Poor .info Domain Name Strategy, Afilias

Afilias had submitted a proposal to ICANN for the .INFO gTLD that would allow them to shut down domain names at will if they consider them abusive. The proposal was approved.

The problem they have is not going to be solved by this strategy. The value of high end .info domains was just diminished because now the registry can take them away from you for anything that they consider abusive, and in this day and age it is easy for someone else to spam for you in order to make you look shady. Given that, who wants to invest $20,000 in buying and building out a premium .info name? Probably only the people who are unaware of what Afilias just did.

Meanwhile .info domain names are on sale at GoDaddy for $1.99 - $8 cheaper than any other extension. And it turns out spammers are less discriminating than most other business people. So spammers still buy .info and Google has to protect their search results. If Afilias wanted to fix the .info quality issue, simply increasing the price at the lower end would go a long way.

Robots.txt Overview, Generator, & Analyzer

We recently compiled a 6 page robots.txt primer and added a robots.txt generator and robots.txt analyzer to our suite of free SEO tools.

Unintended Consequences

Edward Lewis runs SEOConsultants.com, one of the more well known and trusted directories in the SEO space. When I first started learning SEO about 5 years back Edward sent me an email letting me know that something I wrote was incorrect. He was right and I made sure I fixed the issue, but he was also quite abrasive.

When Traffic Power was spreading their slime through the SEO industry, Edward Lewis was one of the main people helping to fight them off...so much so that Traffic Power even created a hate site about him. Edward cares a lot, but sometimes a bit too much. Recently he documented his experiences at Sphinn, where he was largely outraged by some inaccuracies he saw. In less than a week he was banned from the site for being too curt, abrasive, and disrespectful.

The problem with trying to clean up everything on the web is that conversations are controlled by power laws...for every person in the know, there are 100 people new to the field. Plus many of the people who know what they are talking about eventually exit the conversation. Given that trend (and how companies like Google profit from spreading misinformation) the goal of killing misinformation is equally painful and self-defeating.

Being correct is not enough to ensure success. You also have to package your message in a format that people find appealing. Which is part of the reason why blogs are so popular. Someone slicker than you is going to take your ideas and repackage them in a profitable format...may as well be you doing the repackaging rather than letting others take credit for your work.

We all get invested in what we know, and to hear something from a different perspective challenges our identities. Easier for people to buy off on changing their opinions if they learn from a trusted messager, especially if they do not have to admit that they are wrong to do so. An easier way to create change is to share your side of the story on your home turf using good formatting, clear language, and logic. Some people will listen and follow, others will not.

Allowing people to self-select is a much more efficient marketing strategy than trying to force change upon others. It allows network effects to work for you, rather than against you. You pretty-much need legal or military might (government) or a monopoly (Microsoft or Google) to get away with forcing change, and even then it usually ends up creating unexpected consequences (just look at Iraq).

The Value of Perception (and the Perception of Value)

Rich Schefren recently interviewed Dan Ariely. The recording is freely available online here. In the call Dan highlights how companies can increase perceived value and get their customers to spend more by creating a decoy offer, which is discussed in the first chapter of his Predictibly Irrational book.

The decoy marketing offer introduces false choices to make another choice look more appealing. We have a hard time valuing offers, but are relatively good at valuing relative deals. The example Dan uses to discuss the decoy is the pricing of The Economist.

Lets say the pricing is

  • web $60
  • print $120
  • both $120

Given the above virtually nobody will order print, but adding the false choice of print only will make many people buy the both option, whereas if the print option were priced lower or the print option were not there more people would be inclined to opt for online only instead of the web +print combination.

