Domains - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Choosing a domain name these days for a new web venture or microsite is an activity filed somewhere between painful and truly horrendous. So what tools can you use to minimise headaches and the time spent on finding a domain name?

When scanning search results, the only things that users have to decide which one to click on is its position in the rankings, the text of the link and the snippet of text displayed.

You wouldn't let the Royal Mail decide on the text of a piece of direct marketing so why let Google decide what text to display on these critical three lines?

Nominet has registered its six millionth .uk domain name, with the national country code attracting a growing number of domestic companies.

The registry said a YouGov survey of 2,324 internet users showed people were six times more likely to enter a .uk domain name than a .com address when using a search engine.

Google is among a host of web firms facing a lawsuit from companies complaining about programmes that place online ads on unused, parked domain names.

Vulcan Golf filed the complaint in Illinois arguing the practice, by which individuals register attractive domain names but place only ads on them, is a "shocking and egregious, intentional, bad faith scheme to generate revenue and profit from illegal and deceptive actions".

Overseas businesses may soon be able to register domain names with foreign characters.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is meeting in Puerto Rico this week to discuss allowing characters with accents or in entirely different scripts to be added to the internet system.

Domain name Business.com could sell for between $300m and $400m this year, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The name went for a then record $7.5m when it was bought by two entrepreneurs at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

The issue of duplicate content is a thorny one that can affect sites' search rankings, and one that has even caught Google out in the past.

So it's good that the search giant's Adam Lasnik has written a post that throws some light on how it deals with the problem.

Recruitment agency PFJ has launched a version of its job search platform for mobile phone devices.

The new website is available on the .mobi top-level domain at pfjjobs.mobi and allows handheld users to interrogate the company's database of vacancies.

In 2002, AT&T made a major mistake. As part of the launch of its mobile initiative m-life, the company purchased television advertising during the Super Bowl coverage. Nothing wrong with that – along with the Oscars, it attracts one of the biggest audiences in American television and is seen as a creative showcase for the best in American advertising.

But what AT&T missed was how its advertising affected later search behaviour.

A German businessman who owns the 'G-mail' trademark so desired by Google says he would refuse to sell the name, even for millions of dollars.

Hamburg-based Daniel Giersch registered the name for his postal service in 2000 and launched an e-mail adjunct in 2003, before Google launched its web-based mail client a year later.