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March 12, 2008

Client 9 Domains Snatched by Spitzer Scandal Profiteers

Direct navigation and type-in traffic boast the highest conversion rates of any type of search traffic. But not in every case. Take Eliot Spitzer's for example.

Minutes after news broke about Governor Spitzer's alleged involvement with a prostitution ring, domains related to the scandal began selling like hot cakes. According to Wired Blog, domains such as Client9.com have been snatched up since the New York Times went live with the story on Monday and (unlike EmperorsClubVIP.com) they can't monetize the traffic they receive.

Room871.com, purchased last October, has been listed for sale at $750. Anyone expecting huge profits from these domains could be in for a rude awakening.

Nick Galbreth, a software engineer who purchased Client9.com, has made just $11, though he estimates having invested 8 hours of work into the domain.

Chris Potoski, on the other hand, is using the scandal to redirect traffic to his already established adult content sites. He's already gained 11 members from the marketing effort. Of course, he's not sharing the names of his new clients.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:33 AM | Permalink

December 11, 2007

SEW Experts: What's in a (Domain) Name? Take 2

As much as some people would like to have the industry more regulated and standardized, SEO is both art and science. The art part includes opinion. In today's au Natural column, "What's in a (Domain) Name? Take 2," Mark Jackson responds to reader criticism and sticks by his opinion that hyphenated domain names are spammy.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 4, 2007

SEW Experts: Choosing the Best Domains for Search Engine Visibility

What's in a name? Search engine visibility starts with buying the best domains. In today's au Natural column, "How to Choose the Best Domains for Search Engine Visibility," Mark Jackson explains why choosing the right domains, and creating a domain redirect strategy, can be a valuable move in your SEO plan.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 5, 2007

Domain Contacts Should Not Change

Lately, ICANN has been in the process of determining the fate of domain name ownership information. The proposed change aims to improve the privacy of domain registrants by limiting the information required. However noble, we hope the proposal will be tabled to prevent "bad actors" from flourishing across domains.

Until now, the WHOIS database or the Internet "white pages" has been the primary way to find information about domain registrants as well as to protect Internet users from such risks as sales fraud, brand theft and counterfeit. WHOIS is seen as offering a form of responsibility and lucidity to the Web. Imagine if all of this information suddenly disappeared or was no longer so easily available?

This spring, ICANN created an Operational Point of Contact Proposal (OPoC) where registrants of top level (.com, .net) domains would be required to list only one contact's postal, email and phone info. Currently, domains are listed with the registrant's name, a tech contact and an admin contact. The registrant provides a postal address, while the other contacts provide full postal, email, phone and fax info. In addition, primary and secondary servers are openly listed.

The current method of offering multiple contacts helps many different constituents. Steven Metalitz, president of the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) of ICANN's Generic Name Supporting Organization, explained during an Inside Counsel presentation that trademark owners, copyright owners, anti-phishing and anti-cybersquatting interests, corporate transactions, major non-profits, consumers, parents and law enforcement all rely on reaching domain owners and their teams.

At the most recent WHOIS Working Group meeting (transcript here), many questions about OPoC roles and responsibilities were left unanswered. An entire day was spent deliberating about whether new operational contacts should represent domain registrants. Would these new contacts respond quickly to critical matters? Would there be penalties for non-response? Should they assume responsibilities that seem more appropriate for registrars or even ISPs?

The Working Group participants felt that if OPoCs botched the job, these operational contacts could be discredited and at some point no longer exist as an entity â€“ which begs the question of exactly why this intermediary function is needed in the first place. Somehow, ICANN got this one wrong. We're all for privacy here. The focus should be on accessing the registration information. Do we really need another layer of bureaucracy to intervene in the synergy now available between registrants and their users? I don't think so. Should it continue to be available on WHOIS allowing people to easily look it up? I think so.

Rather than creating a new entity for the sole purpose of cautiously doling out information, perhaps another way to keep some control over the matter is to charge a fee for downloading domain information from registrars. This might be a better path, leading to compromise in this ongoing debate.

