Coming soon: .google?
Thanks to an ICANN decision, new gTLDs are coming.
According to a recent Afilias study, a sizable minority of brands may apply for their own gTLDs, ushering in a new era in which consumers are asked to visit websites ending in .brand, and not .com.
Is GoDaddy's .co push slightly deceptive?
Finding a good .com domain name can be tough work these days. There's a good chance that when you go to your favorite domain registrar and type in that perfect .com, it's taken.
There are, of course, alternatives to .com. And one of the alternatives receiving a big marketing push is .co.
Is this the most hated checkout process on the web?
I wrote about the GoDaddy checkout process about a year ago, and it was one of the longest and most annoying checkouts I have seen on any e-commerce site.
There were up to ten separate steps in the process, depending on the options you select along the way, and so much cross-selling that finding a path through to the end was a real challenge. It was the very opposite of checkout best practice.
Since I last looked, GoDaddy has made a few changes to the process, so I've been seeing if it is an improvement on the previous version...
The canonical link element gets cross-domain support
The canonical link element is a great tool for dealing with duplicate content issues. That's good for website owners, particularly in certain industries where duplicate content can be a real pain, such as ecommerce.
But up until now, the canonical link element didn't have much utility in addressing duplicate content issues across multiple domains. But Google is changing that thanks to its newfound support for cross-domain canonical link elements.
The 25 factors behind brilliant brand / domain names
Last night I calculated that I have spent somewhere in the region of three days brainstorming a domain name for a new web venture. It shouldn’t be this difficult, but it feels like it is something approaching rocket science!
There are two major reasons for this.
Firstly, there is a scarcity of ‘good’ domain names that are available. This typically reduces all of your obvious / immediate options, and leads you into a world of pain.
Secondly, and even more importantly, the domain name is also the brand name (or should be) and as such there are plenty of other considerations to factor in.
So what I’ve done, partly to restore some sanity to the situation (I’m still undecided on my final choices) is to create a checklist of factors that should be taken into account.
Econsultancy Site Migration and SEO Impact - the story so far
On 14 December 2008
we relaunched the Econsultancy.com site. This involved a subtle name change (“E-consultancy”
became “Econsultancy”), a new logo, a completely new look site with a new
directory structure, a new URL, on servers in a different country. We had to
migrate 10,000s of pages, deleted a load of old ones, and created 10,000s of
new ones.
The background to all this is explained in my interview about the new Econsultancy site – and question 9, about the SEO impact of this large change, is the subject of this post. What has happened to our previously excellent search rankings since the changeover?
PR tries to sell 'afterthebailout.com' on eBay for $1m
Kudos to Annie Jennings for trying, but something tells me that she’s not going to sell the domain name ‘AfterTheBailout.com’ for more than a million bucks.
Annie, who runs a New Jersey-based PR firm, has fired over two jaw-dropping press releases informing me that the "hottest domain name AfterTheBailout.com is on sale at eBay", with the minimum bid set to a staggering $1m.
Number of bids to date? Zero.
The Web Week in Review
While the launch of Google's Chrome web browser took up many of the headlines this week in the world of technology (and I had to include one story on the launch here), there was other interesting news.
Finding a domain name for your business via marketplaces
Are you looking for a great domain name for your business but can't find one?
It's a common experience due to the volume of domain names that have already been registered, especially .coms.
Ten Firefox add-ons for SEO
One benefit of using Firefox is that it has a community of third party developers designing some very useful (and free) add-ons for the browser's users.
We've taken a look at some SEO-related examples....
