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In This Issue:
Latest Domain Name Scams
Low Ball
Pricing
If you receive a solicitation from a registrar or reseller for very
low prices, please make sure to READ THE
FINE PRINT! What you'll find are schemes that lock you into higher
prices if you attempt to transfer, renew or change the domain
information in anyway. Sometimes they'll offer free e-mail
and Web-hosting complete with lots of
annoying pop-up advertising that they don't tell you about. You might
think you're saving money until you experience poor service, costly
hidden fees and unwanted advertising. Be sure to make informed
decisions for security, quality and support before transferring your
domain names.
Deceptive
Renewal Notices
E-mails or US postal mailers are being used
to mislead domain name holders about the expiration of their domain
names. They are usually in the form of a warning about your domain
names expiring. They may even look like a bill. Typically, your domain
names and expiration dates are included in the message.
The scam messages appear to be generated from large registrars such as
VeriSign (Network Solutions) and Register.com or their resellers.
HUEY Productions sends out ALL renewal
notices on HUEY Productions letterhead. If
you receive e-mail or US Postal mail
concerning the renewal of your names that we manage
for you and are unsure about, please contact
us immediately.
LookSmart Gets Expensive
Pay -- and
keep paying -- or don't appear, LookSmart told existing and new
listing customers last month, in a significant change to how the
human-powered search engine lists web pages from commercial web sites.
LookSmart
previously allowed web pages to be included in its commercial listings
by paying a one-time review fee. This has now been eliminated,
replaced in April by a new cost-per-click "LookListings Small
Business" program.
The new
program still forces submitters to pay a mandatory, one-time review
fee, though at US $49, this is much less than the $149 or $299 charges
levied under the old programs. However, the new program also charges
web pages that are listed a flat $0.15 fee for each click they
receive.
In addition,
LookSmart has a $15 per month minimum spend requirement. This means
that if a listing fails to generate $15 worth of click revenue for
LookSmart in a particular month, the company will still bill for that
entire amount. For example, if a web page only gained 50 clicks in a
month -- $7.50 worth -- LookSmart would still charge the listing's
owner a full $15.
As a result,
commercial listings with LookSmart will now cost at minimum $180 per
year, not including the one-time review fee. That sounds less
expensive than the $299 per year that Yahoo charges for its commercial
listings. However, Yahoo does not have a cost-per-click component.
Yahoo's annual fee provides "all you can eat" clicks, to whereas
LookSmart's $180 minimum cost per year is limited to 1,200 clicks, for
that time period. If you want more traffic beyond this, you need to
pay beyond the minimum.
You'll have
to do the break-even curve for your business, but in a lot of cases,
you'll never make back the money you'll spend each month by paying 15
cents for every click...whether they buy or not.
Keyword Phrases
How your
site is presented and the text you use can have a dramatic impact on
your search engine positioning. Most search engine spiders read the
text that is contained on your Web site and use this information when
deciding if your site is relevant enough to be displayed in its
results. If a search engine scans your Web site and finds no mention
of the keyword phrases being searched (say,
'bed and breakfast'), it doesn't matter how great your META
tags are, your site will not be displayed at the top of the results.
The reason being is search engines like to display Web sites that are
as relevant as possible and they figure that if the keyword is
mentioned on the page, then the Web site will likely be just what the
searcher is looking for. Some search engines even ignore the META tags
completely, believing that relevancy can only truly be found by
searching the text contained within a Web site (Google being the
obvious example of this).
What is also
important is to make sure that the text on your Web site makes sense.
Don't just string a whole bunch of keywords together in a hope of
proving to the search engines that your Web site is relevant. Not only
are the search engines smart enough to recognize keywords on your Web
site, but they are also smart enough to determine if they are
presented in logical pattern. Repeated keywords back to back on your
Web site will simply raise a red flag to the search engines that you
are attempting to manipulate your positioning.
Google More Important Than
Ever
America
Online, Inc., the world's leading interactive services company, and
Google Inc., developer of the industry-leading Google search engine,
announced a multi-year agreement that will make Google's popular
search technology and targeted paid listings available on America
Online brands.
Under the
agreement, Google's search technology will begin powering the search
areas of AOL, CompuServe, AOL.COM and Netscape this summer. By joining
Google's industry-leading platform with America Online's extensive
consumer audience and popular online brands, the companies plan to
create an even better search experience for AOL's more than 34 million
members and tens of millions of visitors to America Online's Web-based
properties, both domestically and internationally.
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