Posted by Deborah Richman at 2:49 PM | Permalink

May 16, 2007

Is The Company Worth As Much As The Domain Name?

Okay the company is always going to be worth more than the domain name, so long as it is not operating in the red. But the recent sales of domains like porn.com for $9.5 Million and vodka.com for $3 million shows how valuable some domain names are.

Poker.com is about to be or just has been sold and the price mentioned was $27 million. Now it would have been nice to buy that one say 10 years ago - the lottery ticket of domain names.

The thing that applies to search here is the fact these buyers value the domains mainly for write in traffic, but also for the impact they know it has in organic results. Even with all things being equal the domain will always be a tipping point.

So craft your domain name well and remember the words are very important.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:11 PM | Permalink

March 31, 2007

No Action for Triple X

As widely reported, ICANN Board members rejected the application for a new .xxx top level domain yesterday. After reading through how the board voted and their meeting commentary, I can safely report that the TLD approval process seems broken.

Was there sufficient interest? One of the key criteria for developing any new top level domain is support from the community. There were more than 70,000 pre-registrants for this TLD. Some board members thought this passed the test, while others disagreed.

Would ICANN be liable? Many board members expressed lingering concerns about new content responsibilities or even regulatory functions for ICANN. Yet it wasnâ€™t clear this would ever happen, especially across international borders.

What happened with the voting? The results were split, with nine members against this TLD, five for it, and one abstained. Both before and after voting, there was much hand-wringing about the tortured and lengthy review process over the past few years.

If approved, then our landscape would have shifted only slightly. We expected adult sites to operate on these .xxx domains, as well as existing TLDs. Existing filtering efforts would still need to be supported by the search engines, too.

However, we have put this new TLD and any changes to rest for now.

Posted by Deborah Richman at 4:57 AM | Permalink

December 14, 2006

ICANN To Launch dotAsia Domains

The .asia domains will be made available soon, ICANN revealed at a conference in Brasil yesterday. The new domain grew from the agreement made between ICANN and the dotAsia Organisation Ltd.

The birth of dot-asia as a TLD (top level domain) should be worth watching since it is not associated with a specific country.

ICANN's board of directors also approved the registry agreements for the dot-biz, dot-org and dot-info TLDs (top level domains), with a caps of 10% on price increases by registry operators.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:06 PM | Permalink

November 2, 2006

Google Effect Of Domain Name Change Of Ownership

This morning I wrote Does Change of Domain Name Ownership Hurt Rankings? a question that has been bugging Danny and myself since I wrote Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership. Well, I now have some webmaster feedback on this that claims that domain name change of ownership, by itself, appears to not have an affect on your rankings.

Not only that, but I have not heard from Danny that his traffic is suffering here since Search Engine Watch changed (1) ownership of domain from Jupiter to Incisive and (2) Search Engine Watch switched servers. Maybe when Danny gets back, he can chime in?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:07 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2006

Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible

Threadwatch reveals some more examples of issues Google is having. They note a search on queer forum returns CraigsList 97 times out of the top 100 results. That is not all, a search on wedding forum returns about 50 of 100 results from CraigsList's site, just scroll down to number 50 and you will see.

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:19 AM | Permalink

Google Sub Sub Domain Issues Clearly Visible

Is CraigsList spamming? No! Is Google suffering? :) Google is clearly having issues with sub sub domains. Continued coverage of Google's public index issues.

Postscript From Danny: Comments at Threadwatch also note Yahoo has the same issue. MSN does not as badly (but that could be the result of spidering fewer pages) and Ask looks very good.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:19 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Bug or Webmaster Bug? Google Responds To Shared Server Bug Issue

Matt Cutts responded to the Google anomaly we reported last week, where Google was displaying a different site's information from the same shared server. In short, two sites are hosted on the same server and same IP address. When conducting a search that should have brought up Site A, Site B was coming up in the SERPs.

