Seven Mile

A Search Engine .. Powered by Millions of Domain Names

Danno writes:

"Hi,

If there ever was a time in human history for a few 'domainers' and a few 'seo'ers/sem'ers' that understand domains and Internet search...to come together.

Now would be the time to for a "Field of Dreams" moment... 'build it and they will come'.

___

Dogpile Beats Google, Again Top Search Engine in Customer Satisfaction
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2007/10/18/dogpile-beats-google-again-top-search-engine-in-customer-satisfaction/

Peace!
Dan"

***FS***  A bunch of domain registrants plumbing their traffic from countless individual names to the results page realting to the name's subject matter within the search engine.  Type eatingdisorders.com and get to Dogpile results for "eating disorders"  ..  Not a bad idea Danno..  but if you really think about it,  we already have that in the form of Google..  GOOG gets millions of unique visits each day to their domainpark syndication channel from domains like yours and mine  ;) ..  still this engine would be owned by the domain registrants .. a co-op..  I like the idea..  but it's hard to align interests. Great idea Danno.

Trademark Law- What Search Marketers Should Know

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627333

This is a topic that all domain registrants and paid-search marketers should familiarise themselves with.

Aaron Wall Spots Google Typo Fixing of URL Search Queries in The Searchbox

Aaron writes:

""Hi Frank,

Hope you are doing well. I am still overseas, but thought you might be interested in how Google is spell correcting some domain name and filepath spelling errors. http://www.seobook.com/google-corrects-domain-name-spelling-errors

They dont fix .nt or .xom, but they directed an seibook.com/bok query to seobook.com/blog !

seibook.com/book is a real URL, only 1 character away from that URL causes google to point to my domain while changing a character in the domain name and 3 in the filename.""

***FS*** This type of stuff can backfire for the obvious "confusion issues" you touch on Aaron. Google acting as the arbiter, deciding which site you want, based on ancillary information you give it..  Type seibook.com in the Google search box and the algo results spit back the requested seibook.com site (for me in Cayman anyway)..  Give Google more information such as the /blog filepath after the URL and Google thinks the user is looking for Aaron's site because it knows that seibook.com/blog isn't indexed or doesn't exist.

I think this gradual shaping of navigation will eventually creep into address bar navigation..  That could reignite browser competition... and combined with higher registry renewal prices will cause lots of longer tail "tasting acquired" portfolios to start dying off.  Expect a lot more name deletions in 2008-2009 ..  partly based on the economy (speculative chaff jettisoned) and partly based of changes like these.

That said, this only works so far. History has shown, you can't cage the user...  Throw up too many blockades, detours and roadblocks to user intent and people will abandon your platform. I am living proof of that statement as we get almost 100% of our traffic from around Google..  Google sends us nothing -- effectively no traffic, yet all our visitors are Google users.. That's a lot of disgruntled customers who are forced to leave Google, finding their way to our front door by avoiding the natural path (through Google).  If Google stopped the gaming their search results, allowing Domain Name searches in their search box to resolve or at least show the actual site requested, our traffic would spike significantly..  I don't expect the cold war against direct navigation to stop anytime soon ...  but a fellow can always hope.. and take comfort in the fact that Google, Microsoft and all navigation helpers can game and cajole as they wish..  People will find their way to the 'free Internet'..  (the site they actually want) eventually.

Everytime I post on this subject it reminds me of the great quote by Gandhi:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you; then you win!"

For the longest time Search engines ignored domains..  and later some (not all) search operators laughed at the domain name navigation concept, ridiculing it as "Grandma Navigation" .. well the fact that Google runs a registrar, a domain parking program and aggressively shapes domain searches in the Google searchbox, illustrates to me that they have decided to fight (or at least try to control) some forms of domain navigation.

I look forward to the day when every domain name correctly entered into the Google search-box will reward the user with a link to the site they request.  If you love your users Google,  set them free. :)

Interactive Marketing Spend to Surpass $61B in Five Years

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/10/15/forrester-interactive-marketing-spend-to-surpass-61b-in-five-years/

Something's gotta give here..  there is only so much inventory..  Only so many eyeballs..  The price of a unique IP visitor is going to go wayyyy up in future.

Pink Houses

"..And theres winners, and theres losers
But they aint no big deal
cuz the simple man baby pays for the thrills,
The bills and the pills that kill.."

--John Cougar Mellencamp

What a difference a year makes..

Miami’s economy was not swinging like just twelve months ago..  Lots and lots of empty homes and condos..  Lots and lots of foreclosures. There was a foreclosure convention running in the same hotel facility as the TRAFFIC conference and those foreclosure specialists were making money.

This new foreclosure dynamic is partly responsible for the global credit market flux we saw in August.. Why? Lenders took debts they couldn’t sell as stand-alones and grouped them with other loans.. Those packages of loans were resold as securities effectively hiding 'the bad' in a forest of other loans. When times were good and interest rates were at 1%, the market bought those ‘securities’ and discounted risk. When rates rose, some loans stopped performing and the securities that constitute them didn’t look so hot. The debt markets started to question the soundness of all similar securities and liquidity got scarce.

