Domain Owl

Two excellent tools to suggest for use this week, DropDay.com indexer and rank checker, and Nodds.com article submission and link back directory. Drop by DropDay.com and check your domains, and get the nod from Nodds.com.

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Want headphones? Don’t head for the Radio Shack. According to every search I performed this morning, absolutely no headphones are for sale. Even though they feature three sections with multiple categories inclusive for over the head and under the ear and behind the neck headphones and earbuds, a zero null results and a dead white screen is the result of every click.

Now, that’s technology at work.

PS I called the 800 number to ask about product information, a man named Lynn listened to my problem and then said “Hmn. By Golly, I see what you mean”. Sometimes you don’t get the sharpest tool in the shed, but isn’t Radio Shack about …getting the sharpest tools in the shed?

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I would like a word about administrating comments in WordPress, if I might. I administer 6-7 blogs and on any one day I can be working between them, submitting posts and publishing entries. One of the tasks that absorbs too much of my time is the weeding of spam comments, especially when a huge array has been submitted. This has become an awesomely irritating task that does not lessen over time.

It seems to me there should be some core functionality that argues against a spam comment submitter posting where their comments are not welcome. Not only are they risking their urls be submitted to the “hate” lists, but with adult material and pornographic links, these amount to a sheer nuisance. There simply no reason seven to eight thousand comments a day which will be deleted should be occurring.

Over time the aggregates are staggering. My readers for any of my sites are not porn searchers, and none of the keywords for any story can be resulted from an SEO search for those names. Yet time after time obnoxious links with undesirable words crop up, in comments stuffed with links I have no intention of approving. You’d think there would be some way to turn the spigot off.

I can see how many people simply ply onto my blog without reading it. It shows in the poorly worded in and inaccurate “responses”. What stuns me is the amount ungrammatical postings and clearly spun nonsense posts that are still nevertheless commented daily. Many are obviously form illiterate typists. Why would I want pidgin English from a spam url on my site?

I am going to start writing letter to domain registrars and hosting companies demanding these sites be taken down and emails disabled for any link that hits my sites more than 5 times with pornographic materials and illiterate, unconnected spun posts. I am also going to chronicle the results, if any. It seems to me there should a line beyond which consistent spam posting becomes Internet abuse. Malicious posting cannot be ruled out.

The most frustrating thing I find about these posts is how badly they are skewed to my website topics. I can go to blog A and see posts with backlinks suited to the keywords for sites B, C and E and have to delete them. I can go to Blog B and see comments with backlinks suitable for sites A D and H. And so on. If you are going to make the effort to mechanize posting or even do it by hand., why can’t the writer match the blog comment to the subject?

The answer, of course, is that someone has hired an illiterate non-English speaker working from a foreign land to do the backlinking. They certainly understand enough English to pile porn links into the comments and save. But since they can’t read English they are throwing all their backlinks at the wall to see what sticks. And I am getting really tired of cleaning off the wall.

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The time has come to talk of mice and men, of SEO title tags and image links and description with meta tags. Poesy aside, the competition has become fierce in the domain world for active backlink building and aggressive SEO engineering like never before. The sounds of SERP recalculation is hitting the air even as we speak.The time for SEO semantics is past.

The SERP is the Search Engine Results Page. The goal of a webmin or webpage administrator is the number one page or number one result. Of course this is not always possible. But the herd of domain name owners online has embraced the active engagement of SEO forces this season and shows no signs of letting go. Any domainer with time to watch TV is giving away clicks. Looking for unexploited nodes is the new flipping channels.

The new term in domaining is link wheeling. Linkwheel is a term used to describe your stack of pages where you have gone to an online web destination and furnished indexed material with a allowed hotlink back to your site or a directory link or a categorical abstract of your site together with a link.this can be done on sites that are very familiar like Ezines.com or not so established, such as Buzzle.com.

The Squidoo lens can be important for building an aggregate of responses and search interest. No longer are domainers concerned with whether or not there are people online enough to support their sites. They want to discuss every spoke in the link wheel.The link wheel is turning for competitor ever day. The moment you decide to vend your domain name, you better have a fistful of stats ready. These are no longer for nerds.

The forefront of domaining today is expanding the web and building demand for new link directory sites and article submission portals. if that weren’t complicated enough, the profusion of stores and niche promotional tropes leave some domainers with simple old-fashioned blogs looking sort of empty-pockets. And for the first time the black hat of SEO is getting pronouncedly more gray. Many a domainer is reviewing the services and yield of the email blast functionality with a more tolerant eye.

Blog owners are tracking their trackbacks. Site administrators are watching their traffic stats like rising bread in the oven. Programmers are mixing fresh slurp code like competitive chili cookoff contestants. SEO specialists are no longer evangelists but coaches. The final crush of using online tools and SEO indexing instruments has come. With equal access to most and broad access to many portals available to online citizens, the race to the finish should be a photo (sale) finish.

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Linkbuilder newscaster no. 1: live from the SEO Chase we’ve got the top winners risking a penalty lap with a black hat flag ….

