking fourth on the keyword toys is 17 928 000 annual visitors.

But wait! Some of those visits are international, where Toys.com probably won’t rank, right? Fair enough. Let’s compare numbers with AdWords daily clickthrough estimator. On Toys without geographic targeting, you’d get from 33K to 41K clicks a day. On Toys set to US geotargeting, you get 20K to 25K. So conservatively you still have 1/2 to 2/3 of the traffic being American.

OK, fine! The value of ranking fourth on the keyword toys is only 9 000 000 annual visitors.

The traffic is worth about $1/click to ad publishers, and likely more in earnings per click to folks like Toys’R'Us, otherwise neither them nor their competitors would buy the ad inventory!

But that’s still not all for Toys.com -  that’s a generic keyword domain, notice. So they’ve got type-in traffic (probably another few hundred a day, say 300 to be conservative – e.g. another 100 000 visitors annually). Plus there’s people Googling Toys.com for another few hundred thousand in annual visitors.

And of course I’m not addressing the random mid-tail/longtail traffic a domain name like that will pick up with even moderate SEO.

If you’re Toys’R'US CMO, give your domaining team a pat on the back and send them to a sunny beach for a few weeks. Assuming you maintain the search rankings and don’t squander them, that team just made you a pile of money.

UPDATE: That assumption was faulty. Domain Name Wire reports that the rankings are gone. D’Oh!

If you liked this post, you may also find an interest in my brand-building guide. Also, perhaps you should add my rss feed to your reader?

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Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months…

First, non-cash spending is a slippery beast. My high school economics teacher, Mrs. Guedon, actually taught us this and yet I dismissed her preference for using cash as being silly and old-fashioned when an ATM can easily give you an update on your account balance.

Unfortunately, ATMs are not especially good at keeping your spending in check. Especially when you’re paranoid like me and feel the need to destroy your ATM receipts – your memory of account balances ends up being pretty weak.

In 2009, I’m going to review my monthly cash-flow – in all accounts – much more closely.

Second, StumbleUpon ads have a very variable ROI and pricing. I experimented heavily with StumbleUpon ads over the past year and spent roughly $1400.

From what I’ve seen of other StumbleUpon advertising case studies, this is some of the most extensive advertising anyone will publicly recognize. I’m sure there are bigger spenders, but they don’t want their social media success to look fake.

Personally, I’m in the online marketing business, I know that distribution is key and I’m not embarassed to say I advertise my content. I’m proud of it really, because it shows how much effort and pride I take in my material.

That’s a big digression though. What you need to know about SU Ads is this:

• The bounce rate is about the same as other SU traffic – often around 95%. For you money, that means that you’re really getting 5 cents on the dollar worth of traffic that is going to pay attention to your content. Though SU prices their traffic at 5 cents a visit, you’re really paying $1/visit.
• But wait! StumbleUpon traffic is unique: It generates its’ own follow-up traffic when your paid visitors give you thumbs up and reviews! So you’re not really paying $1 visit.
• It’s hard to quantify precisely how much follow on traffic you get. I tried digging into my analytics to tell you, but it’s reporting fewer visitors than I even paid for. That’s normal, since we’re talking about web analytics that relies on javascript, which many stumblers block. Test SU ads yourself if you must know.
• Complicating things further, when you’re buying large quantities of StumbleUpon traffic as I was, and “friending” the stumblers who give you thumbs up, this leads to more reviews and traffic. So there’s a latent benefit.
• The catch is that those relationships, if not kept up, wither and the latent traffic dissapears. Except for my loyal friend and reader, Ann Smarty (internationally famous link building pro, and noted blogger), I rarely get folks stumbling my content any more *sniffle.
• In fairness, that’s largely my fault since I didn’t know what to do to keep building the relationship, after friending those stumblers. I reviewed some of their blogs when I liked them, but most had no sites…
• On a related note, I think I rarely if ever added StumbleUpon buttons prominently above the fold and throughout my content – this may improve your results.
• The StumbleUpon analytics aren’t that insightful – most posts get ~1-2%  of folks thumbing them up or down. You only get more than that with controversial content. No offense to the StumbleUpon team – but there’s just not much you can do based on that info, imho. At best you can promote content on the same topics that do well…
• StumbleUpon no longer lets you advertise SEO content in their “search” category. Considering SEO industry voices like Search Engine Watch made the category, that’s ass-backwards to say the least. Heck, I stumbled the search category recently and saw a meta search engine displaying an award from SEW!
• For all the talk of quality content gaining links, exposing my content via StumbleUpon attracted hardly any links except for when I released Internal Link Building. FYI: I spent my StumbleUpon budget on original feature length content like disguising text link ads, measuring distribution to project link building success (ironic, I know), domains not being legally equivalent to real estate, how Google would rank for mortgage calculator terms etc.

By comparison, my search engine traffic bounces much less and I suspect is responsible for gaining me various social media links etc.

Third, you really have to know what you’re doing before messing around with buying Facebook ads on their app traffic. And you need a large budget so you have time to optimize. I got myself smoked for hardly any conversions on ~ $300 of testing. Not a big loss, but the ~$30-$40 I made was a punch to the ego. I didn’t have the thousands nor the patience necessary to test that into profitability.

Fourth, launching Internal Link Building was one of the coolest but also most time-consuming projects I handled this year.

1. I had to handle a bunch of bugs at the outset that slipped through my beta testing.
2. I got links.
3. Two more sphinns and it’ll be my first post to make 100! .
4. It taught me to shutup until things are really ready to launch or you piss people off. I announced it before my download counter was working properly, delaying launch by several days and wasting MEGA traffic.
5. There is a HUMONGOUS search marketing community in the former Soviet Block. Besides the Russians, you have Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians and many more who are deeply involved in this business.

Fifth, if you’re not in it consistently, the domain name game isn’t for you. You need to put up or shut up. While it saddens me to an extent, I hereby resolve to liquidate my domain name portfolio this year.

