DN Journal wrote a cover story about Frank Schilling, which is quite motivating to me, especially after meeting Frank in person and getting rum cakes from him today. About 5 years ago Frank got into domaining as a common man, and now his portfolio is worth deep into 9 figures. In the interview Frank said:

Everything on the Internet begins with a name and there are very few people who understand how domain names work or their importance to commerce, branding etc. Even folks who think they understand branding, don’t get the power or importance and versatility of names - they too miss the boat. This is the ultimate niche during the ultimate window in time and it will be for decades.

Most domainers thought Frank was late to the market and now he is the #1 domain investor in the world. And in spite of all the stories of domain success, there are still many steals on the market today. A few months ago I bought a name for $2,500, and since then the same name in a worse extension sold at auction for well over 10x the price I paid.

A few weeks AFTER Scores.com sold for $1,180,000 I bought Scores.org from the BuyDomains marketplace for $2,300. I don't have a site there yet, but I have a logo and an idea for a site I eventually want to build, if time permits.

I have been on a bit of a domain name binge this year. As I learn more about content and branding and managing people, today's $1,000 or $10,000 domain name is going to look cheap looking back at it 5 years down the road. My story won't be as good as Frank's story, but given how motivated my wife and I are, I think we will do well. A few years ago SeoBook.com was an $8 domain, with a default Movable Type template. Once I could afford spending $99 I bought a logo and color matched the CSS to it. The site has since got enough exposure that I met and married the most wonderful woman in the world through it. And it all started with a domain name. :)

If you are an SEO and you grasp a bit of what made Frank do well AND know how to make a site part of the organic web, you don't need to pay .com prices to compete. A .org or .net can work just fine if you have the content quality needed to be remarkable and citation worthy. And you can get a big big name in those extensions for $5,000 or $10,000. Sometimes you can get it for $8!

At Pubcon Las Vegas keynote speaker Richard Rosenblath said that content does your marketing, and content is essentially the next building block on the web as search continues to dominate the web. From the Bruce Clay blog:

The old model is owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don't care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail.

Market's are not fair, but they do not need to be if you have great timing. When you look at some of the content sites that are out there in many verticals the competition bar is still quite low. Wikipedia does not dominate because it is great, it dominates because most content is junk. HowStuffWorks is not a great site, but it sold for $250 million dollars. And if you look at the top ranking sites that talk about the deal, most of those pages are not exceptionally compelling either.

It doesn't matter how ads change or where the future of search lies. The tools and ideas needed to succeed are at your fingertips and you are going to do great.

I feel lucky to be able to write this post in anticipation of the years to come. You and I are lucky enough to be at a place in time where we can write our own luck! Cheers to the future, and thank you for reading. :)

Joost created an SEO link analysis extension for Firefox that shows link anchor text and PageRank on Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central, and Microsoft's webmaster portal. I also updated SEO for Firefox to fix a Yahoo! Search error, but to get it to update you have to uninstall and reinstall it because I did not update the versioning data and my programmer is a bit backed up at the moment.

Wiep published a group survey of SEOs on factors affecting the value of a link.

In the past any large company could use subdomains as an effective reputation management strategy. As eBay and others have aggressively used subdomains to dominate branded AND unbranded search results, and Google has improved their sitelinks technology, any relevancy gain by treating subdomains as a separate site has gone away. Google is going to start treating subdomains like subfolders, and limit the number of results from any site to two.

There is still an upside to using subdomains because they allow you to feature standout content, but that upside relates to how marketable the content on that subdomain is, whereas in the past using lots of subdomains allowed eBay to get 20 of the top 30 listings for some queries, even if the subdomain was recycled garbage.

This move adds value to regionalizing sites and creating niche brands (like MobileCrunch), since currently I believe ebay.ca and ebay.com will be seen as two separate sites. If sites are too aggressive with regionalization or creating niche brands and start double dipping that way then Google might eventually look to devalue that move as well, although that will be more of a challenge because it would create a lot of collateral damage.