The issue was technically not on Google's side, as Matt explained. The server folks that set up the server set up the virtual hosting configuration incorrectly. So why wasn't it an issue on Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com? Matt explains that Google uses "persistent connections to a webserver via a Keep-Alive header" that allows Google to use one single connection for all the sites on one server, thus taking up less server resources for Google and the Webmaster's server.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:01 AM | Permalink

Google Bug or Webmaster Bug? Google Responds To Shared Server Bug Issue

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:01 AM | Permalink

Google Bug or Webmaster Bug? Google Responds To Shared Server Bug Issue

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:01 AM | Permalink

Google Bug or Webmaster Bug? Google Responds To Shared Server Bug Issue

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:01 AM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

Does Google Use Whois Information?

Can whois information be used by a search engine to rank web pages? Is Google using whois information in their ranking of web pages? Some research on a recent trilogy of Go Daddy patent applications raised those questions in my mind.

The patent filings involve adding additional reputation information to published whois data, and letting others use the information for a number of reasons, including letting search engines incorporate that reputation information into their ranking mechanisms.

This seemed in line with something that Google discussed doing last year in Information retrieval based on historical data. But, is it something that either company can do? Is it a use consistent with the way that whois information is supposed to be used? There's the rub.

A recent task force vote from the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) recommended a limited use of whois information and a definition of the the purpose of Whois. The purpose that they came up with doesn't seem to go well with a commercial search engine using the information as part of their ranking algorithm. Their definition was agreed to by the GNSO, at a vote by teleconference on April 12th. Here's the definition of whois information they decided upon:

The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information sufficient to contact a responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or reliably pass on data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration of the records associated with the domain name within a DNS nameserver."

What this means is that less whois information, rather than more, will be published and available to the public.

The Go Daddy patent applications were originally filed on October 29, 2004.

Presenting search engine results based on domain name related reputation (US Patent Application 20060095404) Publishing domain name related reputation in whois records (US Patent Application 20060095459) Tracking domain name related reputation (US Patent Application 20060095586)

The Google patent application was published on March 31, 2005. Here are some of the uses of domain name information that it suggests could be used by Google:

Domain registration could be used as a way to determine the "document inception date," or an age associated with a page.

The expiration date of a domain could indicate the "legitimacy" of a document, with short term registrations indicating more questionable pages.

Changes, and the frequency of changes, in registration information, including contact information, hosting companies, and more, could also raise warning flags.

Information about name servers, and other sites on those name servers could also play a role in a ranking score:
A "good" name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a "bad" name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new.

Does Google use this type of information? Some signs point to that, as noted in this Search Engine Watch Forums thread: Does New Google Patent Validate Sandbox Theory?. A Search Engine Roundtable post also describes an interest in using that information: Google Admits to Improve Search Quality with Registrar Data. Both hint at reasons why Google became a domain name registrar beyond registering domain names.

If they are using whois information, will this vote from ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization force their use to change? Tough question to answer.

There's an interesting piece of information hidden away in the real-time captioning of the minutes of the ICANN Meetings in Wellington, New Zealand on March 29th, which discusses the reasons for this change, and some of the implications of it, such as the removal of the name and contact information of the owner of a domain from whois information in what will be available to the public.

Near the end of the teleconference, there's a discussion, and an unconfirmed report, that Jordyn Buchanan, who has been the chair of the WHOIS task force would be leaving his present employer to work with another former chair head from ICANN, Vint Cerf.

Vint Cerf is presently the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Google Web Search area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 11:52 PM | Permalink

Does Google Use Whois Information?

What this means is that less whois information, rather than more, will be published and available to the public.

The Go Daddy patent applications were originally filed on October 29, 2004.

The Google patent application was published on March 31, 2005. Here are some of the uses of domain name information that it suggests could be used by Google:

Domain registration could be used as a way to determine the "document inception date," or an age associated with a page.

The expiration date of a domain could indicate the "legitimacy" of a document, with short term registrations indicating more questionable pages.

Changes, and the frequency of changes, in registration information, including contact information, hosting companies, and more, could also raise warning flags.

Information about name servers, and other sites on those name servers could also play a role in a ranking score:
A "good" name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a "bad" name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new.

If they are using whois information, will this vote from ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization force their use to change? Tough question to answer.

Vint Cerf is presently the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Google Web Search area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:52 PM | Permalink

Does Google Use Whois Information?

