Domainer's Gazette-Home

one small suggestion to all the SEOmainer’s out there… I don’t suggest using a dot/period for your title tag:

I recently bought an old directory focused domain (similar to dmoz and yahoo dir), which I’m in the midst of building out and adding relevant sites. As I was concentrating on my ‘Arts’ category, an old painting website came to mind - Next Monet - one I used to visit and window shop quite frequently, but had simply fallen off my radar.

I initially forgot the name, but remembered the ‘Monet’ portion, so I searched in google.. ‘my monet’, not it. ‘buy monet’, nope. Then the actual name popped in my head.

So I google searched it, ‘next monet’……….*no results*

uh-oh, maybe they got pinged running some nasty seo…

I knew the site still existed, so I typed the name in the address bar, and up it came. When I looked around, though, the site didn’t seem penalized. Still appeared to be a trusted site. Then I glanced at their source code and found this:

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”

…a noindex…..and…..a nofollow…on an ecommerce website….hmmm…customers are overrated I guess..

In their defense, maybe they have some sort of search engine specific no-compete with the artists they represent? (Not likely)

Could it be they decided to layoff ‘Jack the web guy’ to slow their burn rate, and he in exchange tossed that time bomb on their homepage as a little f-you as he’s walking out the door? Who knows..

(they can thank their lucky stars that Yahoo is ignoring that tag - otherwise their site traffic would prob fall to zero.)(and I’m not even gonna go into the fact that they’re failing to use paid search to advertise when someone searches their name - gallerydirectart.com is eating their lunch there..)

Looks like Netsol is further promoting their “SEO management services”, adding this new banner to the mix.

you know what I’d love to do? (but don’t have the cash..)

subscribe to one of these services, document the entire process, and post the entire history here for all to see.. If not me, Aaron Wall, Shoemoney, or Jim Boykin should do it..

Network Solutions is quietly promoting some SEO services I find quite wrong.. After acquiring a domain yesterday, I logged in to change its DNS settings. Directly above my newly acquired name, this promotion caught my eye:

Get top 10 rankings in search engines like Google® and Yahoo®! — Guaranteed!

Now, initially I was saying,”yeah, you can get me top 10 listings within *paid search* on goog and y! by bidding $10 a click.” But they weren’t talking about paid, they’re talking about organic SEO.

“Search engine optimization of your home page and key landing pages. 20 targeted keyword phrases delivering at least 5 listings in the Top 10 results on major search engines”.

Wanna know what they’re most *inexpensive* rate was for the guaranteed package?

$2,800.00 ($5,800 was the most expensive)

after I slapped my forehead, I began to ask, “what do they consider ‘major search engines’?”

their response in fine print:

Network Solutions will only submit keywords to search engines in the United States. The search engines included are: AOL, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves), Google, Hotbot, IWon, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!.

then, within the fine print as well, I discovered this doozy:

This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your Web site.

So, imagine yourself working at a small business, say a plumbing company in Smyrna GA (the type of business they’re targeting here), where any-and-all marketing and advertising dollars are spent to generate revenue and leads. You’ve heard about all this SEO stuff, and how it can open a flood gate of traffic & sales to your business website, but you have no clue on how its done. Assume you sign up, stars in your eyes, your boss is gonna love you when he sees the latest quarter of sales performance..

According to Netsol, they’ll contractually deliver on their promise if they deliver this:

2 of your website pages appearing in the industry leading seach engine Hotbot, and the other three pages in Lycos, all at 10th position..

so, if you were following along, and imagined yourself working at that small business, you’d be fired right now for blowing $2,800.