Sunday Thoughts & Updates

If you or someone you know is running in the Boston Marathon tomorrow, let me know. We will be watching some of the race from mile 13 in Wellesley, and I will be on the lookout. Watching the Marathon has become an annual tradition for us, and it usually motivates me to run more.

Here are some thoughts and updates for the weekend. If you have anything to share or discuss with others, you are welcome to do so in the comment section below. Enjoy the rest of your day!

• A couple of days ago, Shane Cultra wrote in response to the Google mobile search changes, “If you have a great domain you can use it as your brand to stand out.” I agree with Shane here. I think longer tail names may be most impacted, although Penguin and Panda probably did more damage to those. However, there is still inherent trust in a keyword .com brand, and that has not been diminished.

• I read the Business Insider article about Tidal. I wonder how long I should wait before writing this email: “Dear Mr. Carter, At what price would you sell the Tidal.com url?” (Kidding, sort of).

• Looks like Francois changed Domaining.com to https last week. I know there was some news that Google would consider https in its search rankings, but as far as I am aware, that has not yet come to fruition. For me, it’s too big of a risk in changing the redirects right now considering the major url change I made a year and a half ago. Without a certain reward for doing it, I think there is a greater chance of breaking things and incurring extra costs for a very limited potential reward. It’s on my radar though, and I use https for the back-end of my site already.

• Speaking of Google, the mobile-friendly website deadline is just two days away on April 21. It looks like most domain industry blogs are prepared for this change, but it’s something others need to consider as well.

• There are still two domain industry tools I use just about every day: Freshdrop and DomainTools. I’ve also been using DomainIQ quite a bit.

• The World Domain Day auction is happening right now on Snapnames. There are just a few days remaining in this auction.