SwiftRank has been one of the most active domain buyers in the last couple of years, purchasing what is likely millions of dollars worth of domain names in public and private sales and auction. The company owns thousands of the best geographic hotel and travel related domain names, all of which operate independently but in conjunction with each other.
I believe the company’s largest publicly reported sale was SydneyHotels.com for $100k, and the company has spent significantly more in private. The company now owns names like LasVegasHotels.com, BostonHotels.com, CapetownHotels.com, VancouverHotels.com, HongKongHotel.com, and even NewYorkRestaurants.com. Do a search for large city hotel/s .com names, and there’s a good chance the company owns it.
I just learned that the company has re-branded itself as  Travel Shark, which in my opinion, suits them much better and is a stronger brand name. The company has launched a creative way to announce the re-branding effort and I want to share the four videos with you.
Is there an emoticon for scratching your head with a perplexed look on your face? Please insert here.
Congrats on the name change. I guess this is their quirky way of rebranding. They obviously put a lot of effort into it.
They certainly have lots of great domains to enhance their business model.
Rob is being nice when he uses the word quirky. These youtube vids are horrible..They shouldn’t have released those imo .
The website however is real sharp and good.
And when you operate in the travel/hotel niche it does not boil down on selling domain names. If you own targetted sites and you just take 5% from the bookings you will sleep very thight every night.. There is alot of cash going on there. 5% doesn’t sound much at all . But if you take in account how many people book hotels ,travels etc etc it adds up super fast.
“SwiftRank” hints of the idea that the company’s “exact match domains are destined to dominate” the SERPs.
As always, when SEO strategies become popular – especially ones that suggest the SERPs/site-rank can be “gamed” (for example, by exact match City+Hotel.com domains) – well, that tends to be a death knell for the “advantage”.
So now that the WWW is abuzz with discussions about the death of the exact-match-boost I guess it’s time to rebrand, from SwiftRank to . . . TravelShark . . . Travel that . . . bites? 😛
Emoticon for crickets chirping (more like)
One thing I’ve never understood is why Swiftrank sites never appear in Google. Considering they own thousands of sites, you’d think they’d be ranked better. I’ve never actually come across a Swiftrank site without searching for the “city hotels” name PLUS “Swiftrank.”
I’m sure some of their sites do rank, but how visible are they? SydneyHotels doesn’t appear to be on either page 1 or 2 for the search “sydney hotels” without quotes.
SydneyHotelsAccommodation.com, a name most people probably wouldn’t hand register, is a minisite that’s at the top of page 2. But SydneyHotels is nowhere to be seen.
I’m with Rob and Theo on the quality of the videos. They’re amateurish in quality, and not in a hip, tongue-in-cheek Geico lizard kind of way. I don’t know why a large company would release something with such low production value. TravelShark is a nice name, but other than that, the whole thing makes no sense.
Off the subject but a new website for Harry Potter is buzzing right now, pottermore.com, by Christopher Little Literary Agency registrar is netnames, I checked and all other major tlds are also taken by netnames.
Including, .com .net .org .info .asia .mobi .biz .us. .co .tv .me .it .ca .co.uk .mx .cm .de .jp .ch .bg I haven’t checked all cctld’s but I think this one’s secured.
I came across some through google search.
I’m sure there prime names receive thousands of uniques per day with direct navigation
I also heard there after a big geo.com last year.
Wish them the very best. Bet the top 50 names of there portfolio is 80 percent of there revenues.
They know what there doing imo.
They bought a few names off frank.
Hope frank did what rick did with candy.com
The people on youtube seen to like the videos, they are all getting positive comments. Their kind of funny!