phraSEOlogist - SEO Phrasing

How to keep your Existing Domain Name

2008-07-05T10:16:00.006-04:00

Over time I have discovered that one of the most perplexing situations a client can be in is the expiration or deletion of their own domain name through a registrar (the company you paid to register the domain on your behalf). As the registrant owns the property, it is far more emotional to suffer the consequences of losing it, which is inevitable unless you take some action. Each registrar has policies which it must adhere to by law, and then some others which it can be lax about. Over the past few years, abuses in the process have been on the rise and require that you be better informed about how the system works. Most important of these is what the registrar does with your domain when it expires and since this field causes great confusion for the average registrant, it is important we clear this up first.

Your first step is to confirm your expiration, status and registrar info. My favorite is at Domain Tools where you can just type in the domain name and it will give you all the information you need in the very first search field labeled "search whois". Results should show you or your company as the Registrant. If not you need to go right to ICANN and start a domain dispute unless it shows "private registrant" which means you protected your privacy when you registered. Either way, under the "registry data" you should see an ICANN REGISTRAR field. This is the company that was ultimately responsible for acquiring your domain initially and they are your first point of contact for all disputes.

The body which regulates domain names is called ICANN. From a registrant's perspective, they are an administrative body which handles the writing of laws and the process for dealing with disputes and resolutions. Their domain expiration law states that as a general rule, registrars have about 30 days to hold onto the domain in expiring status before releasing it into deleted status. During this time, your domain is published to a number of websites which track expiring domains and if your domain is of interest, may start generating bids or traffic. In order to circumvent this process, you must first do everything you can to assault the registrar with complaints about their process, ability to allow you to renew or failure to notify you. Sometimes you can get through and get your domain renewed. Please keep in mind that per the domain rules, they cannot hold up your renewal simply because you owe them money for other domains or services. If they try to get you to pay for something else, go right to ICANN.

You might think they are being shady or dishonest and you might be right. However, they don’t want to hear ICANN yelling at them about not upholding a domain holder’s rights, so make sure you head down the road of contacting the registrar right away. If this fails you can take the next step and start a dispute. You can even get the domain held up indefinitely if you are the domain holder by putting a lock on it. Check the Expired Domain Deletion Policy at ICANN which clearly states that a second notice or reminder is required to be effected by the registrar company before your domain can be cancelled - clearly one point of contention for you or your company. The second is that extenuating circumstances may allow you to hold the domain in lock, such as “Failure of a Registrar’s renewal process” (for instance, your credit card info was correct but was refused), “Registrant is in bankruptcy”, “Discrepancy in the amount paid”, or “Billing dispute”. At the very least, instigating one of these causes of action will allow you to take the domain off the expiring list and give you time to consider your next step to get the domain if you lose your case. Depending on the value of your name, to yourself and/or the domain buyers community, you might want to seek counsel immediately to hold the domain in lock while you dispute the issue. If the domain is of importance to you in terms of revenue, you can force the registrar to forward the resolution of the name to another website, allowing you to continue having the revenue stream.

Keep in mind that as a general rule, registrars are actually on your side to an extent because if they lose any face with ICANN on such a simple issue, it can lead to problems for their accreditation. This doesn’t mean that as a rule they are more than happy to sell your domain into an auction if uncontested, but once you bring action everything is in the spotlight and their backdoor policies will take a backseat to your frontal assault.

Now let's assume that for all purposes you have either travelled down this road and lost or it's near the day of expiration and you have no opportunity to get the domain into lock before it is auctioned off. Despite what you may think, this does not mean the domain will be gone today. First things first - the registrar wants to sell it to someone else so that they don't lose the domain record and can keep that revenue coming in indefinitely.

The most important aspect of this equation is the registrar's Domain Drop Policy. There are a few who have no policy, but your first step is to call them and ask if they participate in auctions for expired domains and who that auction company is. As of July 2008, the major list is:

Godaddy : TDNAM.com handles all auctionable property. Also be sure to search for the domain on GoDaddy's website and if the "Backorder this domain" checkbox is availab,e check it and deal with spending what might turn out to be a non-refundable $18.95.

Network Solutions and Enom : Both these companies recently created a subentity called NameJet.com. Search both the Pre-Release and Expiring lists for your domain name. Technically you should appear in the pre-release category with final date listed being the same as your expiration.

MelbourneIT is one of the largest registrars out there, and resell their properties through AfterNIC. A general search on their site should show your property in the list.

Register partners with SnapNames which is also a large domain auction block. You may need to watch your domain more carefully with a large entity like SnapNames since they have a great deal of subscribers.

