T-Error

Web site development system quickly hitting milestones.

The DevHub ecosystem of web sites is growing quickly and traffic is increasing in stride, reports the company.

According to the company, there were 900,000 visitors to web sites on the DevHub platform in June. There are now over 10,000 publishers on the network and over 100,000 domain names. A little less than 5,000 of these sites are “DevHubbed” sites, as the company calls them. That means they are fully developed sites with 5 or more pages of content.

DevHub also released a service that will build out your web sites for you if you don’t have time to use DevHub. An example web site is BoxOfficeEntertainment.com.

The average site at DevHub is earning between $1.80 to $3.20 a month. That seems like a strong number given that most of the domains at DevHub have basic one page sites and receive little type-in traffic.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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The main source of funding for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

In my open letter to new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom, I made made a key point with regards to domain registrants:

“Remember that domain owners ultimately fund your organization. Registries and registrars merely funnel domain owners’ money to ICANN.”

It’s a fairly simple idea, but here’s a flow chart.

The orange line are registration fees. Registrants pay the fee to a registrar, such as GoDaddy. GoDaddy then takes some of it as a profit and passes the rest to the registry, such as VeriSign. VeriSign then keeps some of this as a profit and passes the rest on to ICANN. In practice, some registries have fixed fee agreements with ICANN, which only bolsters the amount they keep in their own pocket.

The blue line represents the ICANN fee charged directly to registrants and passed on from the registrar to ICANN. Some registrars include this in the registration fee; others break it out.

The red line represents accreditation and annual fees paid by the registrar to ICANN. Some of these fees correspond to the number of domains registered. Ultimately, it comes out of the registration fees (blue line) paid by registrants.

As you can see, all of the money comes from the domain registrant. The middlemen take a cut and pass the rest along to ICANN. If the registrant goes away, ICANN basically has no money.

But domain registrants often feel like they are an unheard voice at ICANN. One example could be found at yesterday’s ICANN new gTLD/trademark event in New York City yesterday. Phil Corwin, general counsel for Internet Commerce Association, noted a missing check box on an evaluation form distributed at the event:

…at the bottom of each page was a line reading “my interest in this matter is defined by my work as/with a:” followed by a long list of possible connections, such as registry, registrar, or large corporation – but, remarkably, with no listing for “registrant” (other than the catch all “other”). ICANN thus continues its tradition of failing to perceive the existence of registrants, as is demonstrated by its finance dashboard which shows in bar graph form that ICANN receives the vast majority of its funding from registrars and registries, but apparently not a single dollar from registrants who fail to get any bar (even though they supply nearly all the money that flows through ICANN’s contract partners). Registrants to ICANN are seemingly like plankton to Moby Dick.

To be fair, domain registrants in general have failed to form a cohesive voice, save for the business constituency and an under-funded Internet Commerce Association. But that doesn’t mean ICANN should push forward policy that ignores the registrant community’s voice.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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New York Times article covers this week’s new TLD discussion in New York.

I don’t typically write about mainstream news articles about domain names. When I do, it’s usually because the articles are inaccurate. But today on the New York Times’ Bits blog, author Saul Hansell wrote a well balanced description of the current battle between trademark holders and domainers titled “Brokering Peace Between Brand Owners and Domainers“.

In the post, Hansell describes the warring sides: trademark holders that want added protection when new top level domains are launched, and domain owners that don’t want to be subject to frivolous trademark claims.

Most of the time was spent on a proposal to help manage disputes when a new domain name contains what some company considers its trademark. Like much that Icann does, it was a raucous affair, with people from big companies complaining about the evils of cybersquatting while those representing domain name owners railed against abusive trademark lawyers. The Icann officials tried to be polite to all sides while answering all manner of trivia questions, including one stumper about how the Treaty of Versailles applies to their new plan.

The question over the Treaty of Versailles wasn’t a joke. It underlines the complexity of what ICANN is trying to do. In effect, it is creating “super trademarks” and policy above and beyond what exists in today’s legal framework. That is fraught with land mines.

The article has one point that is negative to domainers:

The domain owner constituency, by the way, seems to be made up of two rather different groups. There are the democratic idealists who want to preserve the rights of the little guy to express opinions and do business on the Web. And there are organized “domainers” who see buying portfolios of Web sites as a digital form of investing in real estate. (Much of the value of that real estate comes from exploiting typing errors.)

