Unlike BMW in 2006, Matt Cutts did not make a public spectacle (or at least not yet) regarding their black hat behavior that has landed them both algorithmic and “manual” re-ranking. Although JCPenney has reportedly fired it’s agency SearchDex, who has yet to update it’s response to Google’s Guidelines. It is not clear if their agency was to blame for the questionable links, simply the “fall guy” or if these links were purchased on behalf of JCPenney.

No matter the case, it is extremely important that, as with any other form of marketing, SEO is subject to qualitative scrutiny that can be more destructive than productive. I am not sure if David and Doug were looking into JCPenney because they stumbled upon this or they were trying to level the playing field for a client, they don’t like the retailer or are just trying to be good citizens of the web, but I am sure that information probably won’t make it to the NY Times.

I am sure JCPenney or SearchDex will be talking to the public, but regardless if these links were purchased or were just built by the agency, the fact of the matter is that they were poor links because they were located on sites that had little or no topical value and hence no value to ultimately pass to the destination or linked page.

Reviewing a previous post from 2008, Fishing for Links, it does appear that some algorithmic adjustments have been made that has lowered the value of links from irrelevant sites that help sites rank for competitive terms.

Will this change the face of questionable SEO linking practices on the web? I would love to hear your thoughts…

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As Facebook and other sites that gather personal information continue to grow, the laws that govern and control how much information is divulged are expected to become stricter. More advanced privacy rules from Washington can possibly severely inhibit social company’s ability to customize ads to the users of the sites. This will stunt sales growth and possibly discourage user participation if it is enacted.

For companies like Facebook that aggregate user data, Congress, the Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission are seeking ways to impose even more privacy safeguards and limit the exposure that companies have to this information.

Facebook has defended themselves by highlighting the fact that they give users a complete control of how much of their private information they are willing to share. There are several features on the social networking site that the user can alter for their preferences. They can choose with whom to share their individual information, photos and other updates. There are also other features that Facebook uses that completely block the sharing of certain components of a users profile. For instance, Facebook does not allow users to track information such as who un-friended them, contrary to several advertised downloads that offer that particular feature.

Facebook will have a permanent presence in Washington and with the team that has been assembled to investigate the patterns of how sites collect the information, and the ways that it’s used. Since Facebook is so dominate in the industry, their input and cooperation will do a lot to help establish laws and set precedents in information gathering.

An emailed sales pitch from a sales rep from Quattro (a mobile ad network recently purchased by Apple) obtained by TechCrunch refers to a “new program launching this month called ViP (Verification of iTunes Purchase)”. The programs ties iPhone and iPad ads in apps directly to your purchasing data from iTunes where than can learn, among other things, the conversion rate of ad impressions to downloads via a “proprietary direct link from the ad to App Store”.

Using personal data to refine how ads are delivered is not new, and right now iAds VIP is designed to help developers sell more apps. But any ad program that offers “a proprietary direct link” direct to your iTune’s purchase data has huge implications for both fans and music marketers.

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Editor & Publisher and the Huffington Post are both talking about the updates. Interestingly enough, I heard about it from @michacha101 who is one of those people that I have no idea why I follow on Twitter but have gained value from doing so. Having said that (and given them a plug) I am learning more about the openness of the social media environment and the value that can be taken from it. Journalists drool over this kind of exposure and availability of information. Trouble is that for the sake of ‘objectivity’ or ‘political correctness or whatever there will always be rules and regs that restrict just how effective the medium can be.

The Huffington Post tells us that some of the LA Times policies include

Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.
Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

There’s a lot of detail that I am leaving out here and here’s why. I have to give the LA Times credit for being on the ball. You see the Huffington Post had only one comment but it was from Andrew Nystrom / L.A. Times social media guy / @AdNys who was completely transparent by saying:

Thank you for writing about our new Guidelines. For the record, here are links to:

- The full text of our revised Social Media Guidelines: http://latimes.com/socialmedia — our original Guidelines were issued in March 2009, before the WaPo or WSJ (and most other major media outlets) issued theirs.