Amongst other gems:

• Motocyclette.ca (Motorcycle.ca in French)
• MontrealHotelReviews.com
• UserGeneratedContent.ca
• PMEs.ca (SMEs.ca in French)
• Gvn.ca, which gets typeins from people presumably looking for the government.
• NorthfaceJacket(s).org – check the search volume kiddies … can you say ecommerce?
• WebmasterWelfare.com (aka Adcents)

I’d prefer a buyer who can pick up the whole portfolio, to be honest. Email gab at this domain if you’re interested and have a budget in the low 5 figures. My finance domains are particularly sweet generics.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. I haven’t figured out my approach towards affiliate marketing for 09, but I suspect it will be a merely residual monetization stream as I work to develop Original Monetization.

At the end of the day, you need to focus on what you do best – for me, that means coming up with new ideas, not domaining or affiliate marketing or stumbling. It sucks to look back and realize that – even though I knew it from my first year in online marketing – you can’t focus on more than one or two fields at a time, and you have to limit your projects too.

Sixth, search marketing shows rock. Go SMX! The great folks at Third Door Media and their mods gave me my break at SMX West last year (thanks Vanessa!), and then again at SMX Advanced (thanks Stephen!), and I’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted back to the podium this year. Let me know if you’re going and we’ll hang out! Also, fyi, you can use “SMXSpeaker” as a discount code to save $100 off the registration for SMX West.

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Are domain names the internet’s real estate? Can keyword research be considered intellectual property? I put these and other questions to Eric Goldman and Mark J Rosenberg, both of whom are speaking on SES San Jose’s legal panel. (Clarification: This is an interview, not coverage of an SES session.)


(Image: Jason Burrows)

Note: This post only offers information. It does not offer legal advice, counsel or opinion, and should not be relied upon for such. Speak to a lawyer who is a member of your local bar if you need counsel.

1) Are domains really an equivalent to real estate? I asked my real estate prof that and he highlighted a variety of reasons why they aren’t. Ex.: No rights-of-way, usufruct, and other such items.

Eric Goldman (EG): No, domain names are not virtual real estate, and I always chuckle when I see the domainers bloviate about this analogy. Personally, in almost all cases, I’d rather own the top spot on Google for a keyword than to own the keyword.com. I expand on this point more in this lengthy article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=635803 [Requires some kind of subscription; password confirmation email not hitting my inbox so I'm not linking to them. Talk about SE friendlines... Abstract looks interesting though!]

Mark J. Rosenberg: He [your prof] is right. Domains are like any other personal property. No different than a baseball bat. They can be bought and sold without any special terms and conditions. If used incorrectly, they can cause damage.

2) Can SEOs be considered fiduciaries/trustees for their clients, at least with respect to the site? What criteria would militate in favour and what criteria would oppose such a characterization? Is implementing non-best practices a breach of trust that can constitute a cause of action?

EG: No, I think the analogy to fiduciaries or trustees is way too strong in most cases. In some cases, SEOs can be “agents” of their clients and have the power to bind their clients to legal commitments, but this is probably not the case with the standard SEO-client relationship.

EG: However, like any professional service provider, SEOs could face malpractice or related claims for botching their jobs. I’ve never seen an SEO malpractice claim but I suspect they will come in the future. Even then, the standard for malpractice will be loose (i.e., general incompetence will probably not be deemed malpractice; it will take a higher degree of incompetence to be actionable).

EG: In all cases, an SEO who does a lousy job will develop a poor reputation and suffer some economic consequence accordingly. Also, this issue becomes less important to the extent clients are paying performance bonuses or other compensation tied to results.

MJR: [Whether the SEO is a trustee or not] is most likely a contract specific issue. Unless specified in the contract and/or SEO given special responsibilities, the answer should be no.

MJR: Some of the criteria that would militate in favour are handling money, extensive control and/or operation of site including content. Those that would oppose such a characterization include an SEO acting as a consultant merely providing advice, and having limited or no control over site or its operation.

MJR: [As to breaching a trust by forgoing to implement best practices,] This is case specific. For example, in some situations, there may be a legitimate reason for not implementing a best practice. Otherwise, I would say that depending on the extent of the violation, there may be a claim for breach of contract.

3) Keyword research – can it be considered as intellectual property? If an affiliate manager gives yours away, or a search engine does… are they violating your rights?

EG: It’s possible for the insights derived from researching keywords to be protected under IP. Most likely it would qualify as a trade secret (if it qualifies as IP at all). In order to remain a trade secret, the SEO would have to require everyone who has access to those insights to agree in writing to protect their confidentiality. This can be tricky–especially with the search engines, who aren’t promising anything!

EG: Note, however, that depending on an SEO’s contract with its client, the contract may transfer ownership of the SEO’s work (including their keyword research) to the client. Clients are often as concerned about confidentiality as the SEO, so this can set up some conflict during the contract negotiations. SEOs really interested in protecting their work product, including their keyword research, need to retain an attorney to help them build the proper legal
protections into their contracts and operations.

MJR: It can be considered a trade secret if it is treated as such. If given away without permission, there is a definite violation, provided that it was a trade secret in the first place.

4) What is the standard of care SEOs need to employ in carrying out work for their clients ?

EG: As I mentioned, I don’t think the standard of care has been defined in the courts, and I expect it will take some time before it is. In all cases, the legally defined standard of care will be less rigorous than the marketplace expectations of SEOs’ ability to deliver results. Add value to your clients, and you will be richly rewarded. Chunk it, and your phone will stop ringing.

MJR: There is no special standard. It is to abide by contract terms to the best of their ability while governed by the usual implied covenants and standards under the UCC [Uniform Commercial Code, a US inter-state legal convention aiming to harmonize signatory].

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I’ve just seen this in Google on an experiment an acquaintance of mine is running (she doesn’t blog on SEO, hence it being here; she also OKayed me writing this up). A recently registered domain, without having any links pointing to it, is now indexed.

There’s private registration, although because she didn’t immediately “activate” private registration, with Namecheap, it’s possible to see the old registrant info prior to activation. The person who registered it has some other trusted/well-ranking sites, so it’s possible that by correlating the whois info, Google is expecting that this will be a quality site and decided to index it.

Myself being a Namecheap client (thanks Smaxor for the free SSL tip), I decided to speak to support. They don’t autosubmit domain names to Google. So submission is not the reason the domain is indexed.

