Right now (as of June 2) there is a conversation ongoing at Webmaster World about the declining value of a #1 organic search ranking.  The argument is that the #1 position doesn’t attract as much traffic as it used to (on Google in particular) because of the way that Google has placed ads and added ad sitelinks, etc… all around the top of the page.  Not surprisingly there is much bellyaching by the SEO community many of whom have staked their pitch to clients on the claim that 75% of people skip over the ads and go straight to organic.

I have been labeled a PPC guy before, but that’s not quite accurate.  I’m just lazy and cautious.  I go for the most income for the least amount of effort and risk.  If that result can be achieved through organic listings, so be it.  However, that’s rarely the case in more competitive spaces.  And while dramatic algorithm shifts are less likely today than they were a few years ago, I prefer not to put myself and the expense of my time at risk.

Besides, if you really think about it, does Google REALLY want you to get a #1 ranking?  Sure, there’s the whole ‘user experience’ spiel from them and it’s true, to a certain extent.  If they delivered total junk results, they’d go the way of Alta Vista, Lycos, Alltheweb, etc….  But they do walk a fine line with wanting to deliver quality results organically (where they make no money from the clicks) versus driving the visitor to the paid listings.  Their stock share price doesn’t rise and fall by organic click-thrus.  Of COURSE Google wants people to click on the ads and not the organic.  But can they really be considered ads anymore?

Google has dealt with this tightrope walk by implementing the Quality Score on paid search, an algorithm that works similar to the organic algorithm.  The most relevant ads/landing pages show higher.  There are other benefits as well, like lower average cost per click.  Quality Score has been around for a couple of years and Google is always improving/refining.   Through this Quality Score refinement Google is making the paid listings just as, if not more, relevant as the organic listings.

I think what Google is doing is making the organic results supplementary to the paid listings with no decline in the sacred ‘user experience’.

Does this make me sound like a PPC ‘homer’?  I prefer to think of it as walking with the wind at my back instead of in my face.

TV drives people to the web. Not exactly breaking news. But too often, TV advertisers fail to take advantage of the waves their ads create.

It’s something I’ve seen for a long time and now has a direct connection to this site. Almost two years ago JK Harris bought backtaxes.com. I wrote about it back in January ’08. Soon thereafter, I was ranking #1 when people went to Google to search for the domain. Even though you or I might go to the URL bar to put in the domain, there are so many people out there that will go to google or yahoo and actually SEARCH for the domain. So without intending to, I was getting a ton of traffic to that post driven by people who had just seen the ad. I happened to have Adsense on there, so I made a little bit of money from it. Accidental profit is fun.

Well, lightning has struck twice. Let’s go even FURTHER back to June 2007. I subscribed to Sirius radio at the time and one of the songs I was hearing a lot was ‘Electric Worry’ by Clutch. It’s very catchy and I couldn’t get it out of my head and I couldn’t buy it from iTunes at the time so I ended up watching the youtube video over and over again. I wrote about it here and soon after I began to see that I wasn’t alone in like the song. I would get a few visitors every day from people searching for the lyrics ‘Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos’. I thought that was kind of cool.

Fast forward to the beginning of November ’09. There’s a new video game being pushed for the holidays called Left 4 Dead 2. I think it has something to do with shooting zombies. In the commercial for the game, ‘Electric Worry’ is the background music. Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos. On average, 900 people a day are coming to that page from Google since that commercial started airing.

Lesson learned: TV pushes people to the web. Be there to greet them.

Still crap.

On the upside, they raised the domain exclusion list option to 500.

On the downside…. you’ll need it.

I bet this would be really cool if it weren’t created by Yahoo…

http://apt.yahoo.com/index.php

I don’t believe I’ve ever had a friend come back who hasn’t told me the thousands they made in Las Vegas.  With numbers like that, it’s a miracle that the poor city can stay in business!  It’s not a charity folks!  Do your part and give back!

Well, contrary to popular belief, not everybody wins when they go to Las Vegas. 

The same can be said for domains.  I’m always hearing about the big sales and great deals and it seems like nobody ever loses with domains!  Well, not quite.  I just kind of lost and won at the same time.

I recently had a domain that I bought on the aftermarket for $600 expire.  I never transferred it out of the no-name registrar it was registered at and for whatever reason, it didn’t auto renew.  Point is, I lost it.  It wasn’t about the money, it was more about me losing a domain I clearly had desired enough to buy.

Well, I just got it back.  For $8.  Nobody wanted it and it passed through the expired domain vultures (of which I am one on occasion) and went back to open registration where I picked it up again.

So, I’m not quite sure how I should feel.  I guess I’ll just be happy that I got it back.  I even saved $17 by letting it expire and picking it up at my preferred registrar! 

Many domainers have been trying out AEIOU.com‘s micro-site development as a way to rapidly develop some of their domains and get away from parking.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, a developed site will still get the same amount of direct navigation traffic and now you’re hopefully going to be attracting some organic search traffic, as well.  The cost of an AEIOU micro-site is $250 and the primary monetization option is AdSense.