- Our directory of 200+ L.A. Times(@lat¬imes)-rela¬ted Twitter accounts: http://latimes.com/twitter

- The full text of our 2007 Ethics Guidelines (currently under revision): http://latimes.com/ethics

Hope this is helpful. I welcome all feedback.

Nice move.

So let’s recap. As a result of the social media ‘world’ I got data from someone that was of interest, that was about information that can be seen both positively and negatively depending on your point of view but was ultimately made completely transparent by the source which ultimately reflects positively on them. Pretty cool.

So if you really think that people care about where you are walking and what you see it’s likely that you are just really enamored with yourself. What people really want is information that helps. Thanks to everyone who helped here.

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But this time, Facebook is finally saving someone’s bacon. Or, oddly enough, his pancakes. As the New York Times says,

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

One minute after his status update, someone in Brooklyn was mugged. The article isn’t exactly clear on how Bradford was named as a suspect in the mugging, but he was arrested for the crime, even though his father and step-mother both said he was with them in Harlem (and Harlem != Brooklyn, if you’re not familiar with NYC).

When Bradford’s lawyer told the Brooklyn DA about the status update, the DA’s office subpoenaed Facebook’s records to verify that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The IP address resolved to Bradford’s father’s home—and the charges against Bradford were dropped.

The ADA realizes that anyone with his username and password could have posted the status update, but, as Bradford’s lawyer says, “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil.”

So it just goes to show: maybe all those pointless status updates aren’t so pointless after all.

What do you think? Can status updates (with IP records) be taken as legal alibis?

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The regulations seem to address the issue of disclosure: if I give you a copy of my book and you write about it, you have to let your readers know that. If I buy you dinner and then you write about my book or reference my site, you have to disclose that. And so on, and so on.

Problem is, this FTC guideline has gotten more and more onerous in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, and bloggers are getting a bit paranoid about the implications.

Luckily, it appears that this paranoia is misplaced, so you can all take a deep breath. Earlier this week – Oct 14th, 2009 – Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, had a conference call with reporters to clarify the situation and here’s what she said:

“We’re not going to be patrolling the blogosphere, we are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.”

Engle emphasized that what they’ve released are new guidelines. “They aren’t rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law. They are guidelines intended to help advertisers comply with Section 5 of the FTC Act [PDF]” which focuses on unfair or deceptive practices.

So it’s not the rebirth of the Blog Police as the Disclosure Police, as I tweeted earlier while listening to a panel on this subject here at Blogworld, but it is nonetheless a reminder that you should still be transparent anyway. If a vendor pays $200 to write about their product, don’t run away in terror, just let your readers know.

And that’s what this brouhaha is all about anyway: just be transparent and disclose what’s going on, and you’ll be in the clear from both the FTC and ethically on the right side of things too.

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Much like buggy whips, assembly before the assembly line, the introduction of the steel belted radial tire, we have allowed companies to fail. This sudden and disturbing interest in bailing out companies so that they can continue on with their old business models that do not fit where technology and society is going is going to fry innovation in its tracks. Sorry, while I like the New York Times and the Seattle Times, it was not a big loss to me to lose the Seattle PI, the Rocky Mountain News or other newspapers that have shutdown or gone out of business.

This is not an assault on Journalists, this is not an assault on the free press, we need a reasoned non yellow journalism (AKA Fox News) way of getting the news. What is happening is that we are getting the news from people we trust, not necessarily the NY Times. We are following what our friends follow, we are reading blogs, we are reading the BBC, and we are reading a whole host of online content. While the ads on the internet and on those content sites might not be generating mega bucks in profits, they are reporting the news. If anything shows that the current way news is developed, promulgated, and shared is broken, look at what happened during the Green Revolution in Iran. Most people got their news from Twitter. If you want breaking news you will go to twitter, not to CNN and not to Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC.

