Whether you have a new online business or an existing one you’ll want to review my tips on domain name management.
Review
Periodically review the domain names you own. If you don’t need one or are not pursuing that aspect of your business, save money and don’t renew a domain name you won’t need in the future.
Secure
When you start your business, secure domain name variations of your company name to protect your brand. Consider buying the .us variation in addition to the .com if you are a U.S. based business and other country extensions if you have a presence there.
Save Money
You don’t need to buy hosting for every domain name you own. You can use domain forwarding to point domains you own to your main desired domain where your website resides.
Select
New or old, periodically it makes sense to review the domain names you do own. For those you are using for your website and online presence, set your renewal in five year increments. For those you may let go in the future consider one year or two year renewals.
Need help with our domain name management? Contact www.McCordWeb.com today.
Thinking about buying a used domain name? Be careful, very careful, even if a domain is offered to you for a great price and it really looks like a great keyword match, take a deep breath and do your homework before you jump on buying that domain name.
Why should I be careful?
It today’s environment when great domains become available it is typically because they have been burned out by spammers. A domain will carry history, it is not just a name and when you take it over thinking you are getting a fresh start; it may be banned by spam registries, Internet Service Providers, and been used and abused by spamming or black hat SEO’s.
Even $200 is too much to pay for a domain that has been abused. You may never be able to use the domain name in an email address and the history may be so tainted that you will never be able to remediate it and place on any search engine with it.
My recommendation is – No Go.
My candid recommendation on buying a used domain, based on how things are, is that I would pass. A domain name does not assure SEO placement, and if you really love the domain you may be able to buy it fresh and clean and never used before as a .us or .biz.
If the price tag is even higher, hire an expert to do due diligence for you. I’ve seen domains go for $10,000. You’d hate to pay that kind of money and find out that the domain had been horribly abused making its value to you nearly nothing. Be careful and do some Google searches first before you consider buying any used domain names.
If you need savvy help reviewing statistics before you buy a domain, contact us at www.McCordWeb.com.
As noted in the announcement, Google rolled out new column sets you can turn on to get a better idea of your new “Average Position” based on their new definition of what Average Position now means to them.
These new items are:
Impr. (Absolute Top) % – the percent of your ad impressions that are shown as the very first ad above the organic search results.
Impr. (Top) % – the percent of your ad impressions that are shown anywhere above the organic search results.
Search (Absolute Top) IS – the impressions you’ve received in the absolute top location (the very first ad above the organic search results) divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
Search (Top) IS – the impressions you’ve received in the top location (anywhere above the organic search results) compared to the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive in the top location.
Are you confused yet? The bottom-line is that we have seen many client accounts suddenly have a drop in Average Position in the regular column set now that the definition of what Average Position is according to Google.
The resulting action is that we have had to push up click costs or move to automated bidding algorithms in Google Ads in order to get back to ad positions that allowed for our best number of clicks and conversions.
Obviously clients are not happy about this. It is obvious that Google has adjusted the definition and algorithm for ad placement in order to drive greater profits.
As I manage many top performing accounts across a wide and diverse sector of verticals it is most unusual to see many accounts have the same performance dip in one month and on one specific date when other factors do not come into play.
The bottom-line is that you have to be very sophisticated in approach and management operating in Google Ads at this point in time. This platform is not a place for the inexperienced or do it yourselfer.
I have been a Google Partner and Certified AdWords Professional for years. I have studied and passed numerous certification exams, nearly from the time that Google instituted the AdWords certification program.
This announcement states that people were confused on what Average Position is and that it is not what they had thought. Here is the important quote from the announcement.
Contrary to common perception, average position is not meant to describe where the ad appears on the page. Average position reflects the order that your ad appears versus the other ads in the ad auction. As a result, an ad position of “1” means that your ad shows ahead of all other ads, but it doesn’t mean the ad was at the very top of the page. Sometimes no ads are displayed above the organic search results so the ad with a position of “1” appears at the bottom of the page.
Therefore, we’re rolling out four new metrics over the next several weeks that – unlike average position – provide clear insights on where your ads are appearing on the search results page:
Well, this is a change. All the AdWords test materials and study guides over the years have stated that average position was just that – a statistical average of where your ad appeared on the page to give you an idea of how high or low your position was as a factor of your quality score and bid.
Strangely, now Google has announced that no, we have all been mistaken and that Average Position was not that, but rather a factor of ad rank – which is very, very different.
This is a marked change and one that has impacted numerous client accounts in November. Where accounts were happily chugging along with great click and conversion numbers, November 6th hit and I had many accounts take a sudden nose dive in clicks and conversions. I saw this across several key accounts in very diverse sectors. It appears that Google has restructured the auction algorithm to cater to this new terminology that they have themselves created for Average Position as of this year.
Please visit my post on Wednesday, part two of this series to learn about the new metrics they have rolled out as part of this definition change of Average Position.