Don’t beat up Hansell for suggesting that much of the domain owner money is coming from typing errors. The article points to an example that is a typo of NYTimes.com, and I wouldn’t challenge Hansell to find other examples. It is a problem in the industry, and one that gives it a black eye. Argue all day about the semantics of “domainer” and “cybersquatter”, but the problem still exists.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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We’ve been reporting about various gains and milestones that Bing was able to achieve during its first months, all of them coming from third party data sources. With July’s site traffic performance kicking in, it’s just about the right time for the Bing folks to report on their performance for June.The Bing Community Blog had it all covered. According to an official post, user response to Bing was quite overwhelming with 8% growth in unique users to Bing.com for the whole month of June. Even the results of their own user poll indicated positive remarks on Bing with respondents saying that they will most likely recommend the use of Bing for searching purposes.

Likewise, Bing’s Shopping portal also showed a positive note in terms of site visits and consumer activities. A 3x increase in site visits plus a 5.42% increase in cashback transactions were registered since Bing launched a month ago.

Bing’s Travel  site’s  traffic increased as well, registering 90% growth since Bing launched.

The goodies didn’t stop there though. Bing is also positively impacting Microsoft’s advertising partners with the release of Bing. The article gave the following examples of advertisers experiencing some positive gains with Bing’s rollout.

• Since the launch of Bing, TigerDirect has seen sales and order volume triple, and seen both conversion rate and average order size increase significantly. Based on this early success, TigerDirect has increased its search marketing spend with Bing by twofold.
• One IT provider has reported 36% higher click volume, 43% lower cost-per-click and 400% higher click-through rates in June.
• A large wireless communications company’s campaigns have received 28% more clicks since Bing launched than in previous weeks.
• One PC manufacturer’s impressions have increased 46% since Bing launched.

Naturally, with the success that Bing is getting, webmasters and developer would also want to dip their hands into Bing. And many of them did. As a proof, Bing’s API has been getting around 22,000 requests for usage. With the launch of Bing Toolbox, a webmaster tools and resources, more webmasters and site developers would surely want to partake of what Bing has to offer for their sites.

With all these successes, one can’t help but wonder whether Bing will be able to sustain user interests and maintain an increasing trend in site traffic, search query volume and other performance indicators?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

After One Month, Bing Reports Positive Trend

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Over the past couple of months, after merging Search Engine Journal and Search & Social, my business life as an SEO and online marketing consultant has changed a bit from the behind the scenes copy, coding and linking world, to add a bit more bizdev, management and of course, travel - which means I’ll probably be blogging on the business aspects of running a search agency more and more on SEJ.

After a week of four flights and various locations around the US, and even Russia last month, I’ve found that there are some very important essentials to making business travel easier and keeping on top of day to day initiatives a bit more tolerable. The most time spent in business travel is usually either offline (in the airplane or taxi) or in inconvenient locations; such as waiting at airport gates or hotel rooms with limited wifi- which means laptop usage is not always a reality.

Business Magazines

Unlike a good amount of business travelers, I tend to enjoy my unwired time in the airplane, and enjoy reading magazines about business management, which may not be about search, but always seem to give me some inspiration to apply to Search & Social in terms of staffing, traditional marketing, productivity and smart investments. Furthermore, after 7 years of blogging, my attention span does not allow for reading an entire business book, so I enjoy magazine format.

The two magazines I always make it a point to pick up are Inc. and Entrepreneuer. Recently Inc. has been reviewing different start up and funding projects like Ycombinator which I found very relevant to our company currently growing and expanding our offices. Furthermore, Entrepreneur just ran an awesome piece on Patron tequila, which was started 20 years ago by John Paul Dejoria, who is also the entrepreneur who started Paul Mitchell hair products with $700 when he was homeless and living in his car.

I think sometimes when we live in the SEO bubble, it’s very easy to build a business based on services and scaling, but looking into business as a whole and learning from other industries can help not only diversify a business - but a strong company and brand.

Blackberry Business Apps

I’m not an iPod guy, I’m old school. I love my Blackberry Curve. I love the way it fits into my pocket and into my hand. My fingers know the keys, the pearl ball, the quick buttons on the side. My Blackberry is my lifeline and my comfort blanket when I’m on the road.