Official announcement by Matt Cutts at Pubcon, reported first by Barry.

Pay Per Post Already Dominates Many Business Models

Search engines toe the company line fighting against spam, but are paid posts any worse than sponsored research? The day before Matt posted about some lowbrow PPP ads used to equate paid post with bogus information on brain tumors, I posted about how some scientific research is polluted by commercial interests, and an SEO Book contributor by the nickname of RFK left this great comment:

I was just going to comment on this issue on Matt's blog, since he went on a rant about paid posts being bad for personal brain surgery research. Really.

The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it's become more and more apparent that the "studies" published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline.

This begs the question: what's more harmful, the illiterate drivel of a $10 Pay Per Poster or a biased supposed medical study published by a respected researcher? Obviously Google can't control what papers are published, but they shouldn't be pretending that restricting competing paid advertising practises is about returning better content.

The Copy & Paste Culture

As a joke, years ago I created a rather offensive seedy website (with low quality information on porn, drugs, and gambling), and a professor diametrically opposed to my worldviews sourced that site as a credible source. If he was that intellectually lazy with his own professor profile page, how much intellectual laziness goes into the average web page?

As media empires crumble the recycling effect of online information is only going to get worse. While I may not agree with all of the research, the Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines, particularly Google highlighted how journalists start research using Google, and even have a way to warp Google for other writers:

More and more, initiatives to maintain journalistic quality standards complain that also journalistic stories are increasingly the result of a mere "googlisation of reality". One drastic example is described by the German journalist Jochen Wegner [Wegner 2005]: A colleague of him did a longer report on a small village in the north of Germany. He reported about a good restaurant with traditional cooking, a region-typical choir doing a rehearsal in the village church and about a friendly farmer selling fresh agricultural products. If you type the name of the small village into Google, the first three hits are the web sites of the restaurant, the farmer and the choir. And if you compare the complete story of the journalist with the texts on the web sites found by Google, you will see: As a journalist of the 21st century, you don't have to be at a place to write a "personal" story about it. Google can do this for you.

When you think of that publishing trend, think of how well Wikipedia ranks, and how Wikipedia often reflects the public relations campaign of the largest market participant it gets a bit concerning. It gets even uglier if you think about the erosion of publishing based business models, and their increasing reliance on public relations firms to give them stories as they drastically cut staffing levels.

The Race Toward The Edges of Reality

The types of publishing that will dominate the web are

• those selling content as service: the value add of service will allow them to develop relationships with readers which help them market their content while still being able to provide honest value and compete in competitive marketplaces
• those giving away content to push commercial services: if you can gain enough attention, respect, and credibility you can charge well for your work. You can even sell what others give away, see the above category.
• those creating content from passion: they don't need to be profitable if they are doing it for fun or because they are passionate
• those with extreme bias: a biased article is remarkable and more citation-worthy than a vanilla article
• public relations spin: essentially Pay Per Post, also without disclosure
• those creating thin content: consumer generated content, repackaged ideas as link list linkbaits, and/or copy and paste of one of the above groups
• profitable advertisements: with automated integration or editorial selection causing these to have exposure in the above content types even if they are not well ranked in the organic parts of the web. The ease of tracking these ad results will effectively warp many of the above categories of information.

Biased content is easier to reference, syndicate, and subscribe to than more balanced content because we are more aligned to communications messages that match our worldview. And much of the passion driven content is tied to a strong bias (like hate sites). Which means that search engines can try to display a diverse set of search results, but as time passes they will reflect more biased groups of opinions and far fewer balanced articles.

Your Feedback Needed

Maybe it has always been this way though? Do any reporters read this blog? I would love your comments on concepts similar to result diversity in offline publishing, especially contrasting it before and after the web.

I wonder if my roll as an SEO makes me interested in such issues? Do other SEOs (perhaps you) find macroeconomic and publishing trends interesting? What other topics do you find yourself losing hours to every week?