If you want to find news information you will go right to AP (even if you disagree with their policies) because the AP has a web site. Or you will go to Yahoo news, Google News, or MSNBC. People go to the middle man, not necessarily to the core web sites that create that content. Bloggers have had to deal with this for years; it is time for newspapers to learn the same.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D). White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue. Source: The Hill

While later on in the article they do talk about the core ideas behind why this needs to happen. One of those ideas is that blogs are unreliable. When people are reading blogs like 538, or other authoritative blogs then the argument does not hold true. Blogs are not the boogey man to scare small children with, there are blogs that go back and fact check everything like Ars Techica. We do have blogs that spin the news to suit them, but this is no different than what we see in media today, information as entertainment is nothing new. The problem is that with all the choices we have to divert our attention, newspapers are but a small section of where we will spend our money on entertainment.

News is hardly news anymore, and buggy whips are a dying business. We didn’t prop up the buggy whip industry, and news is all over the internet. Some of the sponsored big box news is absolute tripe, with a large amount of demagoguery on both sides of the political fence. No one complains when average people get sucked into something that is not fact checked when it comes from big box news. The same holds true for blogs and other social media, if you look at what makes it to the top of social media and blogs; it is all from great sources with trustworthy people, at least as trustworthy as anyone else who purports to be a reporter. Newspapers do not need a tax bail out; they need to learn to work in the new environment.

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If the domain name aptly represents the industry or niche it does business in, it can get direct traffic where users type it into the address bar and reach the site. It also represents your company in cyberspace and is the first port of call online.

There are two tricky issue involved in the buying of domains. The first is that you cannot use comparable sales figures (as in the case of real estate). The second is the intrinsic value of the domain name itself (as in the case of vehicle, jewellery etc). These are intangibles and cannot be used as bargaining chips at the negotiating table.

This post is based on an interesting writeup by James Siminoff, webpreneur and owner of phonetag.com and grid.com. James spent over $100,000 on grid.com and feels that valuable domains can be found for $10. The domain vibrator.com sold for $1 million and of late, toys.com sold for $1.25 million.

James has used his personal experiences in buying domains to arrive at a step by step process that should help you secure the domain you want.

1) Brainstorm Domain Names:

Maintain a list of the niches that interest you. When you look for short attractive names, chances are that they are taken most of the time. But the variations or combinations of those domain names can still be available. To help in your quest, James mentions a great resource called Dotomator.com

2) Check for availability of domains of interest:
Godaddy is a big player in the domain name registration business. You can use their bulk upload features to upload your list of domain names. The interface will tell you which domains are available and which domains have been taken.

Another good domain registration service is instantdomainsearch.com where availability of .com. .net and .org domains can be ascertained and a direct link to Godaddy site for registration of availbale domains is included. You can also do an encrypted search on this site.

3) Visit the auctioneer sites:
Domaintools.com provides a whois lookup of all expired, current and deleted domains. Sedo.com is an excellent site where you search for availability of domains and also park, buy and sell domain names.

4) Prune your domain list:
Domains can be broadly classified into four categories.

a) Real Business:
These are domains used for existing businesses. Such domains are very hard to get as they serve existing business interests. James mentions that he bought the domain trustme.com from an existing business and it was a hard slog getting it and increased the price as well.

b) Domain Squatter pages:
This is a common practice as people look at it as a business venture. Registering the maximum number of possible variations of a word as domains at $10 per head per annum gets the owner revenue if these domains are parked on sedo.com for example and sedo also gets to share the revenue with the owner. A good example is the Kauai.us domain.

Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands and is a tourist destination of immense interest. A screenshot of the kauai.us site shows it is a parked domain monetised for Asdsense with the owner hoping that someone would want to hopefully buy it at the “right” price in future.

Such sites are easy to buy as most of them are up for sale. In the above example, there is a Buy this domain sign.

c) Pages with Site Under Construction sign:
There are two ways about it. Either a business is preparing its site for launch or a person has registered it and forgotten about it. Such domains are ideal to target. James has had good success with such domains.

d) Dead Pages:
Nothing comes up when the domain name is typed into the address bar. It is hard to predict whether it is available or not. James talks about the case of nobel.com, a domain owned by an insurance company. He already owned nobelcom.com and he figured it would cost him a fortune if he contacted the CEO about it.

Contacting the VP of the IT divison helped him plead at a human level and the company consented to sell the domain to him. James picked up the domain in lieu of something that would have cost $50,000 or more.