What’s also interesting is that when this domain – a nonsense keyword domain – was registered, there were 0 results for the madeup keyword. Now there are a few besides my contact’s domain; she and I have searched for it a couple of times. Perhaps Google [supplemental?] indexes pages that it wouldn’t otherwise index when it realizes they have unique keywords on them that are being searched for. Of course, that could easily lend itself to abuse, which is something Google’s engineers are weary of when deciding if a criteria is worth using.

A final possibility I considered is that there’s a trojan on my friend’s computer or mine. Keystroke logging might then have got spammers to find these keywords and autogenerate the junk constituting the rest of the SERPs [which, again, weren't there when he decided on that nonsense keyword]. I think this is the least likely of the possibilities though.

Update: My friend Andrew Shotland has a post featuring over a dozen techniques to get indexed without links or submission!

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In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, imho, is growth. Growth photo by Artful Life

1. Two brothers lived in a city once. The first married rich, and got a dowry of $1M. The second worked so that he quickly saw his annual income growing by $100,000 annually. The former gentleman, not having much idea of the difficulty in building up an income, began spending the fortune without having an income.

Two other brothers lived in another city. The older inherited the family business, which took in $100,000 annually. His brother, envious, built up his own competing business, and scaled so that his enterprise grew at a rate of $100,000 annually.

Two more brothers lived in a third city. Each built up a business. The older brother’s grew at a rate of $1M annually, and the younger’s grew at a rate of $2M annually.

Which brother was better off, in either situation?

In the first situation, the older brother ends up being in debt by $100K more each year, starting in year 11.

In the second situation, the younger brother’s business becomes increasingly successful while his brother stagnates. Eventually, the younger brother’s business begins chipping away at the older brother’s market share, due to having a bigger brand, broader selection, cheaper prices … you name it.

In the third situation, despite the older brother’s business showing positive growth, he was not keeping pace with the younger brother’s efforts. In the Fortune Bigger Brothers rankings, the older brother was slipping slowly back in the rankings behind his brother. Eventually, he might even end up in situation 2.

There are a few takeaways.

• First, if you are just sitting on your money, you’re actually showing negative growth. In the bigger economic picture, this is known as inflation. In the world of independent webmasters, this is neglecting a site in the name of a so-called ‘passive income’ that is really just a short-sighted dwindling away of assets. This is buying a site and then omitting to flip the site.
• Second, it’s merely a matter of time before others overtake your brand, top you in the SERPs, replicate or even steal your link sources.SEO books existed before Aaron Wall wrote his. Frederick Marckini, CEO of iProspect, wrote one of the earliest ones. How many of you are aware of that? How many of you have bought the book, or would buy it today from a used book seller?
• Finally, in the general economy, if your revenue isn’t growing the fastest, you face diminishing purchasing power. In turn, this can lead to others overtaking you, as in 2, above. This carries through to your industry.

Coniferous Growth photo by Fallsguyd.
Growth speed (or velocity for Scrabble players) is a key economic issue. And it’s a key point for an independent webmaster too.

Recently, Aaron and Giovanna Wall launched PPC Blog, featuring such quality content as Why Google AdWords Site Targeting Usually Fails. Their focus has been on growing distribution (see also Lee’s excellent piece on developing your network), and here’s how you can tell.

1) They paid a premium for the domain name PPCBlog.com, which allows them to brand the site as PPC Blog, and thus get lots of links featuring that phrase. Between that, and the fact (per Matt Cutts) that Google favours exact match domains, they should easily rank for PPC blog. That phrase will convert visitors into RSS subscribers.

2) The site is unmonetized, meaning that it’s going to attract many more links than if it were. It’s a short term loss (e.g. they could put on AdSense, affiliate ads, or SEO Book banners) of revenue traded off for a boost in links and traffic that will turn into additional distribution. They’re growing readership first and foremost.

3) Obvious, prominent links from SEO Book aimed at sharing the readership over.

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You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches.

(Removed the keyword the tool was showing cuz that’s private.)

Here’s another one:

This comes right as the Overture tool from Yahoo has finally been put to rest, after showing data from January 07 for over a year. A smart move by Google that will not only gain it attention from SEOs, but surely the domaining world as well.

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It’s no secret that this auberge de jeunesse in Montreal, the Auberge de Paris (I realize the name is unusual), is a client of mine. For a while now they’ve had issues with their reviews being merged with their sister downtown Montreal hotel‘s reviews.

The problem is that since the youth hostel’s reviews tend to score lower than the hotel’s reviews, on average, the hotel gets lower review scores. The result is that the hotel unfairly gets a bad rap.

(The hostel doesn’t get an offsetting revenue benefit because (i) hostel prices are lower and (ii) the Auberge de Paris doesn’t get shown in the Google universal maps results (in fact, only one youth hostel in Montreal does, oddly enough). )

So what causes these merged review listings?

There are a variety of possibilities, but the one that seems most logical to me is confusing external links. I was recently doing some competitor analysis and found an old link of the hotel’s on a page where its competitors also got links. The link featured the keyword “auberge,” which in French means inn. (An “auberge de jeunesse” is therefore a youth “inn” – a youth hostel.)

From having been with the hotel for a couple of years now, I know that there are other links of a similar nature elsewhere, featuring youth hostel anchor text. So I’d say it’s fairly likely that this is the causa causans or at least one of several causes.

The implications if this hypothesis is correct, as far as SEO goes, is that competitors could manipulate your search marketing results. They could build/buy links with messy anchor text to

• merge your reviews with their own (for extra publicity on your branded search terms) or
• merge them with a business in a different industry and thus reduce your sales as customers get annoyed due to the wrong numbers etc.

Note: I’m not claiming credit for the hypothesis – I believe that Mike Blumenthal said it somewhere only I can’t find where (it might also have been Mike Belasco or Andrew Shotland ?). If you know who’s behind the idea, do let me know in the comments. You’ll get a link like Antonio from Marketing de Busca earned.

