Here is my round up of important domain name news from the last few days or so.
To start off I really enjoyed DNJournal.com’s great article on the life of domainer and NewYork.com owner Leyland Hardy. It makes great reading.
I was pleased to see a report from DomainNews.com about a recent survey of UK marketing professionals about their use of the .co.uk ccTLD. I was reported that:-
.co.uk is the Internet domain of choice for 60% of UK marketers, an independent online survey has found. The survey showed that of those companies that maintain a .co.uk domain, 83% have chosen it as their primary domain.
Basically, the .co.uk ccTLD is a strong brand, so thats very good news!
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal discussed a new facility in Google Adwords that permits the blocking of domain parking pages. He writes that Google Adwords is
running limited testing of a feature which lets its advertisers block domain parking sites which their AdWords ads will be served on; specifically ‘Domain Ads’ and ‘Error Page Ads.
Quite rightly he goes on to advise advertiesrs to think carefully before blocking domain parking sites as the parked domain could be a site with type in traffic that converts well. Nevertheless, Google has put doubt into peoples mind about the quality of traffic from parked pages. Could this be a mistake that Google might regret? As the Search Engine Journal article suggests, parking companies may simply look for ads from paid search companies. I will be watching this story to see how things develop!
Michael Gilmour has recently started a series on domaining called Domaining 101. Mark Fulton of DotSauce also posted an article covering domain name investment called Domain Name Investing 101. Both will be invaluable to newer domainers.
CNN discusses the future IDNs. IDNs present a great opportunity for domainers with the skills to exploit them. Frank Schilling posts his response to this article, here
Finally, I have added a new page to this site listing all the domain name internet discussion forums (20+) so far. Check the Page/ Article list in the sidebar, and visit the forum listing page to make sure that your favourite forum is on there - and if I’ve missed it out leave a comment and I will add it in.
