T-Error

Survey asks how ICANN can improve its web site.

ICANN’s web site is outdated, and the organization knows it. It has hired an outside firm to perform usability analysis and improve the web site. The organization is serious about the effort; I spent 30 minutes on the phone today with its outside consultants discussing the site.

You can complete a short, online survey here to provide your feedback about the site.

I don’t want to sway the survey results, so I won’t give my specific opinions here. But take some time to complete the survey and provide meaningful suggestions. “This web site sucks” won’t help them fix it. What information are you looking for? How can they organize it to make it easier to find?

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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DomainsBot, the leading semantic technology provider for the domain name industry and one of Sedo’s technology partners announced the launch of its…

DomainsBot, the leading semantic technology provider for the domain name industry and one of Sedo’s technology partners announced the launch of its new corporate website www.DomainsBot.com/B2B.  The new website features improved navigation tools, multimedia content and…

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Find out what keywords people are using in domain registrations.

What terms did people register domain names for yesterday? Domize let’s you take a peak.

Domize’s domain registration statistics provide daily and monthly stats for domain registrations by TLD and term. For example, its June 30 report shows that .com picked up 27,145 net registrations while .mobi picked up 482. But perhaps the coolest feature is seeing what keywords people use in their registrations.

On June 30 the top terms appear to be related to Michael Jackson:

Term / Added / Deleted / Net Gain
1. jackson 1,175 103 1,072
2. michael 1,192 127 1,065
3. green 600 201 399
4. cash 516 172 344
5. online 1,208 896 312
6. home 736 456 280
7. life 558 284 274
8. auto 469 214 255
9. king 356 106 250
10. all 521 280 241
11. pop 283 46 237

Domize also shows the biggest losers. For June 30, the biggest losers (meaning more domains using the term expired than were registered) were domain names including ‘financial’, ‘asbestos’, and ‘lawyer’.

For a longer term perspective, Domize also has a 30 day report.

Domize tells me it has lots of statistic enhancements in the works.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Domain registrar files patents for system to sell equity in domain names.

Go Daddy Group Inc. has filed a patent for a method of selling equity in domain names and protecting the domain names in which the equity is issued.

The patent is for a system that will facilitate the sale of shares in a domain name. The patent application explains that a number of institutions are interested in investing in domain names, but there isn’t a simple mechanism to do so. Conversely, many domain owners are interested in selling equity in their domain names, but need a way to connect with investors.

The sale of shares of equity in a Domain Name associated with the current invention simplifies the current rudimentary process by which Registrants attract investors through either knowing the party or being connected through outlets such as forums or other online media. Such a centralized sale of shares of equity would need to provide means to underwrite the sale of such equity and provide a means to protect the domain name from inadvertently or fraudulently being transferred to another entity…

…The invention should have a desirable side effect on the entire domain name industry in that it may provide a significant amount of secure capital to registrants, which would allow them to develop their domain name organizations and invest in capital expenditures such as dedicated servers, other domain names, etc., while providing assurance to potential investors and underwriters that the domain name may be protected and used as collateral during the sale of such equity in the domain name.

United States patent application 20090171823 describes the method of connecting domain owners and equity underwriters as well as protecting the domain names that receive investments. Go Daddy has also filed United States Patent application 20090171678 specifically for protecting the domain name during investment.

Both patents were filed in 2007 but only published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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On Tuesday, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real were named in a lawsuit filed by some music publishing companies claiming that each of their online music stores - Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody - infringe upon their copyrights. If you’re shaking your head and wondering how that is possible, with all the royalties they pay out, you’re not alone.

This copyright business is  a real mess.  As consumers we know not to illegally download music or share it online, or we could potentially face crazy fines from the RIAA, such as the $1.92 million one recently handed down to Minnesota mom who downloaded 24 songs.  For websites and companies looking to distribute or allow the playing of music on their sites, it’s far more complicated than that and the stakes are incredibly higher.  In fact the copyright laws as related to music are so complicated that even places we consider to be legitimate sources are being slapped with lawsuits alledging infringements.

In the case of this latest lawsuit, the publishers claim that all three companies may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but didn’t license the copyright on the compositions.  There are a whole lot of details out yet explaining the legalities and issues at hand in the case, but it is assumed these music services struck deals with record labels, but somehow the publishers and labels are separate entities and the rights are separate.

In many cases we assume that the publishing rights were also covered by the major record labels.  But in some cases the publishing rights were owned by independent companies, and the claim looks to be that the publishing rights were never cleared with them. 

What this means is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all streaming music that they only had partial rights too.  And since the publishers consider each instance a song is played to be an infringement… yikes!  They could be looking at some pretty hefty fines if the court agrees.

If you’re interested in reading the entire court filing, which I will warn you is a massive 104 pages long, here you go.  Have at it.  In the meantime, we’ll definitely be following this closely.  Any ruling in favor of the music publishers could potentially have major ramifications for all three companies.  I imagine that Google right now is pretty darn happy that they’ve stayed out the music game, and that their search engine competitors are being tested.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Microsoft, Real, & Yahoo All Sued for Music Store Copyright Infringement

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As real-time search and Twitter’s growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people - bloggers or celebrities.

While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this “prominent” people, you will have to construct your search terms like - “Name Twitter” or “Name Tweets” or “@Name”, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these people’s latest Tweets?

It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. That’s more like a “real-time” search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of

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Yesterday Twitter sneakily unveiled a new user interface for both the “followers” and “following”.  While I personally believe that their efforts could have been better spent on stabilizing their servers and working out those infamous “overcapacity” issues, the change is a good one. 