Non-commodity based value is largely a game of perception. You can build perceived value by

  • building exposure and trust in the marketplace by giving something of value away for free (people will think "if this is free imagine how good the stuff they are selling is")
  • minimizing downside risk (through the use of payment plans, refund guarantees, etc.)
  • comparing yourself to higher priced offerings (the words SEO training are considered far more valuable than the words SEO Book - something I wish I would have considered in 2003!)
  • expanding your target market and resonating with niche brands (what is the difference between Prozac and Sarafem?)
  • breaking the language of a commodity product and reshaping it to associate it with higher value fields or fields with less competition (Starbucks language sounds more like fancy tea than a I need caffeine cup of coffee)
  • using scarcity (how much did Beanie Babies, Pet Rocks, and Tickle Me Elmo dolls sell for?)
  • requiring prompt action (when we ran a discount during the launch of our membership site people joined at a much faster rate before the price increased because the price increase was a real tangible cost of not acting quickly)
  • adding bonuses and benefits that are unique to your offering

Everything around us is a collage of overlapping value systems competing for attention and resources. What backs the value of the U.S. Dollar? Why has it fallen 20% in the last couple years? Housing prices went up for a long time, and then they stopped. Last year Indymac bank was a top 10 mortgage lender and now they are bankrupt.

Many investors shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In response to deteriorating business conditions the U.S. federal government offered to allow the companies to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve and increase their borrowing limits. That help stabilize their stock prices a bit.

What really scared investors away from shorting the stocks further? A proposal from the White House to Congress would give the U.S. Treasury authority to buy the stocks to provide needed liquidity. Imagine betting on a company failing when your government says that they are interested in buying stock in the company if the company gets in a pinch. That is the sort of news that can send a stock price up 40% before the market opens.

Why would the government care about the stock prices if they have little to do with the functionality of the businesses? It all comes down to perception. A healthy stock price gives the perception that all is well and helps keep the housing market as fluid as possible, whereas low stock prices erode confidence and evoke a sense of fear, which adds a lot of risk to an already unstable housing market. Perception becomes reality.

The Grass is Greener...

One of the easiest ways to scale a business model is to rely on user generated content. This effectively turns readers into writers (free content) and marketers (brand evangelists promoting their own work). But at the same time it makes it hard for readers to keep reading all the content produced from those sources.

We subscribe to personalities and known shared biases. I read everything that John Andrews writes. I read everything Barry Ritholtz writes. The same can't be said for many group blogs. The option to water down what you are doing for a short term revenue boost will always be there, but the ability to re-gain attention and trust that was thrown away in the process is not.

The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be. - Robert Fulghum

Misinformation / Information Pollution Adds Value to Paid Content Business Models

The SEO market is flush with free information, but many times the free information is factually incorrect, which can cost a lot of money to anyone building a business based on such information. The cost is not immediately readily transparent, but eventually it appears. By the time it does many people who lost money from it may not be aware of what happened, as their attention is already elsewhere.

There are a variety of reasons for misinformation to spread

  • stale search relevancy algorithms that rank old information because it was published on a leading site in 2001
  • intellectual laziness, reductionism, and lack of openness to the experience of others
  • affiliate programs and business models rendered useless by marketplace changes, but still profitable because they can be sold at a low price point and have no real costs associated with them
  • search engines trying to hide their secret sauce

I thought I would give a few examples of commonly spread misinformation.

There Was No Ranking #6 Penalty / Filter

If you read the comments here you will see how bad I was roasted for suggesting that there was a #6 ranking issue on Google. Matt Cutts stated that he was unaware of such a penalty, and that was the official word until Matt came said they found and fixed the issue.

Where is the harm in that? Well, if you took Google's official word as being accurate, you never had a chance to survey this glitch. Glitches often reveal engineer intent and give you an early warning to make the changes necessary to keep your sites ranking before the new relevancy algorithms launch.

Google Does Not Care About Domain Names or TLDs

Some people believe that domain names and domain extensions do not matter. After seeing Google temporarily drop .info domain names that was a pretty clear indication to me that they did not think as highly about .info names as they do about some other extensions.