So, in order to get the most out of my Blackberry, I have downloaded these Apps which helps me connect with staff, friends and backend reporting.

Google for the Blackberry : First off, not only am I a Blackberry guy, but I’m also a Google guy. I love GMail, I love Google Calendar. And I really enjoy the way the Google Blackberry App integrates Google Calendar into my Blackberry Calendar, and makes using GMail on my Blackberry very easy.

For businesses which utilize Google Apps, Blackberry and Google are coming out with Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server this summer. Here are the details :

Google Apps Connector for BES is currently in beta and will be publicly available in Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition in July of 2009. If you’d like to speak to an Apps sales rep, please submit your contact information.

eOffice : eOffice is a document editor for the Blackberry which features Google Docs and Spreadsheets integration. Not only can users open and edit Google Docs, but also upload documents which have been created on the Blackberry, or emailed as attachments, up to Google Docs.

Jott for the Blackberry Jott transcribes spoken word to text and is perfect for dictating ideas while on the move, then will email the transcription to yourself, or to whom you choose, along with a link to the audio recording of your thoughts. I can’t count the amount of awesome ideas which pop up in my head when I’m on the plane or even driving, and we all have ideas when driving right?

Merchant Warehouse for the Blackberry : Merchant Warehouse, a credit card processing company, just released MerchanWARE for the Blackberry last week which offers the capability to use a highly secure Bluetooth card swipe device that brings ease of use, lower processing costs and security to “on the go” businesses. We don’t do much “on the go” credit card processing, but you never know what’s going to happen or who you’re going to run into at conferences, in the airport or while networking at bars. Seriously, I can’t count the amount of times I’ve almost closed a sale on the road, whether it be for advertising on SEJ or a social media push via Search & Social, and the ability to whip out a card swiper and close the deal would be awesome.

TwitterBerry : If you use a Blackberry and use Twitter, install TwitterBerry right now. With TwitPic and other Twitter tool integration, Twittererry is a must. Nuff said.

What Apps, tools, gadgets and other resources do you use to help you with on the go business management or just performing SEO for your clients or staying on top of current trends?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Running a Business from Planes, Trains & Automobiles

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I have always been a huge fan of RSS. More specifically, I have been a fan of XML. Quite a few of the projects I have worked on past and present have utilized XML to standardize data.

RSS really is just a specific type of standardized XML. The purpose of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is, as you may have guessed, to syndicate content. The most common use of RSS is to quickly and easily follow your favorite blogs from either a desktop RSS reader, or possibly a browser based reader.

Personally, I utilize the built in RSS reader for Firefox for my custom RSS feeds I mashed together using Yahoo Pipes, and then I use iGoogle for my daily feeds, TechCrunch, SEJ, Kayak, etc.

What is Yahoo Pipes?

Yahoo Pipes is many things, but the one important to this article is its ability to allow you to create a mashup of RSS feeds with filters and restrictions. The beauty of Yahoo Pipes is that it was developed to allow the average business user to create rich applications without any programming experience. I have spent countless hours on Yahoo Pipes developing “pipes”. It truly is an amazing tool.

I have created a Pipe that anyone who reads this article can use. Simply sign into Yahoo Pipes, clone, or copy the pipe to your account, modify the pipe for your specific desires, save, and then grab the RSS link. More information is available at the end of this article.

You may be asking yourself, what is the significance of Yahoo Pipes, RSS, and Twitter? Well, let me explain.

Twitterfeed.com is a great tool for Twitter because it allows you to take an RSS feed and post the content of the feed at a certain frequency right to Twitter, 1 post an hour, 3 posts a day, etc. For a full description of the service, see the SEJ article on Twitterfeed by @lorenbaker.

Now that we have a tool that allows us to take an RSS feed and post it with precision to Twitter, all we need now is to create a valuable RSS feed that provides targeted content. This is where Yahoo Pipes comes into play.

What kind of feed should I setup?