I figured I’d give them a shot since I’m in the process of developing my portfolio and wanted to see if it was worth the money.  We used my site about South American Vacations for the project.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

**EDIT** – I’ve received several comments and emails all pretty much agreeing with my opinion that the AEIOU site just really isn’t that good.  The only traffic that site has received has been either type-in or referrals from this post.  So, I’m going to begin making gradual changes to improve the content, design and search traffic.  The site you see is no longer the original AEIOU version.

As many of you know, my work is focused on gathering and monetizing traffic. At its root, that’s pretty much what EVERYBODY who does business on the web does whether they describe it that way or not. There are so many ways to accomplish this and I’ve addressed a few of the ways here.

One person I’ve had lengthy conversations with about traffic generation possibilities is Chris Brooks. He’s written some very insightful comments on this blog.

Recently, he told me a competition he’s having as a means to learn more ways to monetize his domain portfolio. We’ve talked about parking and direct navigation, development for search engine rankings, domain sales…. Is there any other way to make money from domains? That’s what his competition is about and he’s going to give 5 of his generic .com domains to anyone that has alternative ideas.

Personally, I think he’s already come up with a fourth way…

1. Park
2. Develop
3. Sell
4. Barter/Giveaway – if parked, these domains might clear their annual registration fee but even if they do, it won’t be by much. There are so many ways to invest that $8 to achieve a better ROI than pure parking. Development is an option but if you don’t know anything about the subject you’ll have to invest time and possibly money to make it pop. You could sell, but I think the market is so flooded with domain sales forums and auctions that unless you’ve got a strong network or know someone to whom this domain would make sense, you’re probably going to have a hard time.

But who would turn down a FREE domain? In exchange, you stand to get some new nuggets of information that can help you with the monetization of the rest of your portfolio as well as possibly giving you new ideas for your business and that information may be worth MUCH more than you’d get from parking or sales.

Check out his domain competition.

Good luck to all.

I was searching today for one of my recently launched mini-sites to see if it had been indexed yet and came across an interesting (at least to me) find. I found a Marchex domain ranking #1 in Google!

As many domainers know, Marchex is a big domain portfolio owner. Back in 2004, they bought Yun Ye (ultsearch ring any bells?) portfolio of more than 100,000 domains for around $155 million in cash and $9 million in stock. For a long time, they just continued to park those domains along with others they already owned or picked up along the way and earned their money monetizing off of direct navigation traffic or traffic from old links to a now-defunct site.

Marchex decided that they could make more money by providing some level of development as opposed to their old parking model. To do that, they acquired Open List in May 2006 for $13 million. The acquisition helped with content aggregation and allowed them to develop more robust sites on a large scale. The only reason I can imagine they would care to do that would be to get traffic from organic search.

By developing the sites, they reduce the number of monetizable actions the visitor can take. People go to sites looking for answers, either for specific question or general curiosities. Parked sites themselves do not provide any answers. They provide two options; forwards or back. If the parked page is properly optimized, the links people see will entice them to click forward to find their answer and that’s how parkers make money. Or the doesn’t think any of the links in front of them will answer their question and they back out and try another option. No money.

A developed site can actually answer the question or satisfy the curiosity without actually making any money. Why would a business want to do that? Well, that’s the trade many make when they want to get those juicy high organic rankings and traffic boosts.

Marchex went that route with their portfolio and it may have hurt their stock price. On May 5, 2006, MCHX was trading around 22 and today it’s 11.5. Other factors contributed to the decline, but there were many that criticized the strategic shift to development.

But today while searching for my site (which isn’t included yet), I came across one of their sites, detroitcontractjobs.com (search link)

So that works. Their traffic volume to their portfolio has to be way up but I wonder if the traffic increase makes up for the loss in revenues. If they can figure out how to monetize better, they’ll be golden.

And maybe they can get their stock back up to the $15 I paid for it long ago.

Tonight I gave a talk to the Cambridge SEO Meetup group about 10 ways advertisers can reduce their exposure to click fraud. If you would like to download the presentation, you can do so here.

I just got back from a vacation in Michigan with my wife and son. My wife grew up in East Grand Rapids, so we spent a couple of days there before heading up to Crystal Mountain for some golf, hiking and boating.

While in East Grand Rapids, I was reading the newspaper and saw an article announcing Grand Rapids new official website. http://www.GRCity.us.

Just my opinion here, but that’s pretty bad. Who picked that? And the people that did the design work, they couldn’t convince the city folks that this was perhaps a less than ideal domain?

This sort of decision process is baffling to me. They clearly spent a significant amount of money on the design. Why did they decide to skimp out on the domain? According to the whois, it looks like they might have worked out a deal on the aftermarket with the original registrant which makes it even more strange. A domain like this usually tells me that they looked for what they thought was the best unregistered domain available.

I’ve spoken with the owner of GrandRapids.com before and I know he’s not interested in selling the domain, but there are still MANY better domains out there between GrandRapids.com and GRCity.us.