Although many people initially brushed off the lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia against Facebook, some emails allegedly from Mark Zuckerberg have been published that may bolster Ceglia’s legal case. These emails are being covered by a plethora of tech news blogs this morning.
Personally, I don’t have much interest in following this lawsuit, although there is one thing that is interesting for me to read. In one of the alleged Zuckerberg emails posted on CNet, Zuckerberg discussed the domain names that were available for the fledgling website to use:
“both original names >facebook.com and pagebook.com are unavailable, so there is no actual domain name either. thefacebook.com and thepagebook.com are both available but are clearly not a premium quality domain as they are much harder to remember.“
It’s interesting to read the domain aspect of this case if these alleged Mark Zuckerberg emails are real. As you know by now, the company went forward with TheFacebook.com and eventually acquired Facebook.com after the site launched. The subsequent emails, where they decided on using TheFacebook.com, would have made for an interesting read, too.
I know there are a lot of domain investors who have developed one or more websites, and many have seen success in terms of traffic and advertisers for one or more website. I want to make a suggestion to those of you who may have local directory sites for national services or products, and I will use DogWalker.com as my example.
If possible, you should consider hand registering long tail domain names to help drive traffic to your site. You can either build mini sites (which I do not do) to drive traffic to the main site, or you can do a 301 redirect, which won’t give you much SEO value, but they could drive traffic to your site.
I own domain names like PhiladelphiaDogWalking.com, LasVegasDogWalker.com, CharlotteDogWalkers.com, and many other large city names that are related (all hand registered). These names are all forwarded to the main page on DogWalker.com for each city, allowing type in traffic to find the page they want.
Here’s my rationale. I pay under $10 for a hand registered domain name. I also pay Adwords somewhere between $.75 and $1.75 or so per click, depending on the keyword. Assuming I get 8-12 visits a year, the names pay for themselves. It’s great because when someone types in LasVegasDogWalker.com, it’s very targeted traffic.
In addition, these names also have intrinsic value to others as well, since they’re descriptive domain names. In other words, I could sell any of these names if that will be beneficial to my business. Perhaps I could sell a name like BrooklynDogWalking.com to a company in Brooklyn for $1,500 and an annual listing on DogWalker.com + a link back. I haven’t done this yet, but it’s a possibility.
To be totally truthful, I don’t have a way to track the traffic from these domain names since they are 301 redirects. However, when I had them on WhyPark, most did receive a few visits a month, so I can assume that traffic has continued.
I recommend you look into doing this. I know some of my competitors are doing the exact same thing, and I am sure yours are as well.
I received a press release this afternoon from a Pennsylvania company called Millennium Surgical announcing its acquisition of the descriptive domain name, SurgicalInstruments.com. According to a recent domain sales report on DNN, the company paid $10,000 for the domain name using Sedo.
This is a very wise acquisition for the company since its business is surgical instruments. Much like the Melville Candy Company paid millions of dollars to own the descriptive domain name for its business (Candy.com), Millennium now owns the best domain name for its market.
According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the exact match search numbers for the term “surgical instruments” is 18,100 globally. The exact match for the company name, “millennium surgical” is just 91. This is a case where the descriptive domain name is far more recognizable than the brand of the company that acquired the domain name.
In addition to the recognition, one advantage of owning this descriptive domain name is the added SEO value of the exact match domain name. The company now appears to be forwarding millenniumsurgical.com to its new domain name.
I was reading Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.com article discussing the embedded video from Google’s Matt Cutts regarding keyword domain names and the rankings they achieve in Google. Aaron is one of the more forward-thinking SEOs, and it’s a good article for domain investors to read.
Firstly, I think Aaron should note that there is a BIG difference between “keyword domain names” discussed by Matt Cutts and exact match domain names (EMD) discussed by Aaron. To me, keyword domain names are names like BestCarInsuranceQuotes.com or WatchMovieTrailersOnline.com, and exact match domain names would be names like SkiHelmets.com or SoccerCleats.com. Anyway, more on that below.
At the conclusion of the article, Aaron posed the question, “What happens to the value of domain names if EMD bonus goes away & Google keeps adding other data sources?”