What this means is that less whois information, rather than more, will be published and available to the public.

The Go Daddy patent applications were originally filed on October 29, 2004.

The Google patent application was published on March 31, 2005. Here are some of the uses of domain name information that it suggests could be used by Google:

Domain registration could be used as a way to determine the "document inception date," or an age associated with a page.

The expiration date of a domain could indicate the "legitimacy" of a document, with short term registrations indicating more questionable pages.

Changes, and the frequency of changes, in registration information, including contact information, hosting companies, and more, could also raise warning flags.

Information about name servers, and other sites on those name servers could also play a role in a ranking score:
A "good" name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a "bad" name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new.

If they are using whois information, will this vote from ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization force their use to change? Tough question to answer.

Vint Cerf is presently the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Google Web Search area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:52 PM | Permalink

Does Google Use Whois Information?

What this means is that less whois information, rather than more, will be published and available to the public.

The Go Daddy patent applications were originally filed on October 29, 2004.

The Google patent application was published on March 31, 2005. Here are some of the uses of domain name information that it suggests could be used by Google:

Domain registration could be used as a way to determine the "document inception date," or an age associated with a page.

The expiration date of a domain could indicate the "legitimacy" of a document, with short term registrations indicating more questionable pages.

Changes, and the frequency of changes, in registration information, including contact information, hosting companies, and more, could also raise warning flags.

Information about name servers, and other sites on those name servers could also play a role in a ranking score:
A "good" name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a "bad" name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk domains from a single registrar, or might be brand new.

If they are using whois information, will this vote from ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization force their use to change? Tough question to answer.

Vint Cerf is presently the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Google Web Search area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:52 PM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

Euro Conference On IR Recapped

What? You didn't make the European Conference on Information Retrieval in London this week? Don't fret. Xan Porter did and has a rundown here, with one interesting paper from Microsoft Research on how key terms appearing in a URL can be used to predict if a page has a good answer. It's something MSN plans test more on "real" web data from MSN in the future. I suspect the method might not be so useful then. Indeed, MSN Search's quality already seems to struggle with the old school search engine method of favoring URLs with search terms in them, an easy thing to manipulate. I can't find a free link to the actual paper. If one turns up, we'll postscript.

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Euro Conference On IR Recapped

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Euro Conference On IR Recapped

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Euro Conference On IR Recapped

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:30 AM | Permalink

Typo Domain Spotting Tool & Domain Registration Stats

I've got some domain name related items I'm throwing into this post: a new typo-domain spotting tool from Microsoft, new stats on the difficulty of getting a short domain plus stats on how many sites there are on the web.

Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol is a new downloadable tool from Microsoft Research that lets you discover typo domains, domains that are misspellings of popular web sites.

Why bother checking? So you can know who might be trying to tap into your brand name or so you can protect children or naive web surfers from landing at the wrong sites.

If it's the latter, anti-phishing features built into the toolbars from Google, Yahoo and MSN Microsoft Windows Live are likely more useful for you and won't require the .NET download.

Typo domains have gotten renewed attention in part because of recent reports on how people are earning large amounts of money off of them. See these past articles from the SEW Blog for background on this:

I'm still working on a follow up about the issue and how these domains are funded by the major search players of Google and Yahoo. The short good news answer is neither company says that typo domains are kosher. If they spot them, they're supposed to be ousting them from their domain monetization programs. The short bad news answer is that it seems like there's much more work that could be done to kill these off.

Need a good example of a type domain? Try windowsmessenger .com. When I was on a trip recently, I wanted my wife to try and reach me on my watch through MSN Messenger (a long story that I'll explain some other time on my personal blog, Daggle).

I told her to install MSN Messenger. She guessed at the domain, ending up at this place. It looks like the MSN Messenger site, which isn't surprising since it frames the real site in order to run Google AdSense ads alongside it. In my view, that's misleading and the type of thing I hate to see supported.

Yes, it's not a proper typo domain, in that it's not a misspelling of the real messenger.msn.com site. But it's close enough in intent to be annoying. FYI, messenger.masn .com is a better example of a typo domain for MSN Messenger. The new typo tool helped me spot that one. And yes, it's carrying ads from Google.

