Google.com - Ultimate Parked Page?
A large factor in domain valuation is the extension. .Com, .Net, .Org, .Info, etc… Kevin Ham has recently received a lot of press (positive and negative) for his relationship with Cameroon and their .CM extension. Frank Schilling has said on many occasions that he wishes there was more expansion in to extension typos. Well, Google has cut in front by not needing ANY extension. Put the terms in and voila! An equivalent to a parked landing page with sponsored results, related items and images.
People buying generic domains often think of the domains value stemming from the direct type-in traffic coming straight from the URL bar. These domains attract traffic without any effort. No SEO, no link building, no marketing. Just a direct connection with people’s keyboards.
And as we all know, most of these domains resolve to a parked page with nothing but PPC network text ads. That’s changing to a certain degree as more domainers begin to focus on development and establishing partnerships offline, breaking the reliance on PPC. But it’s practically impossible for these people with portfolios filled with thousands upon thousands of domains that make just slightly more than their annual registration cost. In those cases, development may be impractical.
Now it looks to me that Google may be trumping the whole game with relationships with the browsers. I’m a Firefox user and have noticed that if you put your search query into the URL bar, you will either be taken directly to a site or will land on a Google SERP (search engine results page). For example, if you put just ‘cars’ into the URL bar, you get forwarded to cars.com. But if you put ‘candy’, it takes you to the Google SERP for candy. Of particular interest to me was a search I did for one of my favorite bands. I put ‘No Use For A Name’ into the URL bar and landed directly on their site, http://www.nouse4aname.com. The search didn’t match the final destination page. Not quite sure how that worked.
I had heard that Google had a relationship with Firefox so I figured I’d try the same test with IE7. Every search resulted in a Google SERP. I figured that Microsoft certainly would have the their URL bar searches resolve to a Live.com page. Wrongo. Can someone explain this to me?