The value of your mashup feed should be your main focus when setting up a feed. By using the Pipe that I am including in this article, you can enter multiple RSS feeds into the Pipe and filter the articles by a keyword. For example, if I had a Twitter account that was interested in financial aid information for students, I would find RSS feeds from reputable sources such as the Department of Education, Fafsa, scholarship sites, loan companies, grants & awards, etc. By coupling that with a keyword filter, I can filter out all of the articles that do not have “college” in the title of the article. I can also run a keyword against the description of the article.

By doing this, I create an RSS feed that is appropriate for my Twitter account by mashing up articles from dozens of sources that have “college” in the title. People who follow my financial aid focused Twitter account will appreciate the articles that I post because they are relevant.

So with two simple tools and a little research, I can provide extreme value to my Twitter account in addition to my regular tweets.

Are there any other benefits this provides?

As you can imagine, with a little innovation, there are a few things you can do for a little self promotion or to generate revenue with this idea.

* Note: I do not condone either of these two methods of revenue generation, but not mentioning them could prevent an innovative idea from a reader based off of this information. So in that light, I will share.

Instead of linking straight to the article, you can use a URL shortener that will frame the article, and place ads at the top.

Another method is to send them to your own website, with a link to the actual article. This brings the visitor to your site, and then to the article if they click the link. This also provides advertising opportunities, the ability to win the user over with content from your website, and inflating your website statistics.

What would be more valuable is to use a shortener that has social media features such as digg or stumbleupon. With the toolbars these URL shorteners provide, it will engage the user and add to the value, rather than annoy them.

Yahoo Pipes Explanation

My RSS Mashup from Yahoo Pipes

This window allows you to add feeds that Yahoo Pipes will go out and retrieve. You can add and remove them with the plus and minus signs.

Here is the bread and butter. This window allows you to filter the RSS feeds by a keyword. As you can see in this example, the filter is set on the title and description for the keyword “college”. You can change the keyword, remove the filter for the description or title, etc.

This one is pretty straightforward. This will limit the length of your mashup to 20 items.

• Yahoo Pipes
• TwitterFeed
• RSS Explanation

Joshua Odmark is a technology consultant at Simply Ideas LLC and also blogs for Performance Marketing Blog. Follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Twitter Tip: Utilizing RSS & Yahoo Pipes

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Does it matter to Google if the specified page is in the root folder or deeper? This question has been popping up for ages and let’s discuss all possible angles of it.

1. The page physical location hardly matters

Though it is often speculated Google likes root folders more, it is more about the "visibility" of the page and proper interlinking than its actual location. Any page linked to repeatedly and consistently throughout the site will be found, indexed and ranked just fine.

Quoting WebmasterWorld thread,

For many sites today, the url is only a dynamic and virtual representation of the site structure and there are no "real" folders - so a search engine will not find a valuable signal if it looks at things like presence or absence of directories.

A quick example indirectly proving this point is that for many years Google was recommending using numbers in the end of the file path to get accepted to Google news (which is no longer true btw). This /XXXXX/ part could possibly look like separate folder and it would be weird if Google advised to have it and used it as a dampening ranking factor in general search.

Important note: it is speculated that Google may be using "URL stripping" (i.e. dropping the file path to discover and crawl the folder), so if you are using "virtual folder" which returns no content or 404 status code when queried directly, this may result in extra crawl errors. In this case the file location relative to the root may matter to some extent.

What does matter is the URL length:

Extra folders may make your URLs look much longer and this may be not really good in some cases.

User experience:

• User browsers can handle very long URLs: Microsoft Internet Explorer, for example, has a maximum uniform resource locator (URL) length of 2,083 characters.
• Users hardly pay attention to the URL in the browser address bar but shorter URLs do occasionally enhance user experience: for example, they are easier to remember and can improve the direct type-in traffic

This is called "intuitive URIs" when you can just type /your-word after the root and end up where you need to be.

Google:

• Best SEO URL practice: it is recommended to have no more than 3-5 words in the file path (note: this is not really about the whole URL but the actual file path after the last / in the URL but should be mentioned anyway as it indirectly demonstrates Google’s overall treatment of the URL length):

  According to Google’s Matt Cutts if there are more than 5 words…

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

• Click-through: this research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. Besides, longer URLs are cut off in Google SERPs - so the end user can’t see where he is going to land, this should be decreasing the click-through immensely.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

URL Structure: The Closer to the Root - the Better?