5) Contact the owner:
If a site is for sale, the link displayed or contact us link should enable you to contact the owner. Such messages have a higher success rate in making contact. Use the Wayback Machine to look at the old pages and contact details.

If unsuccessful, use the standard whois on a site like domaintools.com. It also offers a historical whois version.

6) Various approaches to contacting the domain owner:

James feels it is best to contact the owner first and find out if the domain is for sale and not make an offer straightaway.

a) Direct Contact:
If the owner is a student or someone who cannot be searched for on Google, then direct contact is the best way. James says that when he bought the domain grid.com, he had a hard time tracking down the real owner and accidentally revealed his webpreneur details to the owner by email. This mistake raised the stakes by about $50,000.

So, if you have documented success as a buyer, you are best not to reveal it as the status of the buyer can impact the final price.

b) Hiding your details:
A cheap way of making contact with the owner is throug a gmail or yahoo account with username as a pseudonym and the email signed with a name like Joe. This does not elicit much contact from the owner as you may appear to be a scammer.

An expensive way of doing this is through paid services which allow you to mask your details when contacting the owner. Godaddy and Networksolutions offer such services. James has had no success using this technique.

c) Optimal way is to hire a PR or law firm:
Hiring a small town law firm or PR firm has given James the best success in clinching domains like trustme.com and phonetag.com The service costs between $100 and $300. The owner can see she is contacted by a real person from a company and this prevents the price from getting inflated.

7) Domain Valuation:
James says that he has no comparables to evaluate domain name prices. It all boils down to what the owner is asking for. James does not have a budget in mind when approaching owners as he looks at them as assets as in real estate.

8.A rough guide to evaluate the domain name:
a) Number of letters in the domain name:

3 to 4 letter domain names are expensive and can sell between $5,000 and $500,000. A name with 5 letters and more becomes cheaper.

b) Number of words in the domain:
One word domain is high value. The more the number of words, the less valuable it becomes.

c) Easy to spell:
The easier it is to spell the domain name, the more valuable it is.

d) Reason for typing the domain name into the browser:

James draws a parallel between college.com and phonetag.com (he owns the latter). It would be worth getting a traffic analysis report from Compete.com The natural search traffic to college.com woud be much higher compared to phonetag.com

e) Natural flow of the domain name:
The more natural the flow of words is, the higher the domain would appreciate in value. James points out that a word like phone tag would be more natural than a random flow like micro soft (separated by a space).

f) How does this domain name affect your business?
A better domain name is more viral and easy to remember reducing customer acquisition costs. The worth of each customer and the current acquisition cost of each customer need to be factored into the final value.

9) Negotiation:

a) Reacting to ridiculous offers:
James mentions that the owner of bulk.com wanted $800,000 and he offered $35,000. The sale did not go through but owners can be sitting on their high perches with overexpectations.

b) I am not sure – what do you think?
The owner who has this question wants to negotiate for sure. James says he goes in at 20 to 30% below the bottom range of his budget.

NOTE: There can be legal issues here. If you write back saying you can buy it for $5,000 it becomes a legal contract that can be enforced in court. James advises that it is good to put in a rider something like – I can buy for $5,000 pending all terms are agreeable.

c) Spooking the seller:
If you agree to a price straightaway, then the owner is bound to develop sellers remorse concluding that he has underpriced the domain than what it is truly worth. James had this problem when buying grid.com and had to sue the owner to enforce the contract (out of court). Rather than get into legal situations, you would be well off negotiating the price down with the owner.

d) If the price is right:

If you feel that the seller’s price is close to the market price, then there is no need to be over cautious about it. Just settle for it.

10) Get the agreement:
If the seller says yes to your offer, then it is a contract that is enforceable in court. Get the assent in writing. Once that is done, open up an escrow account at escrow.com and transfer the funds at the earliest. The quicker this is done, the harder it is for the seller to back out.

Enjoy the original writeup for 10 tips to buy a domain in its entirety. You cannot fail if you follow this process to the best of your ability depending on your individual cirumstances.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing company offering both natural search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

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