Domain Owl

I read an article recently in Rolling Stone magazine about some computer hackers and the “crime of the century”. In trying to blog about it, I found an interesting conundrum: The top (series of) search engine result(s) from searching for the article was a blog review of the article by another blogger, not the magazine author. By Google searching the article title, the top page of search results was not the source, but the review.

Rolling Stone is proud to announce digital issues, but the title of this one article or searched keywords did not render a result even at the Rolling Stone site. This means that every mention or Twitter or email or Digg gets related back to the first online result, the same blog but not the copyrighted origin. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as stolen SEO.

Thus the source website yielded the SEO to the blogger. The blog author gave due credit and links to the source but the blog entry remains the top result for another author’s work. Yet it’s a mystery why the originating publisher would pass up an opportunity to get search result traffic. It’s hard to know the thoughts of a webmaster that stalls SEO discoverability and direct search engine referrals for putative digital subscriptions.

Stolen SEO should be a crime, but the individual leaving the door open are the source originators themselves. How many times have you found yourself using the Search bar at a given site, fruitlessly entering qualified terms, but not getting anywhere? These are the “light bulb” moments domainers and webmasters should tally in their tickler file of websites to build.

Target is a good example. I don’t go to Target.com because the search engine does not render results for products I know they have. Google searching should work, unless the clickthrough link pulls that scummy trick of landing the searcher at the landing page of the site, to begin the search all over again. IMOHO that is NOT a good search engine result. It creates work for shoppers.

How is this an opportunity for domainers? Domainers win when they conceive of a website that solves a problem and provides visitors with sticky content. Nothing could be more sticky than the search result for the item the web browser is looking for. One of the lamest excuses for imitation is that it’s flattering, but decades of Microsoft success prove you can’t “own” an idea.

If the store wanted to accessibly sell lawn chairs, it would maximize keyword efficiency.  But Target has left a window open for enterprising domainers. They can make a site featuring only those items inside the niche and save the shopper time, typing, and trouble. Any site that tries to encompass too broad an encyclopedia or catalog risks alienating visitors by this response failure. The elision of likely keywords from surgical results leaves the door open for enterprising web designers.

By shrinking the ugly cycle of scanning page of items after page of items at the store site, and waiting for all this to render, a site master can marry a city name or store name with an item to shop for and make a killer domain out of keywords they can optimize until the cows come home. This opportunity is available in markets heating up right now, like online coupons from sites like Dukky. Maybe users don’t want to wait for the next campaign and want the coupon now.

Why is this a domain development opportunity? Because a website owner of “Targetlawnchairs.com” could make a bunch of listings on the site and link them to the densely buried Target.com product listings. Surfing a densely niche targeted site for lawn chairs available at Target stores allows online discoverers to skip Search restarts and navigate back and forth through a million results.

Collecting information from online Web sources and redelivering it to the web visitor is not exactly rocket science. But it is webmaster science. Domainers can execute reasonable answers to online search query problems  and compose a likely site, and shrink the type in cycle for grateful web users. The traffic should tell the tale and  bring revenue and clicks.