On the last night of TRAFFIC (or the last ‘morning’ depending on your definition of night) we went to a private party in South-beach.. We rolled past lots of new, darkened condo towers, many of them unfinished.  When we got to the club we walked past the line at the front door.. I thought about the other would-be patrons standing in line.

There are several types of club goers. Those who dutifully wait in line, chatting with other pals and strangers to pass the time... those who try to buy their way through the back-door of the club and those who cut through the line by signing-up for "bottle service".

I learned about bottle service several years ago.. and thrilled to learn you can whisk through the line at hot clubs and secure a great table by calling in advance for a $350 - $900 bottle of liquor. Pay up-front and get ushered in like a baller.  Prepay two or three bottles and bring your entire crew of ballers. The good tables are always taken by those with bottle-service... and there is always somebody bigger.  I once had a friend buy a $350 bottle of champagne only to be evicted by a celeb ordering 6 bottles of $750 champagne.

Well, selling Internet traffic comes with a similar set of secret handshakes. Traffic is Traffic...  I own domains and you own domains. Some of us sell our traffic through the front door (Google Adsense, TrafficZ or Domainsponsor main-page signup)..  Some negotiate specialty deals which run directly through Yahoo, Google or Ask. Behind those curtains are differing revenue share percentages..  Big, high-quality traffic publishers can negotiate a greater percentage of gross revenue than small publishers with bad traffic.. That’s the way it should be I suppose.

The problem with life (and traffic for that matter) is that it isn’t always fair.  Sometimes the nicest, most fun people have to wait in line at the club and sometimes worse traffic can get handled much better than 'the cream' - and than it deserves to be.

Just as sub-prime loans can be repackaged and sold for more money, sub-prime Internet traffic can be sent to traffic aggregators and parking co's where it hides in the forest with other good traffic, making the parking co look like a better traffic source than it is..

Consider Ask.com ..  which has a deal to send traffic to Google and provides redistribution services to third party middlemen and optimizers.. Ask may not offer a "fire and forget" feed that any domainer can use out of the box, but because Ask’s feed is not Smart-priced, there is a huge opportunity and inefficiency for those who know how to handle it. Traffic can be sent to a parking co with an Ask deal, (where it subsequently flows to Google) skirting the Google smart-price filter that this same traffic would be subject to at the front door Google "Adsense for domain" (AFD) feed.

And like our nightclub where serious drinkers with open expense accounts and a penchant for tipping have to wait in line at the bar with those nursing a VOS; the good Internet traffic going through Google's Smart-price filter pays the freight for a lot of VOS drinking, sub-prime, backdoor syndication fluff.

This is just one inefficiency of many on the Internet of course..  The loopholes seem to get created faster than previous ones are closed.

Whether it’s Google providing access to different types of feeds to different parking co's or whether it's a volume lead buyer purchasing sign-ups from one parking co and not another; there are always differences which act as a backdoor, providing enhanced monetization to some traffic for no other reason than the fact that the loophole exists.

In the final analysis it is higher converting, quality traffic which pays the thrills, the bills, the pills that kill by underwriting the paid-search advertising market and accompanying loopholes.  If you own 'that' traffic in the form of quality domains or quality subsyndication partners, you will be in a much better position if credit market style 'contagion' shake-out ever finds it's way to this industry.

Smoke Mirrors and Deception

Josh comments on Johnon.com/Michael Gilmour..  His thoughts posted raw and unfiltered..  except for heading, courtesy of me..  Smoke and mirrors never last tho ..  Cream always rises, truth always finds a way to show.

http://www.johnon.com/417/domainer-profits.html

""Domainer profit margins: Michael Gilmour of WhizzBangsBlog.com knows his business. He presented numbers (I love to see numbers) on Google's traffic acuisition costs and the percentage of ad revenue shared between Google, domainers, and parking companies.

Guess what? Google¹s share has gone down (-29%), domainer¹s have basically stayed the same (-3%), and parking companies revenues have increased around 45% (since Q4 2005).

Google¹s share has gone down (-29%), domainer¹s have basically stayed the same (-3%), and parking companies revenues have increased around 45% (since Q4 2005). I think you get my point.  :)

My prediction:

Some very smart person or group of people is going to set up a transparent and very well run "parking" company that will disrupt the current situation in a significant way. My guess is this company will offer variances of parked pages, real mini-sites and Transparent Accounting to those who park their domains with them.

Lastly, this company will take a much lower revenue share than other parked companies, and domainers with Traffic will stampede towards them.""

***FS*** I'll go one better..  the parking company that acts as the disruptive conduit upsetting the apple cart rev-share will be domainer centric. I have watched so many parking co's come and go..  Many "get" this biz but many don't..  A significant percentage of present day domain parking co's play a combination game of "keepway", "watch the competition then react" and "I think I've got something really special that nobody else does..  but I'm wrong"  All those games eventually blow away amid disruptive competitive actions.