Back to the tool, I thought one of the best features is how you can point it at a web page, then watch what other sites get contacted as a result of your visit. For example, a visit to msn.messenger.com (the real site) shows me that Omniture gets contacted (probably to track my visit for Microsoft), as does live.com and msn.com (probably my live.com and msn.com cookies kicking in). Google also gets contacted, the result of my Google Toolbar calling back to the mother ship to get PageRank data.

In other news, The Search For A Domain Name came out at the end of last month has lots of interesting stats on the availability of domain names. Want a three letter domain name? Sorry, they're all registered. It also has stats on the length of domain names and other tidbits.

And who owns a domain name? Whois information can tell you, but only if it's accurate. ICANN has a system designed to let people report if they find inaccurate or missing whois info about a domain. Spotted via ResourceShelf, now out is a report (PDF format) on how the system performed over the past year. The system got 63 percent of problems solved.

Finally, got a domain name? You'll probably want a web site next. April 2006 Web Server Survey from Netcraft reports there are now more than 80 million sites on the web, with charts gong back to October 1995.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:26 AM | Permalink

Typo Domain Spotting Tool & Domain Registration Stats

Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol is a new downloadable tool from Microsoft Research that lets you discover typo domains, domains that are misspellings of popular web sites.

Why bother checking? So you can know who might be trying to tap into your brand name or so you can protect children or naive web surfers from landing at the wrong sites.

If it's the latter, anti-phishing features built into the toolbars from Google, Yahoo and MSN Microsoft Windows Live are likely more useful for you and won't require the .NET download.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:26 AM | Permalink

Typo Domain Spotting Tool & Domain Registration Stats

Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol is a new downloadable tool from Microsoft Research that lets you discover typo domains, domains that are misspellings of popular web sites.

Why bother checking? So you can know who might be trying to tap into your brand name or so you can protect children or naive web surfers from landing at the wrong sites.

If it's the latter, anti-phishing features built into the toolbars from Google, Yahoo and MSN Microsoft Windows Live are likely more useful for you and won't require the .NET download.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:26 AM | Permalink

Typo Domain Spotting Tool & Domain Registration Stats

Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol is a new downloadable tool from Microsoft Research that lets you discover typo domains, domains that are misspellings of popular web sites.

Why bother checking? So you can know who might be trying to tap into your brand name or so you can protect children or naive web surfers from landing at the wrong sites.

If it's the latter, anti-phishing features built into the toolbars from Google, Yahoo and MSN Microsoft Windows Live are likely more useful for you and won't require the .NET download.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:26 AM | Permalink

April 10, 2006

Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership

Last Friday, I wrote about the perceived issues with changing ownership of a domain and the impact it can have on the Web sites Google ranking. New domain names are typically known not to do all that well in the Google results. So SEOs tend to buy used domain names before they expire and put up new sites on those domain names. Of course, this is a way to get around, what is typically known as the Google Sandbox. But does that solve the issue? Well, from Google's standpoint, they want to close out that "loophole."

Is that why Google became a registrar? They can now follow change of ownership and expired domain names with pure data. But this can be problematic. What happens when Jupiter Media sells this site's domain name to Incisive, will this site suffer in the Google Web results? What about the hundreds of companies that buy other companies, each day? I have asked Google for a comment on this, but have not received a response. Danny and I won't stop trying to get more information from Google on this.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:41 AM | Permalink

Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:41 AM | Permalink

Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:41 AM | Permalink

Google Effect Of Domain Name Expiration & Change Of Ownership

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:41 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2006

New Article Looks at Google, the Domain Registrar

Via Jim Boykins blog, a guest article by domain name expert Nick Wilsdon that looks at what Google knows about domain names. It's not only a great look at how the domain name industry works but also shares info about what info Google has access to as a domain name registrar. The company became a registrar in February 2005. A very interesting read.

