Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I am excited for the opportunity to be a part of the SEO 101 panel at the upcoming Domain Roundtable conference in Seattle. The conference is Aug 12-15 and finishes up with a huge live domain auction that looks to be even bigger than the auction at the TRAFFIC show in June. They've got more domains, with lower reserve prices, so there should be a lot more sales. I'm excited to meet more people in the domain industry along with my esteemed colleagues who will be joining me on the SEO panel: Aaron Wall, Todd Mintz, Joshua Padau, and John Tompkins.

Check out the agenda for more info about the sessions. The sessions look good, but the networking will be great! You should definitely check it out of you're able to make it.

Labels: domains, seo conferences

I spent most of this week at the TRAFFIC Conference for domainers. Met a lot of great people and learned a lot about domaining. There is an obvious shift in the industry away from simply parking domains and relying on ppc revenue. More and more domain owners are looking to develop real web properties on their premium domains in hopes that their long-term value will increase with a real site. I think that's a wise direction to head, but the reason for this post is to mention that there were some big domain sales at the live auction at the end of the conference. Over $10 million worth of domains were sold at the live auction. They could have easily doubled that figure if some of the high-end domain owners would have been a bit more reasonable with their reserve prices. Regardless, it's good to see that the domain market is alive and well. There were some good names up for grabs today.

See the final sales prices on Moniker.com

It's also interesting to see Frank Michlick's list of sales prices and max bids for ones that didn't hit the reserve. You'll notice that even though only a few sold for over $1 million, there were a lot of others that got 7 figure bids, but they didn't hit the reserve so they didn't sell.

If you missed out on the action at the live auction, they've got an online silent auction going on until next Wed.

Now I'm off to sleep for 4 hours before I catch the plane home. Later.

Labels: domains

Whenever I read an article about SEO or search marketing iin a "mainstream" publication, I like to mention it. This article in the WSJ addresses the issue of changing to a new domain and the problems it can cause with search engine rankings. If you do a 301 redirect, you should be fine, or if there is a drop, it should resolve itself fairly quickly. The article goes on to talk about how some sites drop out of the search results even when you're not moving to a new domain. There's a humorous anecdote about some company who was supposedly threatened to be blacklisted if they didn't quit calling Google to ask about how they could get indexed. Of course, they weren't blacklisted and their site got listed within a couple weeks. They just needed to be a little patient.

Labels: domains, news, seo, wsj