Another possibility is the co-citation with other hostels. Like I mentioned, that link is far from being unique. So it’s possible that Google kept seeing http://www.hotel-montreal.com links in a youth hostel context and the co-citation lead it to think that the auberge and hotel are one and the same. Aaron Wall used to see his name offered up in SERPs as a related search to Traffic Power when he got sued by them; his hypothesis is that it was due to many common citations with TP.

A related but slightly different possibility is that the links to the hotel featuring the auberge keywords are often accompanied by the hotel’s pricing. Ergo, it’s really one and the same product just operating under two different names. The cause in this case could be described as a more advanced form of co-citation that is similar to how crawlers look for address info on a website for geolocation purposes. This could be perceived, as Mike Blumenthal suggested, as an attempt to avoid mapspam. “It is possibly a spam control strategy to prevent multiple optimized listings from the same business.”

A fourth possibility is that the two businesses share the same front office. People staying at either the hotel or the hostel check in through the same front office. In fact, both websites cite the same address. Publishing your address on your site is a common local SEO tactic, and this could easily be the source of the trouble.

Except that it’s not up to the Hotel and Auberge de Paris to rectify this problem – it’s up to Google. It would be totally unreasonable to have this small hospitality business add another front office and associated staff just for the sake of changing the address listed on the site for Google. Not to mention that Google is always encouraging site owners to to act like it doesn’t exist. But then, maybe I’m being shortsighted; does anyone have a workaround to suggest/share?

What do you guys think the problem is? If you’re a Googler and you read this, some help/rectification/clarification/separation of the listings would be great. And please don’t tell me to try this in Google groups – that’s proven completely useless. Besides that, if you guys liked this post, you might care subscribe to my RSS feed (link goes to XML, not Feedburner).

Update: I forgot to mention that Mike Blumenthal covered this earlier:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/02/21/google-maps-more-reports-of-merged-listings/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/02/20/google-maps-conflated-records/

Unfortunately, no word from Google on the real cause of the problem there nor have I seen it since. Hello? Webmaster communication effort? You guys there?

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At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”…

Update: Apparently this treatment is reserved for sites that also change topics. The technique thus remains useful, but obviously the problem it resolves is narrowed to particular situations. Hat tip to Gustavo Cardial for pointing out the error.

Lady Justice, blindfolded with scales and sword by California Criminal Defense Lawyer Rob Miller.

In an effort to balance out the scales, I’m sharing a legal technique called “the trust.” My hope is that it will enable webmasters to buy sites and sell them without fear that their hard SEO work will go to naught.

Disclaimer: As I’m just a law student and not a lawyer, let alone an expert on trusts, please only take this as information, not legal advice, and please correct any errors you find.

What is a trust?

Trusts evolved through the [feudal] tax-evasion efforts of commoners and low-level knights in the Middle Ages. Before running off to rape and pillage in the Crusades, a person (“A”) would leave their property with a trusted friend (B) – who thus acquired legal title through an inter-vivos transfer – to the use of A’s family or kids.

(The reason this was tax-evasion was that higher up lords or the King would perceive taxes if property was transferred in a will. By transferring inter-vivos, you had no taxes to pay.)

Problems arose where the “trusted” friend tried to claim the property for his own use rather than be its custodian for A’s family. The courts of equity resolved them by holding that the “cestui que trust” (today known as the trustee) was bound to hold the property for the benefit of A’s family. A’s family thus had what is known as “beneficial title.”

The difference between beneficial title and legal title is that the former was created and enforced by the courts of equity (whose jurisdiction was more about morality) while the latter was enforced by the courts of common law. Today both courts are merged. But for reasons of history and lawyers having fun finding new uses for outdated legal mechanisms, the trust (the “use” ‘s modern cousin) is still around.

So the trust is by definition a devise of property to another party for the benefit of a third party. The devise, aka settlement, is made by the settlor (A). The person receiving the property is known as the trustee (B), and he holds legal title. B holds the property in trust for C, the third party designated by the settlor. C has the beneficial title and is thus known as the beneficiary. (A is left with nothing, though if a court finds that the trust “failed,” the property will usually return to him.)

Note: You can have trusts created by wills nowadays. It need not be an inter-vivos transfer. Which makes sense, since we no longer have the feudal tax system.

Why should webmasters who want to buy or sell websites care?

The reason I shared the history lesson was to make clear the distinction between legal and beneficial title. By taking advantage of that distinction, webmasters should be able to write contracts that transfer control of a site without getting it shot down by Google.

In essence, the contract simply states that the site’s seller is creating a trust in favour of the buyer, with the seller as trustee. The property in question would be specified as being the website.

The Result of Using a Trust?

The Whois record for the site’s domain will read that the property is still owned by the site’s seller, since he as trustee retains legal title. However, the beneficial ownership of the property passes to the purchaser. Thus Google has no way of knowing that the site was sold, afaik (if you know of other methods beyond whois, please say so in the comments.

Caveats On This Technique

You need to make sure that you draft the trust document very precisely. In particular, you need to show the three certainties:

• Certainty of intent [on the part of the settlor] to create a trust. If he meant it as a gift, lease, power of appointment etc. you might have trouble. Best to use the word “trust.” Obvious, but you’d be obvious how many people screw that up.
• Certainty of the subject-matter of the trust, i.e. the property. Is it just the domain? Hosting too? The backend? vBulletin licenses? Take an inventory of everything and specify it in the trust instrument (and in the contract specifying that you’re to have this trust created). Then make a clause that if you forgot anything, your intent was to include all things reasonably required for the site’s operation in the subject matter.
• Certainty of objects, i.e. the beneficiaries. Who exactly is getting the property? You? Your business partner? Your company? Note: If it’s your company, it had better be incorporated or else you get into really grey areas of the law. Good for your lawyer’s billings, not so good for you.

Penalty clauses for breach of the trust on the part of the trustee should be included and heavy, but not so harsh that a court would overturn them as unconscionable. This is tricky, and I know very little about these, so again, consult a real lawyer for advice.