Nick writes: However it seems that Google did not start signing as a Registrar in order to buy or sell domains; they did this to have greater access to domain information. Now to clear some of the FUD that was speculated about this. Google as, say a .com Registrar, does not have access to all the customer records of Verisign. They can only access the further details of domains which they personally sold. Tucows and GoDaddy are both Registrars with Verisign, do you think they have access to each other’s entire customer database? Certainly that information would be well worth the $3500 fee. No. Unless the domain is within their own account they have exactly the same access as you or me using the public WHOIS records.

He goes on to offer his views, what he later calls speculation, on why Google became a registrar: I believe Google has built or is building a tool to analyse domain names. The API access they were given as a Registrar allows them to carry out the level of automated queries they needed for this. I would also go further and suggest this tool is building up a historical picture of each domain through regular scraping of their WHOIS records.

Postscript: Since we're on the subject of domain names, let me answer I question I frequently receive. When I share newly registered domain names on the blog I get the information using a combination of my time and the WHOIS.sc Mark Alert service. For $15/month I receive daily updates of domains that are registered containing the word Google. I track not only the word "Google" but numerous other names. The service tracks .com,.org,.net,.info,.us,.biz, and .web domains.

Then, I spend some time each week reviewing the lists and checking the ownership. It's not only useful (I hope) but also interesting (often amazing) to see what people are registering. That same $15 fee includes access to the Whois History database that provides historical ownership info back to about 2001. If you're looking for some basic domanin name stats, WHOIS.sc offers them for free on this page.

If you're wondering, the answer is yes, other services exist that can provide similar types of info more quickly and in an easier to use format. However, they are often very expensive. Examples include: + MarkMonitor + Thomson Compumark + Dialog offers file 225, offering fielded searching (numerous options) of domain name info back to 1997. Caveat: The last time it was updated was September 2004.

Again, all of these services are fee-based.

Note: Dialog's Open Access Service offers limited access to the Dialog 225 file. It's very limited in the what fields you can search. So why mention it? It doesn't require a subscription use, searching is free, and you can pay for records with a credit card.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:01 PM | Permalink

New Article Looks at Google, the Domain Registrar

Again, all of these services are fee-based.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:01 PM | Permalink

New Article Looks at Google, the Domain Registrar

Again, all of these services are fee-based.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:01 PM | Permalink

New Article Looks at Google, the Domain Registrar

Again, all of these services are fee-based.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:01 PM | Permalink

November 10, 2005

Matt Cutts Banned On Google? And Oct. 2005 Jagger Update Winds Down

The Oct. 2005 Google Jagger update saga that has sucked the life out of so many (but not all; some are blissfully unimpacted by it) seems to be ending. Indeed, so says Google's Matt Cutts in his Jagger winding down post. But Matt, if the update is over and bugs worked out, why's your blog banned on Google?

The article I just posted for Search Engine Watch members (go on, support the site - become a member and get to read the full story) goes into detail about the situation, but here are the highlights for everyone.

He's not really banned, but less savvy site owners could easily get that impression.
Dave Naylor presents the evidence in Jagger3 hahahaha, where he shows how a search for mattcutts.com brings up no matches. That's often a sign that a site has been banned.
He's not banned, however, as a search for matt cutts shows. You'll see how he's ranking in the top results for that, which wouldn't happen if he was banned.
But wait! Notice how he ranks twice, with listings for both www.mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com! That's a canonical error -- my favorite hated word and problem that I wrote about earlier. It's Google getting confused about which domain name to use for Matt's site (and other sites as well).
Overall, another reason for what I said earlier -- it's overdue for search engines to let us register all our domain names directly with them and indicate the ones they should be using.

Also, by winding down, that doesn't mean winding down on Google itself. Matt's post wrote that you'd find it in action if you went to the http://66.102.9.104/ data center. Over time -- the coming days -- changes will migrate to all the Google data centers.

In some related notes, Barry at Search Engine Roundtable points to Update Saga. Part zillion over at WebmasterWorld, where people are wondering if the update has come to an end. It also notes that GoogleGuy has warned of a PageRank/backlink update to happen between now and the end of the year.

Thoughts on Jagger: Recips Got Hammered, Trust Trumps All from Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog is a nice, short piece summing up what he things were the two major changes in the update.