For years current and past Google employees have denied that domain names mattered much in the relevancy algorithms, going so far as calling the domain name "a relatively minimal factor" (in 2008 no less).

Matt Cutts eventually confirmed that domain names have value at a domainer conference

Generic domains that users are likely to remember, will indeed carry more weight than others. There is a real value to those FuneralHomes.com for example. Google does give keywords in the URL a certain amount of weight, but you don’t need it in order to rank.

But people still blog discounting it because they have not tested it.

.edu Links do Not Matter Much

Here is a lovely SitePoint forum thread where the moderator claimed I was full of crap and I responded with more background context on his claim. He deleted my post and banned me for life. About 5 months later Matt Cutts confirmed my hypothisis:

But, certainly, all of the things that have good qualities of a link from a .edu or a .gov site, as well as the fact that we hard-code and say: .edu or .gov links are good - and when there are good links, .edu links tend to be a little better on average; they tend to have a little higher PageRank, and they do have this sort of characteristic that we would trust a little more. There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu - give that link more weight.

But I still have a lifetime ban from the SitePoint forums for being more open-minded and attentive than their SEO moderator is.

Free & Easy is Often Wrong!

The simple / easy answer is often the incorrect answer. Many algorithmic changes (-30, -950, the sandbox effect) are written off as anomalies by many people who do not experience or understand them. But, for the sandbox effect, a couple years ago if you knew that you could create a subdomain off an established site and then later 301 redirect it to a new domain you were able to rank quickly while competitors thought there was a 6 to 12 month wait needed in order to rank.

It is not that forums need to go away, but we need to do more experimenting on our own, and we need to learn who is trustworthy. The web is still a highly inefficient marketplace, but each day it moves a bit closer toward being efficient. Google believes in security through obscurity, so if you have to wait for an official comment by Google then much of the arbitrage opportunity of a technique is already gone!

The 200% to 1,000% year on year ROI you and I currently enjoy will not last forever. Getting correct information early in context helps ensure you have better information than the general public, which should help boost your ROI if you act on it.

Does Your Website Make People Angry?

Just as it is good to invest in structural change it is good to invest in restructuring debates and reframing ideas.

When we consume media one of the biases we often overlook is our own. When NPR created their Budget Hero commentors quicky stated things like "it's too liberal" and "they used right wing think tank as a *credible* source." Such statements reveal as much or more about the reader as they do about the media.

When you know a field better than most people producing media in your space it is easy to denounce everyone who knows less than you as being full of crap. Dr. E. Garcia, a brilliant Information Retreival scientist, makes a habbit out of roasting me because I have a more practical and less academic experience in the space.

While he feels my work is not up to his standards, the work he denounces helps people gain top rankings in Google and is getting free inbound links. Even better, I syndicated some free Creative Commons licensed content on latent semantic indexing called Patterns in Unstructured Data. Dr. Garcia thinks I know nothing about the topic, but when the original source went offline I started gaining citations as the source for that work too! Am I a leading expert on academic information retreival? No. I read some of Gerard Saltan's work, but my experience are more well aligned with finding the criteria necissary to rank in Google.

Web Designer Wall recently published an SEO guide for designers. In it they stated "Most people aim for a keyword density of 2%." I am not sure where they got that stat from, but generally the document was fairly well done and I am glad they cited me as a resource. I could be envious of the exposure their article got and try to rip it to shreds, but where is the benefit? Dr. E. Garcia flaming me generally does nothing but flow PageRank my way. So be it...you know you are doing something right when people hate you. ;)

Chris Anderson, famous for the Long Tail, recently had his long tail strategy ripped apart by the Harvard Business Review.

Chris does not mind though...he is already on to debunking the scientific method!

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. ...

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Mahalo offers virtually nothing original or of value, but it is worth more than most websites because Jason was good at making people angry. There is greater value in evoking emotions than being the person who's chain is jerked by people writing with the express intent of making you angry.