If you’re buying a site without knowing the owner other than online, be aware that you run the risk of them “selling” the site a second time. As beneficial owner, you can sue the new purchaser to ‘trace’ your property and get it back, though you might have problems if they purchased it in good faith. Of course if it gets to this point, the site will have been sniped by Google and so you’re better off suing the trustee/seller for damages, since the rankings will be gone. This is probably the biggest problem I can see with the whole deal, since on paper (i.e. the Whois record for legal title), the seller still owns the property.

Finally, the last caveat is that if Google’s legal department gets jerky, they might argue that whois represents legal and beneficial title. It’s a weak argument, imho, but it’s there. And judges mostly don’t get the web (with some exceptions), so there you go… Rule #1 in law is avoid litigation.

Conclusions on Using Trusts to Beat Google’s Domain Demolitions

Whoa! Breaking Google’s rules can be legal and ethical? Shocking I know . More interestingly, I’m sure that jurists with more knowledge than me could find other areas of application for legal mechanisms in search (beyond trademarks). Incidentally, I think I’ve found an application for another legal fiction, and I’ll be blogging about it as the second part of this two-part “law and search marketing” series.

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I’d like to highlight that while I haven’t yet studied the civil law’s parallel mechanism, “la fiducie,” my understanding is that it should work the same way. After all, as you might have derived from the name, a “fiducie” is where property is held by a “fiduciaire” (French for fiduciary) for the benefit of another party. And trustees owe fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries, like website purchasers…

Update: As my presentation at SMX Advanced on the site buying panel was well received, and this is something I have an interest in, I now offer site buying services and consulting.

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Legal fictions can be used by greyhat SEOs to overcome Google’s nearsighted paradigms on buying websites and buying links. While Google is trying to pass off its guidelines as law – and is succeeding in convincing some people of that fact* – the facts are otherwise, and my two-post series on the topic will show that the law can actually enable people to skirt Google’s techniques and expose its faults.

For my first post, I will address how legal fictions in the common law solve the problem of having a website’s SEO strength reset upon purchase and transfer. (I’ve yet to grasp how the civil law handles this, though my understanding is that it has similar mechanisms.)

Everyone’s favourite competitive webmaster, John Andrews, recently liveblogged Matt Cutts’ presentation at Domain Roundtable . Matt explained that Google eliminates all or nearly all of a site’s value when it is sold.

Obviously this is not the case for corporate America (Myspace anyone?), which in any case has its own legal fictions defending it (News Corp bought Myspace Inc, and Myspace.com was just one asset…). But for your average independent/competitive webmaster, the situation is different. So hopefully this will be helpful to you search marketing folks without the benefit of Fortune 500 status to back you up.

Update: The post is live: Buying Sites? Use Trust To Avoid Google Domain Demolitions.

For my second post, I will show how another legal fiction enables the purchase of text link ads under the radar.

After my post on hiding/disguising text link ads as AdSense and other ad format, and Shady’s point on making paid links look like the result of linkbait , this tip is another tool in the link purchaser’s arsenal.

Google is broken: it gave up the original PageRank paradigm of valuing links based on the traffic they send in favour of some public relations notion of links as “votes” (next SEO that repeats that links are votes is getting their ass kicked by yours truly). Until Google fixes itself, buying links from craptastic sites with no visitors (the majority of link buys, imho) is going to keep working.

*”[B]lackhat tactics are [...] illegal ways to game the system to your advantage.” – Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics an Hour a Day, p. 206; otherwise an interesting and educational read and one which I’ll be reviewing here once I’ve finished reading it. Note also: I spoke to Avinash before publishing this and he wanted to highlight two points of context for the above statement:

• First, he recognized that it was a mistake and poor choice of words. His point was merely that it’s unwise as your site might get banned (which is a more accurate statement and one I agree with).
• Second, he highlighted that he wrote that prior to working for Google, and thus it wasn’t a statement that they had him put out there. (That said, I’m quite certain their public relations department was more than happy to see that statement put out there.)

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I’ve been asked the question recently in connection to business blogs: Should I blog on the company’s official site/domain name, or should I blog on on a fresh domain name? Each approach has its advantages, but with current search engine algorithms, my advice is to have the blog on the company’s main domain.

Blogging on the main corporate domain

Pros include:

• Traffic can transit over to the blog from the main company site and quickly build up the blog’s authority, share its posts and ideas, and connect to the company through its blogger(s). This assumes you don’t ignore your blog, like Facebook.
• Links go to the main domain that you’re trying to rank, which is key given the importance Google places on authoritative domains.
• If your blog links to inner FAQ pages or other things on the same site, the look and feel will be the same; the traffic is less likely to bounce upon arrival to the pages you linked to.
• Centralization if you have multiple company blogs (they can all go on one domain), as opposed to spreading them out over a disparate number of domains.

Cons include:

• You could get an extra source of “external links” by putting the new blog on a separate domain (and hosting on a different C block of IPs, at least for Google’s algorithms; hat tip Wiep’s link roundup).
• People may be reluctant to link to a “corporate” blog.
• If the bloggers become popular enough, they can just leave and blog independently.

Blogging on a new domain

Pros include:

• An extra source of links to your new site. I say source and note just ‘more links’ because my own experience with my old Montreal SEO site and this one is that after the first couple of links, additional ones aren’t very helpful, unless they’re deeplinks.
• It’ll be easier to attract links to the blog, though if the blog itself doesn’t convert visitors (either from the links or from the search engines), the value of this may be questionable.
• You might have a more relaxed graphic design, like being in the company lounge as opposed to the company press conference. This could, in turn, attract links and positive attention from CSS galleries and help enhance your company’s “cool factor” with web designers.

Cons include:

• More traffic will bounce when it hits the company’s official domain.
• Traffic won’t transit over from the main site as easily (plus you’ll have more bounces there too), so you won’t have as easy a time spreading the word at first.
• Links don’t go to the corporate domain, so you won’t build up its authority as easily.
• Doesn’t scale as well, inherently.

At the end of the day, the domain authority/strength issue is the big differentiator where I’m concerned. If you check out Wiep’s piece on how he had Matt Cutts’ site (about search marketing) rank for one of the most competitive phrases around, you’ll understand what I mean. Matt’s page had a single inbound link whereas players in that space usually have a pyramid of tens of thousands of links backing them up; the ranking was mostly due to his site itself having so many links and being such a trust authority.