From my perspective, strong descriptive domain names will still have the same value before and after because those domain names can be brands on their own. I think long tail keyword names, ugly keyword names with lots of hyphens, non .com, and nonsensical keyword domain names could take a hit in value, assuming they had any intrinsic value prior to the algo change.
Let me explain what I mean for a minute.
Domain names like Hotels.com, Ski.com, Golf.com, Cars.com, Insurance.com, and even my own DogWalker.com**, have become brands after development and marketing. Even Aaron Wall’s own domain name (SEOBook.com) is an example of a EMD, “SEO Book,” turned into a brand. These domain names say what they are and people bypass Google to visit those sites because they know what they’ll get.
Similar but yet to be developed domain names like Cats.com, or thousands of other EMDs can be bought and built into self-branded companies that have similar brand recognition as a branded company like Catster. If a local pet shop with big aspirations buys Cats.com and invests significant time and expense into building a helpful portal that people benefit from visiting, wouldn’t Google want to reward its efforts with a strong ranking, allowing it to compete with larger brands like Petco or PetSmart? Isn’t that one of the best things about the Internet?
Many domain investors (like myself) purchase and value domain names based on the potential for brand development, weighing that higher than current traffic / revenue. I didn’t buy DogWalker.com because I thought I could game a search engine, but rather because it’s easy to remember and I saw the potential it had to become a brand in and of itself.
As I mentioned, I do think that longer tail and nonsensical domain names with keywords will suffer. For instance, a name like Best-Car-Insurance-Quotes.info, which wouldn’t make for a good brand, shouldn’t get ranked higher in Google simply because the owner bought a name with keywords in it. Similarly, a nonsensical domain name like QuotesInsuranceCar.com should not get any EMD bonus simply because the name has a random assortment of meaningful keywords.
I do think Google’s algorithm change impacting keyword domain names will be felt by some. From my perspective, it’s likely that the biggest impact will be felt by domain registrars, since there will be far less incentive for someone to register long tail and nonsensical keyword domain names.
I happen to think that EMDs can be easily made into brands and that there is quite a bit of difference between a EMD and a keyword domain name, and Google is smart enough to know the difference.
**For my DogWalker.com site, it received around 100 visits/month before development about 16 months ago. Today, traffic is around 10,000 visits a month with 20-25% of it being direct navigation. To me, this indicates that people have learned about the brand and visit DogWalker.com in lieu of a search engine.
In January of 2010, I blogged about my goal of selling ResistancePool.com to a leading pool company, and I shared my research on potential buyers and my methodology for selling the domain name. Unfortunately, my efforts did not result in a sale.
Several months after my article was posted, I was able to get in touch with Endless Pools, one of the largest pool companies. Endless Pools ranks #1 in Google for the term “resistance pool,” which likely drives some traffic to its website, and the company also ranks well for a variety of other industry keywords and terms.
When I first connected with the company’s Marketing Director, we weren’t able to reach a sales agreement for the domain name. Recently, I reached out to the company again, and we were able to come up with a deal in which everyone is very happy… especially the Ronald McDonald House.
As you know, I am currently raising funds for the Ronald McDonald House, and I hope to raise $5,000 by the end of April. Instead of selling ResistancePool.com to Endless Pools, the company has agreed to donate the sales price to help my efforts in raising funds for this great non profit organization.
The company will get a highly targeted, descriptive domain name, I am able to “sell” a domain name that wasn’t aligned with my business development plans, and the Ronald McDonald House will receive a donation. I believe this is a situation which everyone will benefit.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the current labor situation in the National Football League, the Cleveland Browns have filed a UDRP for the Browns.com domain name. The cellar-dwelling Browns, who finished 5-11 last season, use ClevelandBrowns.com for its website.
Browns.com has been owned by a registrant in Italy for a number of years. The Whois History results for this domain name go back to 2003, and it appears to me that it’s been owned by the same entity. At the moment, Browns.com does not resolve.
It does look like there might have been football-related links on the domain name at one point, although the owner may not have control over what links were displayed. I find it strange that the football team has taken so long to file a UDRP for the name though, since they must have known another entity has owned it for so many years.
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Although many people initially brushed off the lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia against Facebook, some emails allegedly from Mark Zuckerberg have been published that may bolster Ceglia’s legal case. These emails are being covered by a plethora of tech news blogs this morning.
I received a 
In January of 2010,