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LH.com Is Back Online

Elliot Silver
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5

LH.com is back online.

As you may recall, Lufthansa Airlines won a highly criticized UDRP decision for the name, but Future Media Architects, the owner of LH.com immediately filed suit to prevent the transfer of the domain name. FMA owns a tremendous number of great domain names, and they have a policy of never selling a domain name.

While a UDRP prevents the transfer of a domain name or changes made to it, a lawsuit generally stops the website from working.

As of this morning, LH.com is back online.

Breaking: Kentucky Appeals Court Ruling

Elliot Silver
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According to a report on Fox 17 in Nashville, the Kentucky Court of Appeals. has blocked the state’s attempt to seize gambling domains. The decision can be read online.

Essentially, the appeals court ruled that domain names are not “gambling devices,” and as a result, the initial ruling could not hold since the law pertains to “gambling devices.” The ruling did not address other issues involving the domain seizure, so the law could potentially be revised to include domain names, and perhaps they could be at risk again in the future in Kentucky.   I suppose it really depends on how much time and effort the Kentucky Legislative and Judicial branches wish to devote to this.

Mike Berkens, who has provided extensive commentary on the Kentucky domain seizure, has provides additional feedback on the ruling today.

Creating Search Phrases

Elliot Silver
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5

Say you have a product that is in a quickly saturating market.   How do you get your product to the forefront of this market?   If you are Unilever, you rename the market and own the new market.

I have high(ish) cholesterol mostly due to genetics, although it has been going down as a result of my eating and exercise habits.   I frequently pay attention to cholesterol reduction products, and I found something called Promise Activ Super Shots, which has plant sterols, that supposedly help reduce cholesterol.   They taste pretty good, so I take one whenever I can remember to buy them at the store.

Today I finished the last of the four pack, and as I was throwing out the box, I saw “REMOVE CHOLESTEROL” in big blue typeface. When it comes to cholesterol, I usually see keyword phrases like, “reduce your cholesterol,” “cholesterol reduction,” and “lower your cholesterol,” and this is the first time I saw “remove cholesterol.” I did a Whois search, and sure enough, RemoveCholesterol.com is owned by Unilever, the parent company of Promise, and it was registered in 2007.

It appears that Unilever has created, branded and defined this keyword phrase for their products. With all the competition for the popular keyword phrases, it’s a smart move to create a new one. Now if they would only forward traffic from this domain name to one of their brand websites!!

There Will be Less Domain Development

Elliot Silver
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When I was on WebmasterRadio.fm, I was asked to make domain industry predictions for 2009.   I hate making predictions, but one of my off the cuff answers was that I thought there would be less development by domain investors by the end of 2009 than there is now.   Although this contradicts what has been going on throughout the past several months, I’d like to explain my thinking.

With PPC revenue down and UDRP complaints against generics/acronyms seemingly at an all time high, domain investors at all levels have been moving towards developing their domain names.   Some people are using mini site services like aeiou.com or SiteGraduate.com, other people are using companies like WhyPark to build a continually updated site, others are hiring great developers to build websites, and others have been working on their own to build out their sites.   Development has been the main theme or at least a big talking point at all the domain conferences since late 2007 and early 2008.

The one big problem/obstacle is that development is hard work.   Sure, a 5 page mini site will get indexed vs a parked page which typically won’t, driving organic search traffic to the site.   However, to really make good money and a solid ROI, I think more than 5 pages are needed to capitalize on the long tail in addition to the lower hanging fruit.   Since most competitive keywords and key phrases have considerable competition from fully developed and deeply rich sites, a great domain name usually needs more than just a mini site to see strong results. My mini-sites that do well started off as mini sites, but I also took time to add content.

This being said, the people who have been spending time and money developing are realizing just how difficult it is to make a good return on investment, and some will throw the towel in and either stop developing and building their sites or slow the pace at which they were going. I think we will see this happen towards the end of 2009. People will still be developing their best domain names, but I don’t think it will happen at the same rate that it has happened the last few months.

Again, I repeat, development is hard work. A great domain name doesn’t need to be developed to make money, but development will usually bring in more money and traffic.   The domain owner needs to determine whether it’s worth the money and time to do this.   Ultimately, I believe people who have been spending money developing “brandable” domain names will realize that they aren’t bringing anything special to the table, so they aren’t generating a positive return on their investment, while owners of great generics slowly realize that development is more effort than they initially thought.

There are great options out there to develop good domain names.   However, it takes time and effort to grow websites into revenue generating websites, and I don’t think all domain investors will have the desire to do this.

What do you think?

Elliot’s Blog on Facebook; Twitter Next

Elliot Silver
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I just created a page on Facebook for Elliot’s Blog, and I am going to begin using Twitter as well.   It’s about time I catch up!   Feel free to sign up or follow.

If you have any tips or advice on using Facebook or Twitter, please drop me a comment or a note.

Using Traffic Data to Register Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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6

A few years ago, I bought a couple of domain names for my dad’s business – one of which is the exact name of the store and the other is the shortened version, as it is commonly known. My dad had a website built, and about two years ago, he had Verizon re-design and manage the site, as part of his advertising with Super Pages.

Because it’s a local business, my never really focused on building a highly interactive website.   IMO, the main point was to have a website to inform people of the business who use the search engines or SuperPages.com. I figured that as long as there was information about the business, the brands carried, the store hours, and contact information, all would be good.   I never paid much attention after the site was launched.

Last week, out of curiosity, I installed a tracking code on the website, and I began to see how people were finding his website.   There wasn’t a lot of traffic (under 20 UV/day), but a good enough amount that it might be important to re-design the site. I was able to see that most people were finding the site via Google searching for the name of the store, and most had IP addresses that were local to the store. I also saw that some people are searching Google for industry keywords plus the city or region. Finally, I noticed several Google searches for a couple of long tail keywords that are important to the industry.

Interestingly, my dad’s small business is ranked in the top 10 for these two long tail industry keywords, and I also saw that the keywords in .com were deleted.   I decided to register the names and am now going to see how I can leverage the domain names to help improve this ranking. I am not an expert in this area, but even if owning the keywords don’t help the store, at least someone else can’t register and develop them, which would hurt the store’s ranking for these keywords.

I think website analytics is a neat way to locate solid keyword domain names, and I plan to do some searching through my websites to see if I can find any unregistered keyword terms.

How would you leverage a keyword domain name to help boost the traffic to a developed website?

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