(from the track) VROOMMM. There goes a link. VROOOM. There goes another link. *Putt-putt-putt-putt, pitch pitchaoowww.*

(From the booth)  Here comes the domain for a pit stop and that’s 30 seconds Freddy that link was down between marginal backlinks of negligible quality.

Linkbuilding newscaster no. 2: Yeah, Jimmy he’ll need every bit of that Java juice to get that scripted monster back on its PhP horse.

Norm the home viewer expert: That’s a lot of downtime between posts. Can they keep up that site momentum with all these delays?

From the hosting arena: You said it Norm, watch the way the wheels keep spinning between Ezine and Squidoo. What a waste of fuel.

(From the booth) : This is the pedal to the metal, both feet on the floor, NASCAR approach to link building.

Postgame broadcast:
I am seeing a preponderance of link building energy from webmasters of all shades and stripes.

But what I see a lot of more remarkably is every team, crew boss and shot caller making the same decision: throw the entire kit and boodle of web tags and meta entries and see what sticks.

This is an error. What should be done is a surgical insertion of backlinks to precise keyword match websites and urls with secondary associations as needed. Or when the checkered flag comes down the victory lap will be taken by your competitor.

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I collect a list of all the email submissions from the comments field in the comments admin section. I then make the response url a page where I measure the traffic and check who is coming by IP address. This is a rainy day project but one that can build an appreciation for real users versus those who view yourwebsite as a seo portal for their spam.
Those repeat spam posters who never respond the email blast get deleted.

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I have come to use a new system of measurement with my domainer peers and colleagues, one that reflects their concrete commitment to developing their domains versus the merely stated intent or practice of doing so. So many domain buyers pose as active promoters it is easy to see how some domain name buyers can get lost trying to figure the players without a scorecard.

I never judge another domainer based on whether they use the same tools as I do or whether they favor the same site estimators.  No two domainers are going to use the same system, even if they have the same vendor accounts and use the same site analytics. Based on how these tools have served each domainer in the past, they will come to their own conclusion about the relative worth of each.

It’s a habit for domain name buyers and sellers to hype their latest online app or website find to each other. It’s part of the game. But sometimes I don’t really have time to expend double digit hours per month (or week) evaluating new interfaces or plugging into new websites that claim heightened value for website marketing. You can take the opinion of a domaining peer, or you ca try it out for yourself.

It’s completely possible that a “power domainer” within your acquaintance may favor you with emails concerning the latest fad website or the newest website or domain evaluator which generates the most pleasing estimation responses. it’s wise to be wary of following any one domainers and their practices and viewpoints too closely. It is entirely possible they may be affiliated with the new site or service, or derive a signup credit or kickback.

By the same measure, qualified recommendations by senior experts in the domain world can save you time and put you on a footing with the best in the business.  Checking out their communications keeps you in the loop regarding where the domain herd is moving and how fast it is going. And signing up for a new service can keep you abreast with first hand opinion regarding the efficiency of a website and how prurient their abilities are.

I had one such recent experience lately. One of my clients wanted me to make some blog posts (blurbs) on a service called BuildMyRank.com. Before this gig I had never heard of BuildMyRank.com. This program had some kind of promotional public relations slash distribution channel for brief informational posts about the clients’ relative keywords. The individual client would input the blurb and link them with interconnected anchor links at the target site.

One of the requirements of this site is that your site be “developed”. It’s not clear from the BuildMyRank prose if this means a minisite will qualify, if a parking page disqualifies the url, or of forwarding does the trick. I know I was irritated with how long the BuildMyRank.com signup process took, and the installation of the original url had unrelated interface problems that reflected a beta launch software edition.But nobody wants to walk away from a free (or paid but worthwhile) SEO advancement instrument.

I had used proformatted links inside BuildMyRank.com with my client and so duly posted a website and put up content. (At this time I had no intention of publishing a review) When I resubmitted the information for the newly developed site, many of the key links did not align and the interface keep issuing error messages not in concordance with the posted content. The keywords fit into the linking convention but the “save” operation would plug the links into the software. So I emailed customer support about the problem.

Well, you learn a lot about a website (and their “SEO” services) by the customer service response. My frustration was met with bitchy and argumentative responses again and again. The operator from BuildMyRank.com never addressed the specific bugs. They assured me that “thousands of users worked just fine” and immediately decided to close my account rather than deal with the issue.

Not only had my first attempt to use this Buildmyrank.com service broken down, but my account had significant bugs. Email to BuildMyRank.com did not yield working fruit. The difference between my client and me getting anywhere was that his BuildMyRank.com items were from a paid account service, and I was still in “free trial” mode.Would the eventual SEO value diminish or disappear under similar circumstances? If it indeed ever appeared?

The emails from BuildMyRank.com are snotty and stupid. This told me a lot about how they approached getting things done. Knowing this so far in advance was a relief. I hadn’t recommended this site to anyone yet. They would never know how many referral clients they lost, domainers with huge portfolios looking for SEO results and only the assurance of a trained site operator to work with.