First of all, let’s go over the changes that they made.  On your list of “Followers” and those that you are “Following”, Twitter used to display the person’s avatar and username, and the option to follow.  Little other identifiable information was presented, so if you wanted to find out more about the person you’d have to click on their name and check out their page. 

Now, when you view “Followers” or “Following”, you’re presented with a lot more information, almost eliminating the need to click over to the person’s page to get the full scoop on them.  Now you’ll see not only their avatar and username, but also their real name, latest tweet and location.  On the righthand side where the “Follow” button used to be, there’s now a new button.  Click on it and you’re presented with several action options:  @ Mention xxxx, Direct Message xxxx,  Follow xxxx, and Unfollow xxxx.  So it’s nice in that there’s a lot more information available in one place and there’s less clicking involved.

Here’s a quick peek at my “Followers” page so you can see the changes (click to view full size):

What’s this mean for search engine optimization?  Well, we all know by now that SEO is far more than just link building.  It’s also a lot of marketing, and if you’re on Twitter it’s an excellent way to market your website.  I was a little late in the game getting my site involved with Twitter, but not too late, and it is definitely paying off in terms of gaining new traffic, new loyal readers, new readers, and even some advertisers.  It also helps us to connect with our readers in a way that’s just not possible through comment forms on our site alone.  This UI update really helps to save time in checking out potential followers, or people you want to follow, especially if you’re constantly bombarded with new followers or manually hunt for new ones to follow yourself.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Twitter Unveils New UI; What This Means for SEO

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On Tuesday Digg announced that they were finally rolling out some major updates to their duplicate detection technology, and let’s be honest - it’s about time!  The technology they had in place before was hardly reliable.

The way that it used to work is that you’d go ahead and insert your URL and all the details for the story you were submitting, and then after you had done all that, Digg would ask you if you were sure it wasn’t a duplicate.  Along with that it would show you a list of stories that it thought could be similar to yours.  Many were not the slightest bit related, and some were submitted days, weeks, or even months ago.  Nevertheless, if you assured Digg that your link was in fact NOT a duplicate (even if it was), you could proceed and submit your link.

According to Digg, and Brent Csutoras, they’ve updated the way that their software looks for duplicates.  They said that most commonly the types of duplicate stories being submitted were the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs.  So solve this problem, they devised a solution that will identify these duplicates using a document similarity algorithm.  In other words, it is now capable of identifying identical content from the same source.

Another issue is the same or similar story covered on different sites.  Here’s where things get a little trickier.  Digg claims that they’ve worked on doing a better job at detecting duplicates with similar descriptive information.  Their software will not match stories with similar titles and descriptions with a higher level of accuracy.  This doesn’t sound like it’s the perfect solution, but any improvement is better than what  they had before. 

The order of submitting information has also been altered.  Before Digg would not check for duplicates until you had entered your URL and all the descriptive information, so if there were duplicates you wouldn’t find out until you’d wasted several minutes of your time. Now it will check for duplicates immediately after your URL entry, but before you enter descriptive information.

These changes are still being perfected, so during the pilot period now Digg will continue to only block submissions of the exact same URLs within a 30 day period.  They will also monitor when Digg users bypass high-confidence duplicates.

If helps fight the never-ending barage of spam, progress is a good thing.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Digg Rolls Out Revamped Content Duplication Detection Technology

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SEOquake addon developers continue to impress us with always new awesome tools. This time they are launching a new one called SEOpivot.

This tool finds your site most promising keywords by looking at your site current Google rankings and identifying most powerful words that your site already ranks high enough. In a way, the tool works the way I described in a previous article on doing keyword research for an established site.

Our report will show you all keywords, for which any URL of your domain ranks high enough to get into TOP100 Google Search results, as well as how much traffic you’ll get if you improve the position of the URL we found on interesting keyword.

Each report looks exactly like this:

where:

• Potential stands for the amount of traffic you are going to get after reaching the top position (potential = traffic the first position brings - traffic you are getting now);
• Position stands for your current Google ranking;
• Average search volume (monthly traffic).

The index is limited but it is large enough to give you very useful data:

We studied TOP100 Google Search results for 500 thousands of most high-frequent keywords and received information on more than 3 400 000 domains.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

SEOpivot: Find Your Site Most Promising Keywords

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When the news about Michael Jackson’s death broke out, it was TMZ who scooped it beating other news outlets and was quoted as a source throughout Twitter, Facebook, traditional media and various online properties.

As a result, Hitwise numbers are showing that TMZ’s site traffic on that day was able to achieve a 3 year all-time high. The news created a spike and brought a 5x increase in volume as compared to the previous day’s site traffic.The incident even surpassed the 18% market share of TMZ site visits when it featured photos of controversial singer Rihanna badly beaten and bruised. Overall, TMZ became the 60th most visited site on the day of Michael Jackson’s death. A day before that event, TMZ’s site visit was ranked 305th in terms of market share.

But perhaps the best result that came out from this incident was the fact that it gave TMZ around 61% new unique visitors.

From an SEO perspective, the blog post that broke the news has over 12,000 incoming links. I wonder how TMZ will be taking advantage of that link equity?

Right after other “established” news sources beat TMZ in page visits. Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC, and Google all received some good spike in terms of site visits from fans and onlookers wanting to find the latest development in the cause of death of MJ. Both MSNBC and CNN got the highest page visits on Thursday, registering 67% and 64% increase respectively.

And that goes to show our dear readers the importance of being the first to report any controversial item on the Internet - be it in the form of news or blog posts.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Michael Jackson Death : TMZ Traffic Surge Numbers

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