Writing for Buyers vs Writing for Cynics

6 fundamental laws for online publishing

  1. Most popular free online content contains factual errors, but it is still popular due to an affinity readers have for the author, and/or the ease of understanding what they are writing.
  2. The more you know the easier it is for you to denounce someone who knows less than you in your field, though doing so will rarely build brand loyalty, and often attracts the wrong kinds of customers. Call this phenomena the Threadwatch effect...good for attention, but bad for monetization. This is especially true since people new to the market are willing to spend money to build their businesses, but more established market players are more ad blind and more cynical to most commercial offers.
  3. If you are selling stuff online you are not your own target audience. Every field has far more novices than experts, and experts rarely buy because they feel they already know everything and have got burned so many times in the past.
  4. Most online content is recycled. Local substitution is a fact of life, and probably has been for thousands of years, only now it is faster and cheaper. Unless you add pretty pictures, write for novices, and aggressively market your best content at launch someone is going to recycle it (with errors) and get credit for your work. Competing publishers can polish up posts you wrote *years* ago and be called a visionary for doing so! If you are not making your work accessible to novices then you lose.
  5. The more mindshare you have in your space the easier it is to get weak references from people outside your space who occasionally graze upon your topic. When people who know little about your topic look at your field they care more about format than accuracy because they typically do not realize when they are reading factual errors.

From a business perspective, one of my bigger errors with this site is that I tend to write more for the cynical person who loves SEO than for people newer to the field who are more likely to buy. That is not to say that we do not have people sign up every day, but that we are only targeting the fraction of the customers that we could.

The hard part about changing is that I typically write about what interests me the most, using my own interests as a filter. Dumbing things down would be walking / swimming in uncharted territories, and I don't think I would enjoy it all that much.

Link Laundry List

A bunch of goodies recently. I still have about 5 pages worth of links saved up, but figured it was a good time to share some of the new and the old. Rather than pounding out 10 blog posts I figured it would be easier to write a nice list of attention worthy items.

Why do Domain Auctions Partner With Sleazy Registrars?

I recently won a great domain name at an auction. Spent the money, waited a few days, and got the domain management details.

I logged into my domain management account, and searched around the site...no details on how to transfer a domain name away from their site - no transfer authorization code anywhere. The only article I found was one on ICANN rules, stating that you could email them if you needed help locking or unlocking your domain names - but nothing about auth codes.

Most of their contact policies were via email. I could not find a phone number on their site until after I submitted an email to them explaining my frustrations. Then I got sent back an email telling me to check out their help page which consisted of a Google search box. This page actually had a phone number in the upper right corner. So I called it and it told me I was the first person in line. I waited for a few more songs and got told I was first a few more times before hanging up the phone in frustration.

So then I searched for the parent corporation site and hunted around their site for a support number. That worked and was answered within about a minute. Sweet. But...

The guy who answered the phone at first denied that his registrar had anything to do with the domain name I just bought. "Someone registered that directly with Tucows," he said. I then asked why I was sent a welcome domain name management email to log in at his company's site and why I have a customer number with them. At that point he looked up the name and saw that it was registered with them, but then he told me that they had a 60 day policy on domain transfers and that I couldn't get it yet. I said to send the auth code anyway.

After telling me no a couple times he finally said ok. But then the email did not come right away, so I asked if he could just tell me the auth code. He said "no because then we could seize control of the name." I told him I thought they already did that with their website and customer service.

I finally got the auth code, and the domain name is allegedly "Pending Current Registrar Approval." I hope it goes through!

Are these shady third party registrars actually owned by the same parent companies? Couldn't the domain name auctions allow the end buyers to pay a $10 fee per secured name to avoid sending them to some outfit that wastes their time in an attempt to either steal their domain name or cash? Some of the auctions already have the house keeping some of the best inventory and shill bidding against you for what is left...why must they keep screwing you even after the relationship is over?

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