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Since it changed one of its trademark policies for  AdWords, Google had earned nine lawsuits concerning patent infringement from various companies.  Now, Google is facing yet again, a new lawsuit this time from Rosetta Stone, a language-learning software firm. Rosetta Stone filed a legal complaint against Google for allegedly allowing companies to use Rosetta Stone’s patented brands when serving online ads.

The lawsuit is asking Google to stop allowing other companies to use its trademark when selling ads related to online searches. These companies, according to the lawsuit include competitors of Rosetta Stone.

Rosetta claims ownership of  these trademarks and said that the company has invested substantial money in building up its brand’s popularity, name recognition and brand loyalty. And so, it is but natural for the company to protect its interest. Rosetta Stone’s lawsuit also alleged that Google’s AdWords Program has been using keywords relating to their trademark, which when used on online ads does not include a link to Rosetta Stone but instead points to the companies’ who employed Google’s AdWords program.

This practice is misleading to users and when Google displays the ads of other companies, users led into thinking that they will be brought to Rosetta Stone’s site but instead those links point to rival sites.

Among the Rosetta trademarks which Google is allegedly using for Google AdWords serving are “Rosetta Stone,” “global traveler,” “language library,” and “dynamic immersion.”

The lawsuit has not received any reaction from  Google’s camp yet. However, some trademark law experts said that whether Google has infringed on Rosetta Stone’s intellectual property rights or not, the question that should be asked is whether users were actually misled by Google’s practice.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Gets a New Lawsuit, This Time from Rosetta Stone

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One of our new services at Fuel Interactive is consulting/training. I’ve been training a guy in Austin, Texas, and he’s very observant. That means he asks me questions… and LOL I don’t know everything, but fortunately we’ve got this killer AdWords dedicated account rep team, so I ask them. Here are a couple questions that came up while we were doing some Quality-Score-oriented optimizations lately.

1. Do keywords with zero impressions lower your quality score (QS) at the account level?
2. Is 7/10 a good enough quality score?
3. Does it hurt 10/10 quality score keywords if they’re in the same ad group as 7/10 keywords? In other words, is there an Ad Group level quality score?

First, a refresher:

• Quality score is kept at the keyword level, ad level, and account level
• Quality score is largely but not entirely based on CTR
• High quality score lowers the bid required to achieve a given ad position

Do keywords with zero impressions lower your quality score at the account level?

In short, the answer is no. However, if they are zero long enough, they will become inactive for search, and inactive for search keywords do lower your account-level quality score. Here’s the exact quote from our optimization specialist:

-QS is influenced by CTR
- CTR is influenced by search volume, impressions and clicks
- Since the search volume is low, there are no impressions or clicks i.e., 0% CTR
- If the keywords continue to have zero or low search volume, they will become inactive for search and this will negatively impact your QS.
- In this particular account case, especially, the low search volume seems to have an impact on the QS in a round-about way.

Is 7/10 a good enough quality score?

I thought the goal would be to get 10/10 on every keyword, but evidently 7 is good enough. The AdWords guy says:

Any QS less than 5 can be treated as a low score and they can be either paused or deleted. If need be, you can resume or add the same keyword at a later date when the trend or traffic for these keywords improve. 7/10 is a good QS.

This is a relief, because I don’t see any rhyme or reason to why, in some cases, some keywords in the same ad group are 7 and some are 10.

Does it hurt 10/10 quality score keywords if they’re in the same ad group as 7/10 keywords? In other words, is there an Ad Group level quality score?

Nope, no ad group level quality score. The AdWords guy says:

It is true that there is account level, keyword level, and ad level QS. While there are no obvious QS at the ad group or campaign level, the QS of all the individual keywords put together seems to create a score for the ad group which is an influential factor for account level Quality Score. 7/10 is a good QS and you do not have to worry about it hurting the ones with 10/10.

It never ceases to amaze me that there are more depths of complexity to AdWords for us to plumb.  Here’s hoping these few insights help you optimize your accounts better.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Quality Score: 3 UnFrequently Asked Questions

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Watching Google and Microsoft lately has been like watching a tennis match: Each company seems to be taking turns hitting back at the other with new announcements, new products, and so forth. The latest volley isn’t strictly search-related, but it’s very notable: Microsoft announced “lightweight” versions of its Office products that will be free and […]

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