Update: Romela of Business Solutions has a good addition in the comments. So does Dave, of Zoekmachine Optimalisatie SEO.

So keep those corporate / company / business blogs on the main company website. If you liked this, subcribe to my RSS feed.

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You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. As I recently wrote about measuring and tracking social media, I thought this would be of interest:

Diorex – How to Measure a Niche Post

Communities are a growing interest of mine, and if business works out so that I can fund the project properly, I’ll be launching a forum (no, not an SEO forum) eventually. That’s a big if, and mostly in the wishful thinking stage for now, though. Doesn’t mean a guy can’t read up, though, right?

SBM Unleashed: Building a Community

How to Build Community on Your Blog

I’ve always said that building relationships is the best work you can do for linkbuilding. It’s vindicating to see that people I highly respect are saying the same thing. The popular technique at the moment seems to be linking out, as Todd Malicoat suggested in our SMX West interview.

Link Building & Development: Tune in, Turn on, Link Out

Afraid to Link Out? Think Again

The Role of Outbound Links

As usual, my friends have some great contributions to make:

7 CSS Tricks For Better SEO (SEO 2.o – Tad Chef)

The Secret SEM Sued for TM Violations and Breach of Fiduciary Duty (SEOmoz – Sarah Bird)

Google follows nofollowed links in seomoz comments (SEOmoz Jane Copland)

Let’s Talk Landing Pages (SEOmoz Rebecca Kelley feat. Closed Loop Marketing’s Sandy Niehaus and Lance Loveday)

Andrew Goodman (Page Zero) and Amy Konefal (Closed Loop Marketing) : interview on AdWords Expanded Broad Match

Slightly Shady SEO shares 7 Tips for Paranoid SEOs to Mask Their Intentions features a beautiful tip on linkbuying that is, imho, even sweeter than the disguising text links ads as AdSense trick.

Shady’s my favourite blackhat SEO, and I highly recommend subscribing to his feed (that’s a nofollowed link because the link goes to Feedburner, which is a Google property. It’s not nofollowed to try and play stupid games and ‘endorse him but not endorse him’ or what not).

And for you great folks who’ve had the patience to make it all the way here, I’ve reserved what is perhaps one of my favourite recent links from the awesome people at 10e20: How to Get Publicity in Major Magazines and Newspapers | 10e20 Blog

John Andrews is a casual email acquaintance, but we’re on friendly terms and this features some golden nuggets, so: What Matt Cutts Said at Domain RoundTable 2008 – John Andrews – johnon.com

Some social media stories never hurt, do they? Some of this is original thought, some more for the beginners reading this. It’s labelled accordingly so no one will get confused.

What happens when you apply TV to Social Networking

16 Great Ways To Approach Social Media Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide

Prove it or lose it: how social proof can kill or fill your blog

(The above is by my buddy Jon Rognerud, yet another great SMX networking contact. Which just goes to show what I said above, about relationship building being the best form of linkbuilding. I also recommend you check out his blog, and in particular this post which dissects what percentage of your audience will typically be interested in what type of material.)

In the big thinking category, we have the following non-search items (but if you can think creatively, these definitely apply to search, too).

Just say “NO” to crap!

Playing A Round; Life Lessons in 18 Holes of Golf

My Final Post: Top 9 Lessons In Awesomeness

55 Monumental Ways To Enjoy Life’s Greatest Pleasures

When it comes to copywriting, I think I’ve found the holy grail. Sorry Brian, but I need harder drugs (I do love Magnetic Headlines though!). Drumroll please…

Clayton Makepeace’s Copywriting/Direct Marketing site, The Total Package. See his

Interviews with Top Copywriters

Conversation with the Legendary Copywriter Gary Bencivenga Part I

There’s also some cool things I found indirectly through there, such as this copywriter’s lead gen site a la SEOmoz services marketplace. Copywriter Catalog | Find Freelance Copywriters

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If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. As far as domain authority, original content and other mainstays of search marketing, the official Mercedes site is obviously going to come out ahead. But you need to take into account the fact that the person looking for “Buy Mercedes-Benz car” is probably more interested in finding the local dealership version of the site, which at least has more relevant About Us and Dealer information.

That’s just an appetizer to get your brain thinking like a search engineer. (In practice, you’ll find Mercedes Canada’s site ranking, not Silver Star’s.) Now let’s look more closely at the site and the two pages that will count for it most, ignoring the duplicate content for now:

1. Their category and individual car/model pages, where search engine visitors are most likely to land [if the site gets its SEO done properly], and
2. The lead gen forms. While some places like eBay can pull off car sales online, most car dealerships that are taking search marketing seriously, and the number is growing daily; I had to make an effort to find an dealer’s site here in Montreal not using SEO! are opting for quote-request lead generation forms.

The Car Classes Page

Silver Star’s car classes page has a few usability issues to begin with. I like to address usability before search, because there’s no point ranking a site if the traffic’s not going to convert, or convert poorly at best. (Hat tip for the idea to Web Design 4 ROI – an excellent book that I highly recommend buying.)

There’s no particular order or logic to the classes as they’re laid out on the page. It isn’t alphabetical (Mercedes names it’s lines “C Class, SLK class etc.). It isn’t by price range. It isn’t sedans vs coupes vs sports cars vs SUVs. So if you’re looking for a particular class, you have to read through all of them (or scan the pictures, if you’re sufficiently familiar) until you find what you want. Not quite the “Don’t Make Me Think” proned by usability expert Steve Krug.

Individual Car Class Pages

As far as finding what you want, the pages are spot on in terms of content. They describe the class of cars, and tie some features to benefits. Thus, for the E300, ” 10-way power adjustment for the heated front seats along with manually adjustable lumbar support for the driver’s seat allow for the ideal seat position to be found.”

As far as the onpage SEO goes, however, it’s a mixed bag.

Positives:

• The sidebar’s navigation is excellent: it’s text that search engine spiders can read and it’s precise, descriptive keywords.
• The body text uses the keywords a couple of times.