I don’t know the net benefit of is service to my client, but I do not recommend BuildMyRank.com. The argumentative and offensive stack of response emails form their “administrators” reveals a bunch of coffee drinking teenagers pretending to run a business. Risking your url’s white SEO hat on this company is a risk. If you get difference experience at BuildMyRank.com you have my heartfelt congratulations.

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I was browsing one of those sinister hosting forums today where everything in the domaining world seems for sale for just a few pennies. I was astonished to see requests for European hosting. These are the spaces where presumably offshore or foreign web host space is just pennies on the dollar. Evidently the small change hosting accounts can cost per month is still too much money to pay for some domainers.

There are so many problems with this it’s not even funny. Security problems aside, there is no way you can guarantee any members of your websites, let alone promise e-commerce customers any data integrity. Want to know a great way to get your identity stolen? Store a bunch of personal information and work product in “secure” servers in some unknowable foreign location. How many European data centers have you been to, anyway?

I was surprised to see people (users)  I know biting at these offers. Anyone who doesn’t see this catch-22 coming is crazy. How would you even read a Norwegian web hosting administration interface? What if the English versions bugs up? I have used foreign servers and they collapse and “forget everything” often. Do you know how to conduct a customer service call in Swedish?

I urge everyone to forgo the temptations of offshore webhosting and hidden assets. I urge every domainer to contract legitimate and single account direct payment hosting with an understood Terms of Service contract. With a reliable web hosting vendor. And I am pleading with any domainer who thinks web hosting can come at pennies and reliably earn Google revenues, there is always a catch. There is no free lunch.

If you have to lodge a service complaint, do you know who really owns the web hosting account? Because that is the only person responsible for the customer service end of what could be a very cheap reseller account. To take care of outages you will suddenly be dependent on that guy you traded a dozen bucks to one time last year for this hosting deal.

Are you willing to risk that? Just say no and walk away from dirt cheap (and probably just dirty) foreign servers flashing their wares online. Without legible guarantees and service contracts your home country can legitimize and enforce, you are flying blind without a parachute. And that is never going to make the fine people at Google or Commission Junction or Bing happy with you. Which is what you want.

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Have you gotten bogged down with everyday activities and missed a prime domain name deleting from your hosting or registrar account? Assigning an old email address, spam filtering, and the wearying upsell chain of emails from your hosting account and registrar can make even the savviest domainer skip any subject lines from those domain auto-generation lists.

Make a spreadsheet or get a small notebook. On each page (or in each column) write down the name of the domain you bought, the place you purchased it, how much, and the expiration date. If you have the Paypal address or the email contact and name of the person who sold it to you, this could be queried later on if there is a contested name change.

If you used an online forum, resales portal or auction house, get the user name and note whether or not the person exchanged proper trader rating data. Selling a domain name can be something that domain owners trumpet to the skies, especially if they made a profit. Following the purchase, Google the domain name to see if any comments (or protests) regarding the domain name sale have been published online.

The domain purchase price becomes the new start value for the domain. Every marketing cost or time investment must evaluated for change in domain value from here on in. Don’t use any other projected values discussed in the negotiation phase of acquiring the domain. Those are not concrete. Your goal is to change this domain name purchase value and increase it until the name can be marketed for resale.

Create  a page in the notebook or spreadsheet for domain traffic and SEO measurements. It is worthwhile to note online metrics generators searches for the name on such and such a date, and tabulate changes at these same generators for the name later on. If you jump around using sweetheart sites to get the values you want, the data validity won’t be as strong as all values over time.

As stated, the domain purchase price is the establishing value. This value can be inserted into a variety of formulas. These formulas can be used to generate reports for domain name auction or resale data later on. By establishing an origin data point for all your domain calculations from then on, you can make a quarterly growth table for all the values. These would be traffic, new user signups, offer inquiries, or ad responses and Google revenues.

The notebook domaining method can be used if you only have one or two domains and don’t feel a need to mechanize the data. But it gets easier as you buy more domains to just add the basic information and let legacy formulas through the sreadsheet take over the work for you. Also, exporting data be  comes easier to cut and paste into a computerized spreadsheet, especially if you are catching up.

Regarding domain name expirations; If you outline the Expiry date in red, or sort regularly once a week to check domain name expirations in the spreadsheet, you do a quick check for renewals due, So, when the panic strikes in the middle of the night your most valuable domain is slipping away through the droplist, you can flip pages or scan the top dates for calmness.

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Domainers decide their brand based on their name and their gmail address can be a big part of their presentation and communication strategy. If you’ve invested time and effort establishing a brand then make sure your gmail is not taken. People tend to assume those using the gmail account are associated with the domain or website. Don’t wait until you start receiving strange emails from people who claim you owe them money.

Don’t use gmail? Doesn’t matter. Someone else does and they may be hiring work or doing business as you, the legal owner of the domain name online. Go to Google mail (gmail) and search for available name. Cement this brandable domain name marketing resource by registering the account using your own data, and security information. Even if you never use the email address, it’s certain nobody else can and pretend to be “you”.

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