Domain Names and The Paid Search Traffic Eco System

Owen comments on the "SEO Guru Provost Nails It" post:

""Zillow- nope that's not it .. It's that they do not use "house values" as keyword copy.. That they don't match the other words ..That they use cutesy invented words like zestimate rather then plain english that explains what they do. I could fix this in a NY Minute- do it every day- took a long time to learn. That said, having a press release about knowing the value of your home and staying informed which is not branded zillow but goes to a generic url can get to the top as well and Zillow is irrelevant until they get to the page. Too many companies waste the limited word count that compels a click by talking about themselves and their buzz words rather than make an offer that a customer cares about.

Every Google listing should be a like a classified ad. They need to be rigged that way. It takes seo copy skill which is very different from all the metatags, text anchors and other techy things seo experts think matters more. I do this with PDF docs on a server that has no facing content. Has nothing to do with HTML.""

So I got to thinking about Google, Domains, Traffic, Zillow and companies like theirs. Companies which build wonderful platforms, which exert great collective energy to create a mousetrap, a service, a website.. Zillow has "the buzz" and "press zest" because the site was conjured up by Rich Barton, the former Microsoft executive who created Expedia..  That site became a big hit.  I think Rich and his team will do it again with Zillow, but had they acquired a large bucket of generic real estate domain names for $50 or 100 million, they would have placed their company in a much stronger lifetime position. Why?.. because they would have made it harder for others to bid for traffic at Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Why is that?  It has to do with the traffic cycle and eco system.

There are only so many generic intent domain names with type-in traffic.  Names like SarasotaRealEstate.com, HouseHunting.com or HomeAppraisal.com.  Anyone can own these names and use them as they see fit.  These names deliver high quality type-in-traffic which comes for the descriptive nature of the words which make up the name. Buy one of these names and you get 20 or 30 visits a day.  Work to acquire 10,000 generic names like this and you sit on a gusher of 6million to 9million targeted unique visits a month!

In today's traffic ecosystem the majority of generic keyword style domain names are marshaled by hundreds of middlemen, parking companies, redistributors, subsyndicators etc.. and all this fancy plumbing leads domain name traffic back to the two dominant keyword marketplaces at Yahoo and Google where that traffic is sold to sites like Zillow on a per-click basis.  Had Zillow bought "the cow" in the form of thousands of generic domain names, they upset that eco-system by removing supply from the marketplaces. Point SarasotaRealEstate.com to Zillow and that traffic is no longer available for Trulia to bid on at Yahoo..  You could argue that every time a high quality domain name gets sold and developed or redirected to another existing site that the price for the remaining traffic quietly goes up.

That is one of the reasons I babble about buying a generic defensible type in traffic domain name to compliment your brand. It reduces your lifetime traffic acquisition and marketing costs.

It isn't practical for every start-up to spend $50mm buying buckets of high quality domain names of course..  But if you were sure you had a hit on your hands and if you had the grand-master like foresight to think eight steps ahead of your peers, it would help seal your success and make it harder for others to follow in your wake if you did.

Oversee Gets New CFO

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070912005337&newsLang=en

New hire at Oversee... This is going to be a big company..  I recently heard somebody knock one of their recent purchases as a poor use of money... Those comentators dramatically underestimate the free-cashflow, drive and resolve at Oversee.  This is going to be a generally recognized multi-billion dollar corporation in short order. Smart, regular guys with incredibly big wallets.

Ask to Syndicate Microsoft Adcenter Ads

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001806

...  Of course as a Google partner with the leading Google rev-share, Ask probably won't be displaying Microsoft ads very often.  Microsoft's paid search marketplace is still young and and doesn't have as robust a bid-base yet..  If Ask operates like I think they do, it won't display Microsoft ads unless the bid or effective (post rev-share) click-through is greater than Google's (which probably won't be very often).

Then again .. there is a persistent industry rumor that Microsoft is burning money, overpaying on a flat-rate basis for access to key distribution partners it wants, the idea being that a little mad money will help them grease the skids and grow an ad-marketplace with lots of distribution/reach. If MSFT has the right distribution channel then the bidders (advertisers) will follow.

There will be some great intermediate traffic-arbitrage opportunities through MSFT adcenter if that's the case.

Firefox Takes IE Down Another Notch

Danno sends spicy headline and link:

""FYI...July 17

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39167861,00.htm?r=1

Best,
Dan"""

***FS*** The way I see it Microsoft / IE have two choices.  They can clean up their act (browser) and stop gaming people's navigational intent via BS takeovers of your/my traffic to their "Live" property (this basically goes to improving the usefulness of their browser) .. or they can gradually perish as people like you,  I, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others work against them to undermine their position.  Nobody would work against them if they were delivering a better product or running a clean show.  If they choose the latter,  I expect even more nefariousness and acts of dsesperation as they go down at an accelerated pace.  Serious serious prediction.