First, reciprocal links don't see to work as well (What are they? Want to discuss? check out this SEW Forum thread: Reciprocal Linking – Dead or Alive?). Second, sites with authority/TrustRank seem to do better (What's that? Check out Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge).

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our SEW Forum thread, Oct. 2005 Google Update "Jagger". C'mon by Matt -- tell us what's going on :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Banned On Google? And Oct. 2005 Jagger Update Winds Down

He's not really banned, but less savvy site owners could easily get that impression.
Dave Naylor presents the evidence in Jagger3 hahahaha, where he shows how a search for mattcutts.com brings up no matches. That's often a sign that a site has been banned.
He's not banned, however, as a search for matt cutts shows. You'll see how he's ranking in the top results for that, which wouldn't happen if he was banned.
But wait! Notice how he ranks twice, with listings for both www.mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com! That's a canonical error -- my favorite hated word and problem that I wrote about earlier. It's Google getting confused about which domain name to use for Matt's site (and other sites as well).
Overall, another reason for what I said earlier -- it's overdue for search engines to let us register all our domain names directly with them and indicate the ones they should be using.

Thoughts on Jagger: Recips Got Hammered, Trust Trumps All from Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog is a nice, short piece summing up what he things were the two major changes in the update.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our SEW Forum thread, Oct. 2005 Google Update "Jagger". C'mon by Matt -- tell us what's going on :)

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Banned On Google? And Oct. 2005 Jagger Update Winds Down

He's not really banned, but less savvy site owners could easily get that impression.
Dave Naylor presents the evidence in Jagger3 hahahaha, where he shows how a search for mattcutts.com brings up no matches. That's often a sign that a site has been banned.
He's not banned, however, as a search for matt cutts shows. You'll see how he's ranking in the top results for that, which wouldn't happen if he was banned.
But wait! Notice how he ranks twice, with listings for both www.mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com! That's a canonical error -- my favorite hated word and problem that I wrote about earlier. It's Google getting confused about which domain name to use for Matt's site (and other sites as well).
Overall, another reason for what I said earlier -- it's overdue for search engines to let us register all our domain names directly with them and indicate the ones they should be using.

Thoughts on Jagger: Recips Got Hammered, Trust Trumps All from Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog is a nice, short piece summing up what he things were the two major changes in the update.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our SEW Forum thread, Oct. 2005 Google Update "Jagger". C'mon by Matt -- tell us what's going on :)

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Matt Cutts Banned On Google? And Oct. 2005 Jagger Update Winds Down

He's not really banned, but less savvy site owners could easily get that impression.
Dave Naylor presents the evidence in Jagger3 hahahaha, where he shows how a search for mattcutts.com brings up no matches. That's often a sign that a site has been banned.
He's not banned, however, as a search for matt cutts shows. You'll see how he's ranking in the top results for that, which wouldn't happen if he was banned.
But wait! Notice how he ranks twice, with listings for both www.mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com! That's a canonical error -- my favorite hated word and problem that I wrote about earlier. It's Google getting confused about which domain name to use for Matt's site (and other sites as well).
Overall, another reason for what I said earlier -- it's overdue for search engines to let us register all our domain names directly with them and indicate the ones they should be using.

Thoughts on Jagger: Recips Got Hammered, Trust Trumps All from Andy Hagans at the Link Building Blog is a nice, short piece summing up what he things were the two major changes in the update.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our SEW Forum thread, Oct. 2005 Google Update "Jagger". C'mon by Matt -- tell us what's going on :)

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:04 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

Tapping Google's Patent To Push Domain Registrations

GoDaddy References Google's Patent is a nice one from Aaron at SEO Book looking at how one domain registrar is making use of a Google patent to help promote the idea you should buy domain names for a longer period of time. Ah, finally a new twist for domain registrars. The last search engine oomph push they had was really when longer domain names came out in 1999. That gave us a mad rush for hyphenated domain names that to me never really paid off for people. But a lot of domain names were sold.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:06 AM | Permalink

Tapping Google's Patent To Push Domain Registrations