So let's say your registrar doesn't participate in the domain auction process. This means your domain will drop off the face of the earth right around the expiration date. There are literally hundred of websites dedicated to watching for domains that get deleted. If your name has any chance it might be of interest to someone and you were unable to get it into lock before the expiration date, you will need to consult our post for Buy Deleted or Expired Domain Names at Auction.

However, if your domain is one which goes to an auction drop reseller, such as the list above, you will need to head over to their website and register ASAP! Once you become a regular buyer, you can now bid on the domain in question like anyone else, and chances are most of the time it will not cost you more than about $70. If some some reason it is a very hot domain, you can expect to pay whatever anyone else is willing to bid up to. However your name and bid will be kept secret and you don't have to worry about anyone finding out who won, especially if you opt to register the domain after winning with the privacy option. Your domain will probably be part of a pre-release or "in-house" auction, which is a way of saying that the original registrar is holding onto your property but changing the name of the registrant. Either way, your goal is to get on the bandwagon right away.

In any case, there is no doubt that your first step should be to contact the registrar first as they are the ones with the most power during the first 10-15 days. After that you need to get in touch with ICANN before your domain hits the auction block, and make sure you get a lock on it within 30 days. Rules and Regulations regarding domain names can be difficult at best, even knowing everything I have outlined above. Once again, if your domain is of great value to you, find a good lawyer/counsel right away. I might recommend trying FindLaw.com, but as always, lawyers will make a process which you have full rights to initiate yourself much more costly. Even if you are forced to buy your domain through auction or a drop pickup provider, your dispute process may enable you to get the domain for free, which might be an issue if you paid a great deal of money at auction.

First and foremost, watch your domains. If you have a true registered trademark, this might protect you in all events as the Uniform Domain Dispute Policy will protect copyright holders before scalpers. In any event, learn the auctioneers which hold your names and do falter in your quest to buy the names before they go out to the domain watcher lists.

The Over-Extended Link Engine

2008-07-02T06:40:00.002-04:00

Imagine yourself entering the Tour de France. You have trained hard. Every day you rode your bicycle, worked out beyond your pain limit, and spent a =fortune in getting to the top of the list. As you approach the start line, everything changes. Judges suddenly announce that a 16 member team from Mars will be allowed to compete in the race and as we all know, Martians have 3 legs and ride Thricycles. You jump at the start gun's firing but the Martians cover the entire course in 27 minutes. You find yourself a hot contender for 8th place in the span of seconds. With any intelligence you give up and protest.

This is exactly what has happened to our Search Engine Results Pages. With little exception, spammers controlling infected bots have overtaken all former rank challengers and will soon dominate web results. Perhaps even more frightening - they will soon start creating their own results, inadvertently.

As far as most users are concerned, what Google does is a bit of a mystery when it comes to page ranking, but for SEOs most of the equations are known. Time itself is a large factor when it comes to getting moved up the charts, as well as naming, keywords, keeping things "honest" and backlinking. Or so you might think.

A number of spam attacks have been occurring as of late on the 'personal journal' websites, such as Blogger, Spaces Live and AOL Journals. This would normally be of little concern other than the attackers are able to use compromised PCs to create accounts which bypass or solve the CAPTCHA method of authentication (that's those silly images with warped words in them which you have to type). Originally these attacks were somewhat low on the scale of importance. They did little to affect the general internet structure. Websense's capture of one of these attacks shows how the bots are instructed to get in and post regularly. Success rate is about 10%, which is more than acceptable for a hijacking.

However, things have changed, for the worse. These spambots have now been re-engineered into link farming rankbots. They now hold thousands of blogging and personal accounts and each one is chock full of backlinks to every other relative rankbot site. These spamblogs are filled to the brim with pretty keywords for the hot products being offered. This as it turns out, used to simply be things that were on google's trendlist for the day. If you aren't familiar with Google Trends it's basically a list of what the hottest search terms are. These rankbots are able to quickly create several hundred pages, each on a different site and account, all referring to the keyword in question with very simple formulas. (too simple in fact, exposing major flaws in Google's search armory). Now many such searches will show the top ranked blogs as being pure rankbots with tons of garbage text. Suddenly the voices of millions of other bloggers have been drowned out by the sound of spam.

As if that wasn't enough, I was recently treated to watching firsthand one of these bot sites get so highly ranked that it was number 3 on Google's first page of web results for a recent large event in Paris. Google has so over-tweaked the power of a backlink that a domain name like http://8u8ehfjsgsi.spaces.live.com can be number one for the hottest search terms - beating out real contributors, large companies and leaving the word of personal spaces and blogs in the dust. On a recent scan of the top ten hottest terms, 6 were overtaken by rankbots in the blogosphere, and 1 had a top 3 ranking in google's Web Results. Now that's some serious blowout, but it's just the tip of the iceberg!