Negatives:

• The title tags just say Mercedes-Benz Canada. Not even Silver Star Mercedes, let alone descriptive keyword oriented stuff like “Mercedes E300″ etc.
• The subtitles are images of text, rather than text. In and of itself, this isn’t horrible – after all, many people make their [textual] logos images and use those as the main homepage header! But in this case, there’s no text for the “alt” (alternative) attribute nor is the image itself in any sort of header tags (<h1>, <h2> etc.).
• The content could use more modifiers.

The Call to Action and Lead Generation Areas

There’s also a modest call to action to “build your own E300 4Matic.” From there, using the horizontal navigation at the top, you can customize options and “send config to dealer.”

While I can understand the modest call to action – you don’t want to be loud and cause brand damage – moving the call to action somewhere where it would more naturally fall into the reader’s line of sight would probably boost the conversion rate. I might try having it at the end of the article, in line with the rest of the column. People read down before they read across, and they don’t always read across to the next column. It’s not a surefire idea, but one worth testing at any rate.

Similarly, it would probably be a good idea to test different wording for the call to action. Instead of “build your own,” “choose your options” might work better. Again, something to test, and measure the impact on leads generated and lead quality.

Another option, and one that would probably have a more significant impact, would be to simplify the process of building your car. When I clicked, I looked around the page’s content for a while to see where I could click to customize options. Only by trying different things did I realize that you had to use the top horizontal navigation to do that. Putting redundant navigation into the content area (and simplifying the mass of text).

If you need models for your forms, check around the affiliate networks. There are some excellent landing pages there (also some shoddy ones). In short though, you’re asking:

1. Who? Answer: Their name.
2. What? Answer: The car they’re interested in; you’re doing a good job of pre-populating this field based on the car page that they’re coming from, e.g. E300 being filled in if they came from that page.
3. When? Answer: Buying time-frame (this also helps prioritize what leads you respond to and when), and best time of day to get backto them.
4. Where? Answer: Where they want to be reached – phone, email, fax, cell etc.
5. How? Answer: Loan, cash, other payment?
6. Optional: Trim (tends to be the most important option).

Finally, and this is the best suggestion I could make for the call to action: try sending visitors straight to a “request a quote” form. By reducing the number of steps to get a quote, you’re likely to increase the number of leads generated.

The quotes can always be adjusted once the dealers are in contact with the potential purchaser and get the options selected. But you can’t adjust a non-existent quote request (e.g.where a visitor felt that it would take too long to ask for the quote, got lazy, and decided not to fill in the form).

Three More Areas For Improvement

First, realize that you’re operating in Quebec, where half the population speaks French. Thus if you want to convert Francophone visitors to the site into buyers, and rank your site for French keywords (“nouvelle auto,” “vehicule neuf” etc.), I’d make the “Français” link more obvious.

Second, there’s no reason for people to link unless they’re making a list of local dealerships (and in which case, the competition’s getting the same links so the links’ values cancel out, where search engines are concerned)… Therefore, consider how you’re going to build relationships with folks and establish original content on your site. Professional photography of the cars at your dealership in particular would be a good starting point, while getting involved in the huge car-blogging community would certainly be beneficial as well.

Third, since the strongest page of a site tends to be the homepage (and thus the one that can rank for the most competitive terms), leaving it as a content-less spash page is hurting the possibility of it ranking for any worthwhile terms. It should feature quality copy and try and either (i) lead visitors deeper into the site and/or (ii) get them straight to a quote request form.

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Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to ADD/ADHD readers? Does it contribute to information overload, by encouraging rapid consumption of content?

Q3: What trends do you see in the consumption of content? I feel that major shifts are occurring but can’t put them into words/don’t know where to look.

Q4: With Google stock’s recent $200+ nosedive, who else is going to get hit in advertising soon?

Related note: There’s a glut in advertising, driven by the trend to offer everything for free and make money by selling ads. The problem, as the article notes briefly in passing, is that the ads have to support something that is eventually paid for, or else you end up with a massive pyramid scheme.

Q5: Should you write scannable content? Or will that make people skim your content and cut into your attention equity? My hypothesis is that there will be poorer retention.

Friendly tip: Don’t bold headers that give away your whole paragraph idea. That encourages people not to read all you have to say, which may in some cases add necessary detail to the header. But if the whole can be summed up in a header, why are you blathering on for three more lines?

You’ll notice the headers here indicate the content to follow, but not the ideas contained therein.

Reputation Management: Get Human and The Domain Registry of Canada (DROC, Droc.ca) aka Registration Services Inc.

• Get Human help you reach human operators. Which is great, because too many companies rely on machine answering services! <rant> Now if only it would help me with those jerks at Paypal! I opened a $USD account at my [Canadian] bank (Scotiabank) and Paypal says that if I withdraw US $, the funds auto-convert to Canadian. But I want US$! Which is why I opened the USD account! If anyone here has the solution, please leave a comment and/or email me! gab at this domain .com

• Shady has a great bit on Clickbooth and why Clickbooth sucks.

• The Domain Registry of Canada uses direct mail with sketchy language to make you think you have to renew/transfer your domains to them.

“You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your domains from your current Registrar to the Domain Registry of Canada*. Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.

“* A Registered business styleof Registration Services Inc.”

Well golly gee, sirs, I guess I’ll renew right away!

Seriously, DROC sucks. www.sibername.com/support/droc.php . www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/domain-registry-of-canada-scam-with-direct-mail-and-online/ . www.active-domain.com/news/2002sep-2.htm.

It also appears these people operate the “Domain Registry of America.”

Reminds me of Network Solutions’ SEO consulting services.

Domains: How To Make A Market-Based Appraisal Tool

1) Scrape completed domain sale records.

2) Provide an input form for the domain and its extension.

3) Check the keywords in the inputted domain and the extension against the recently completed sales.

4) Provide list of sale prices for similar domains and average going rate.