One keyword in the top 20 hottest terms each day will be something you cannot decipher. This word could be something like the recent "Prolix Ungulate" attack. What am I talking about? These spamdexing botnets have overtaken the ranking so completely that garbage text they generate becomes the hottest keyword of the day. Imagine that all the searches performed on Google in a day (200 million if I remember correctly), do not add up to the spam generated by hacked bots blurting out noise into the blogosphere. If permitted to persist, these rankbots will own every keyword in Google's engine. I know this sounds ridiculous but it's not. Sources from Google indicate that work is being done to address the issue, but it has technically been an open issue since 2005 when splogging first began.
Here are a few of the exposed flaws:

Overranking of backlinks: Much like IMDB or Wikipedia, these rankbots have links upon links to each other in a very google-friendly format without overextending themselves. If you notice that many of your everyday searches might first turn up a wikipedia entry before they show you the actual product you searched for, that is due to the amount of times users have linked into the page at wiki, and vice versa. Rankbots expose this anomaly very cleanly. Google especialy enjoys links in the form of "Phraseologist" rather than http://www.phraseologist.com/, which rankbots also exploit greatly to their advantage.

Overranking of personal blogs: In order to raise preference for orgs like Wikipedia, Google has to give less weight to the Domain-Name of a link and its content. In this manner, search for most common or news terms will typically shows results from a Wiki first before the actual property owner. This is because a link on an indexed page causes a huge uptick in rank. Allowing personal spaces to dominate such links means that corporations linking to each other in a partnership, like HP-EDS, show up low in results compared to others covering the event. these spam blogs exploit this by understanding that once they are indexed, they have the same leverage as a dot-com domain with a name matching the hot term. So they can instantly jump to the top of the results index with no penalty for being a personal blog.

De-ranking of domain-names: For a long time, a domain name was a key to any rankable site. Just as HP.com should rank first for HP searches, freakpizza.com would overtake most contenders for the "freak pizza" search results. But this is no longer the case. Dot COMs still have some reasonable weight, especially without a dash, and .NETs, .ORGs and even .INFOs still hold their own in the mighty domain world. But their presence is greatly diminished. Search for an item of interest and you might find only 1 keyword-based domain name which matches your search. Most of this rank is now by content and backlinks at stated above, and it is probably overly repressive.

Timing - rankbots are posting to their respective blogs every 12-24 hours. This must be an exploit of time-weighted posts. If someone posts every 60 minutes, they may be given less weight over time or raise a flag. By posting once per day or so, the bots seem to maximize this weight of time effect without diminishing returns or penalties bringing the page to the forefront of suspicion. Also, each page in a link farm posts its link to the other pages at different times, making it appears as if the "hot news" is spreading across multiple users slowly.

Permitted Relinkage - The link to the spyware which the bot wants the user to click on is typically repeated several times over the course of the page. Google appears to be ignoring this and the bots are reveling in the ease of linkage. Even the outside link to the image is being repeated on the page with no ill effect.

Break Spacing - it is unusual for a web page or even a personal blogger to use 70 "break" statements in an html line, but apparently google is not seeing this as a page exploit either. The goal of the extended breaks is to make the end user think that he/she is seeing the only post on the page.

Administrative Overload - After noticing a spam blog on PageOne search results in rank 3, I notified google through the administraive webmaster tools panel. It took 3 days for someone to answer my request that the page be removed. Certainly google must be overwhelmed with such requests as a general rule, and these specificly more than likely require even more investigative research before removal. By the time Google removed the indexed result, two other web results had infected slots 19 and 20.

It seems the new generation of rankbot spam is overtaking our industry, replacing the real world with the unknown. If nothing were done about it, we would have pages upon pages of rankbot results to filter through with no end. This crisis resembles junk email in a very real way. At first you don't care if you get a single piece of junk, but all of the sudden one day you are overtaken by Viagra spam and you can't stop it - because all the providers ignored the "small" problem for too long. These innocuous exploits are becoming more commonplace and will soon break through the barrier, with a massive Martian noise.

Google is working hard to correct this problem but I suspect that there are now new political struggles overtaking the giant in its quest to balance personal life with the real world. Users and their content have been overweighed in an effort to create a blogo-tubular-universe of googlisms. The beast feeds upon itself and its message, in turn creating a new genre which cannot be steered from the helm any longer.