PPC

I was at Treatment Search and clicked an AdSense ad there. It took me to a page that was down. That has got to be the biggest, stupidest mistake you could possibly make. Paying for visits to a page that’s down. I had screenshots but they’re lost, unfortunately.

p.s. On the schedule to be published/submitted for publication this week are a totally original greyhat idea and SMX West photos and coverage. Also, if you enjoyed this post, check out the first Scratchpad and the second Scratchpad.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Just as Google loves data, so should SEOs. I love country code domain names and domaining (NamePros is a great community to learn, if you’re interested). As I was conducting some keyword research to buy new .ca domains, it occurred to me that I could use Google Trends (notice the nofollow on that link ) data to help me with my selection. There are also other uses for Trends data in SEO that are equally interesting.

Google Trends shows you data on which countries’ people are the biggest searchers for any particular keyword. They’ll also show you what cities are the volume users. There’s a few uses for this data. The title promises only one tip, but I’m going to share some more to see if underpromising and overdelivering really works, or if it’s just a popular idea with no juice to back it.

First, you can usually pick up a keyword domain with the ccTLD of the country that does the most searches. For example, if you’re targeting “calgary hotels,” the calgaryhotels.ca domain is likely to still be available once the .com is gone (and if you’re a typo domainer, you look for sites exclusively hosted on ccTLD domains and get the .com ).

The reason you want to get the ccTLD is because you’ll get the edge in Google.ccTLD results, which are often defaulted to in foreign countries. I’ll frequently type a search into my browser (like calgary hotels) and find that I’ve ended up at a Google.ca results page.

As an aside, this post originally recommended that you host locally; I personally don’t think that’s necessary nor a particular advantage. Just because you do business with a local company, doesn’t make you local. By that reasoning, everyone who’s hosted with Dreamhost should have a boost wherever Dreamhost is situated. But, though I’d like to be neighbours with Aaron Wall (that way I could bug him for tips in person ;D), we’re not. Yet we both use Dreamhost.

Then again, most people do business with people in their neighbourhood. This is especially true with regards to smaller hosting companies. In that respect, it makes more sense if this is used as perhaps a counterweight to when big directory type sites try and rank for lots of local terms against smaller folks.

Second, continuing on the theme of SEO uses for trends data, you can figure out what [keyword] direction to expand your site in. If you’re succeeding with selling a product to a particular country or city, then look at related products and see how much demand there is for them in the market you’ve already conquered. This can make upselling (aka add-on sales) a lot easier to current clients. The tip comes courtesy of Julinho (with a bit more detail and practical application added by yours truly).

A few people pointed out that Google Trends is also useful for seasonal data. It doesn’t take a genius to see Christmas is a great keyword in December. But are there any keywords that could get your sales volume on March 23rd up to the same level? I’d bet that gag gifts keywords go hot as April approaches (April fools) and that certain brand modifiers become more important at different times of year. Think TV channels promoting at sweeps time.

And sometimes, Google Trends is just good for a laugh at MSN. I know, I know, I’m in MSN’s corner and want them to boost their share of search, so I’d be better off keeping this one to myself. But returning Google blogsearch’s robots.txt file in the SERPs? Come on! Then again, maybe I should be laughing because Google blogsearch is so full of spam (another great source of data, as per Smaxor). I can’t do screenshots with my HP laptop (or not as easily as I used to with the desktop anyways) so here’s a copy-paste of the SERPs (the Google mail one had me thinking privacy issues – like David, whose Gmail was hacked and caused him to lose his domain! (which he’s since gotten back) – but it’s just some innocuous Google Trends data page):

Web results 1-10 of 3,180,000

See also:

• Images,
• News,
• Maps,
• Sympatico / MSN,
• • More â–¼
  • • AcademicBeta
    • FeedsBeta
    • Spaces
    • Edit Macros
    • Find Macros

Results

• www.google.com

  That Ron Paul Google Trends Chart It Uses a Mis Spelling To Hide the Real Results

  • www.google.com/trends?q=ron+paul%2C+rudy+giuliani%2C+mitt+romney% 2C+john+mccain%2C+fred+th…

• Google Trends · Computers

  Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of …

  • www.google.com/intl/en/ trends/about.html
  • · Cached page
  • Show more results from www.google.com

• Many uses of Google Trends

  Let us discuss how to put g-trends to some good use many uses of google trends … Many uses of Google Trends Let us discuss how to put G-Trends to some good use

  • www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34280.htm

• Andrew Urquhart’s Miscellany : WebTech : Archive : Flawed BBC …

  The BBC Newsonline article: Birmingham tops web porn search uses Google Trends to make claims about what end-users in specific cities are searching for most often based on a flawed …

  • andrewu.co.uk/webtech/archive/?flawed_bbc_ reporting_on_google_ trends
  • · Cached page

• blogsearch.google.com

  Disallow: /trends? Disallow: /trends/music? Disallow: /notebook/search? Disallow: /music. Disallow: /browsersync. Disallow: /call. Disallow: /archivesearch?

  • blogsearch.google.com/ robots.txt
  • · Cached page

• BHIP – Natural Health Trends Corp. – Google Finance

  Get the latest on Natural Health Trends Corp. (BHIP … date news, high quality discussion groups and more on Google … to an independent distributor network that either uses the …

  • finance.google.com/finance?q= NASDAQ:BHIP
  • · Cached page

• Google Trends: amazon kindle, Nov 19, 2007

  Like the recently upgraded Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle uses E-Ink, a new type of … Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are …

  • mail.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=amazon+kindle& amp;date=2007-11-19&sa= X
  • · Cached page

• Google Trends: orchard bank, Nov 9, 2007

  Household Bank uses the information from cookies to provide services that are. … Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are …

  • news.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=orchard+bank& amp;date=2007-11-9&sa= X
  • · Cached page

• google by the numbers at mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m …

  About mobile media lifestyle trends. … Google by the Numbers : “ Google (GOOG) uses its network as a competitive weapon.

  • www.m-trends.org/2005/02/ google-by-numbers-google-goog-uses-its.html
  • · Cached page

• Google Code FAQ – Who uses KML?

  KML in Google Earth Home; Docs; FAQ; Group … Who uses KML? … provide detailed mappings of resources, models, and trends …

  • code.google.com/support/bin/ answer.py?answer=56550&topic= 10032
  • · 19/12/2007
  • · Cached page

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.