This does make some sense. Google is very focused on user content, especially in ways that relate to youtube, and may have been under great pressure to rank user content high on the webscale. However this has backfired a bit too much. You will get youtube results for just about anything with a link to any page in the universe, and it is discreditable. Search engine optimization has turned a cheek to this influx of over-personalization. Without an anchor of some title or type, such results should seriously be considered and treated as junk. Yes, I know that there are users out there who are inventing new words and cool fun things to laugh at every day - but if 100 of them each link to each other with no real world link (real world being nytimes, cnn, wikipedia, etc), then it is just more brabble from the gallery. Such anchors are necessary, perhaps not for a blog rank but certainly for a webrank. And domain names do need to hold some weight. A serp rank should not be so easily given to a random AOL Journal page.

Also what has been made very clear is that CAPTCHA is not an effective inoculation against the disease of bots. However if we can manage the symptoms before they cause serious illness we might pull through for the time being. In my next article I will try to address the disease itself, authentication.

DOMAIN and NAME ownership

2008-07-01T07:58:00.004-04:00

I must admit, I am seriously disturbed by some of the practices, both past and present, of most domain companies when it comes to quality .COMs with the word "NAME' or "DOMAIN" in the phrase. For instance, on a recent search I attempted to gain results for the following seemingly innocuous domain prefixes:

nickel, 5, five, 10, ten, dime, 20, twenty, quarter, cheap, hundred, thousand, 101, 15, fifteen, one, 1, two, 2, three, 3, four, 4, six, 6, seven, 7, eight, 8, 9, nine, eleven, 11 (etc etc), low, less, save

often interjecting in the middle of the phrase: buck, dollar, price, cost or number,

before concluding with: name or domain

I came up with 0 available results.

I can surely accept that about 175,000 clowns as stupid as I am went out and bought these domains and did nothing with them over the past 10 years, but I wish it was the case! The reality is that all these domains belong to...
Sedo, Enom, Afternic and WildWest
Now why isn't that surprising?

Of course things are not so obvious as they seem. Many of these names were picked up by minor speculators over the years and then purchased or kept by the domain companies themselves. Or in the case of WildWest they are simply resellers hawking their wares. Some have even been resold back a forth a few times. But what I noticed as being somewhat illogical is that if you want to start your own "cheap" domain website, let's say 10buckdomains, you'll have to go first to the high-priced domain sellers, and shell out a few thousand for these pretty little gems. Everyone knows that one of the strongest elements in ranking is a name (though easily proven wrong by recent BLOG spammers, more in an upcoming series).

Now I don't want to be a goon and call this the cat standing by the mousehole, but how else are we to interpret this data? Irregardless of how all these companies acquired these domains, their goal is now to keep them at bay. This is quite advantageous because each of these domain names indicate that one can pay less than Sedo or Afternic prices for domains - which is bad competition for those guys!

So who do I get to yell at? Anyone I guess. All I know is that if all the competitive domain names are owned by the four biggest domain resellers, that's unreasonable. The reality is the only way to clear it up is

1) no domain parking allowed for "domain" or "name"
2) no speculating or resale permitted
3) no ownership beyond a small percentage of "premium" names for the large domain houses

4) forced expiration rules with no allowance for registries to renew or hold

Unlikely that anything will happen but I have posted and thus it is so.

A Phraseologist

2008-07-01T07:45:00.002-04:00

This is not a blog where I air my concerns or interests of any kind. All I am looking to do is uncover what I see happening in the background where one might normally not look.

Everyday I am confronted with articles from Google, search results, news, blogs - and every day the content leaves me wondering how it got there, and where is it going. As an SEO, my role is no longer to optomize the search engine. It seems to be doing whatever it does without question. Instead we should all be helping the search engine do its job better. Right now I truly believe there is only one search engine, Google. That doesn't mean I don't use Yahoo or MSN or ASK or any of the other myriad of options still out there. But the reality is if a client wants to get placed - anywhere - he is looking at Google optimization for his keywords. More than likely he is also looking at Adwords for his terms.

True keyword optimization comes at a hard cost - whether we pay the piper or the geek in the backoffice who plays with words. Having gone the piper route too often and sometimes getting burned I have opted to slide over to the geekier side - those who seek the meaning behind the words, the ways in which they are propogated and the form and function that follow the hunt for words.

It has become nearly impossible to get yourself to the highest level on a single word without Adsense. Most one-word domains, with their one-word corporations, and fifty-headed dragons, are all but lost to the highest bidders - which will never be us. We can take acronyms, compound words, multiple words of sorts and a few niche areas that haven't been exploited. But even if we were to wipe the domain gobblers, corporate slurry and bots off the planet we'd still be competing in general for nearly inaccessable webspace.

So now we are no longer keyword optimizers, we're phrase optimizers. No single word remains for us to light upon our match. And Phraseology is born.