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I often hear the endless arguments and counter claims about the importance, or otherwise,  of domain suffixes (aka top level domains), eg: .com, .net, .org etc.

One angle I’ve been seeing quite a bit recently is the suitability and level of trust a user places in a domain name.

For example, if a user had to go to a site like:

http://amazingdiscounts.XYZ

Where XYZ could be any of the lesser know domain suffixes like .me, .pl, .tv etc

would that user be suspicious or at least cautious being on a site that wasn’t a .com, .net or .org?

Additionally, I also see claims that if your site isn’t a .com, then users won’t remember the URL of your site or end up going to one of your competitors sites.

Well, I think that would have been the case 5+ years ago when users relied heavily on bookmarks and typing in the URL’s of the site they wanted to visit.

In my opinion, the whole process that most people use to navigate and find information on the Internet has changed significantly in the last few years.  Let’s look a some of the reasons, why I think this is the case.

Search Engine Prevalence

Obviously search engines have been around for sometime, but when Google hit the scene, it changed the way people search for information.

These days a lot of people use Google as a portal, ie:  it is the place they use to access any information or site they need.   Whether their home page is set to Google or whether they use a Google search bar in their browser, they are constantly interacting with Google.   For these types of people, Google is the Internet.

Additionally, these days, Google provides much more information than the standard search results in the early days.  Now you can get search results on current news, images, videos, maps and all manner of related information.

Google becomes so integrated into these people’s usage, that they rarely or never type in a URL in the browser address bar.  So for example, to go to Amazon, instead of typing:

http://amazon.com

in their browser address field, they’ll type “Amazon” into Google and get to it that way.

Browser Improvements

Browser development have included many improvements to make navigation so much easier from the early days when a browser was much more basic in functionality.

In the early days, to navigate to a web site, you would need to either:

1. Type in the full URL of the site you wanted to go to (including the http://)
2. Have previously bookmarked the site
3. Use a search engine like Yahoo or Altavista (in the days before Google) or navigate through an Internet Directory.

These days, just about all modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE have a range of features that make the above methods mostly redundant.

Features such as:

• Integrated search engine functions, so that there is no need to even navigate to a search engine.
• Auto-completion where you can type in the first few letters of a site, and the browser will display possible matches from your browsing history or bookmarked sites.
• Reopening of tabs and windows when you restart your browser.   In the old days, you had to manually open all the windows you were previously on (assuming you could remember what they were and had bookmarked them)
• Adaptive address bar.  You can type virtually anything into the address bar and get a result.  For example, typing in amazon.com or Amazon, will get you to the Amazon website, whereas in the old days, you needed to type in exactly http://amazon.com

Bottom line is that not many people type in the URL of a website these days.

The Trust Factor

It’s certainly true that the .com extension is the most common in existence and that there’s a certain familiarity with them.

So the question is do people trust non .com domains?

Well, that depends.  Some people pay attention to the domain name and might be put off a little by an unusual domain extension (given that they are sometimes used for phishing sites), however, I think that most people wouldn’t even look at the URL of the site they are on and even if they did, they wouldn’t care if the page in front of them had what they expected or what they were looking for.

Having said that, I found the following piece of information from Alex Smith on the Warrior Forum to be very interesting:

I decided last year that rather than replying on my own preference (.com) and marketers’ general preference (.com), I’d ask all my customers and prospective customers what they prefer to see, and what they think “looks best” on my sort of sites and what gives them most confidence in the site.

And the answer came back “.info”, loud and clear, from a big majority of those who expressed a preference, in each of eight different niches.

Looking To The Future

With the advent of global top-level domain names happening sometime in 2012, there will be a flood of new domains that will increase the top level domain diversity.

Cities and big companies will be applying for these new global names, so in future you’ll be seeing domains like:

cafes.newyork

camera.canon

So what does this all mean for Internet Marketers?

Well, I personally think that popular top level domains will have less and less importance as more choice becomes available and the general Internet users either become more used to the variety, or just don’t know or care.

Cheers

A very important aspect of keyword research is gauging the number of competing sites.

Typically, almost everyone will do a keyword phrase search in quotes to get an idea of the number of sites that contain that particular keyword phrase.

On the back of that, doing an allintitle search, can be very useful as it will give you an idea of the number of sites that have that keyword phrase in their page title.  This is important as page titles carry more weight than the same keyword phrase contained within the article body.

However, if you are looking at the number of results that Google returns, then you could well be relying on incorrect or inconsistent data.

Video Overview

The following video shows you exactly what I’m talking about with the inconsistent Google allintitle results.

Allintitle Results With and Without Quotes

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using the keyword phrase: search engine optimization

It’s important to note that the results will vary depending on your location and changes to the Google search algorithms, but as far as I can tell, the inconsistent numbers has been around for a while.

OK, so let me show you can example of exactly what I’m talking about.

First, I’ll do an allintitle search for search engine optimization without the quotes

Google reports there are 518,000 results:

Remember that without quotes, Google will be returning pages with any combination of the words “search”, “engine” and “optimization”.  For example, one of the sites listed on page one has the title:

Search Engine Submission Optimization

Now let’s do the same allintitle search, but with quotes:

Now in theory, as this is searching on exact matches, ie: titles with the phrase “search engine optimization”, we should get a lot less results than searching without quotes.

So, what numbers does Google give us?

Yep, you read it right.  That’s over 3.5 million!!

That’s 700% more than broad match allintitle search!

How’s that for inconsistent and misleading results.

OK, so what’s going on with the figures?

Well, it’s important to note that the search results figures that Google gives you on the first page is just an estimate, otherwise it would slow down Google search results if it had to search through the entire set of data for each search request.

A Better Method of Comparison

For any Google search, it will return a maximum of 1000 results.  By that, I mean if you keep clicking on “Next”, Google will give you a maximum of 99 pages (assuming you use the default of 10 results per page) of results.

Most of the time, the maximum number of results pages will be less than 99.

OK, so let’s go back to our example allintitle searches, and view the results in a different manner.

Let’s do our search with:

allintitle:search engine optimization

Now, you could keep clicking on the “Next” link to take you to the last page, but you’d soon get sick of all the clicking.

To speed up the process, click on “Next” to go to page 2 of the results, and then in the URL in your browser, look for where it has:

start=10

and change it to

start=990

and then press Enter.

This will take you to the last page of results and at the bottom of the page, you’ll see:

Now if we repeat the steps and do the search in quotes, you see the results:

So for the search without quotes, we get 857 results and with quotes it is 618.

This is much more consistent and along the lines of the results you’d expect for broad and exact match searches.

What’s the Bottom Line?

Probably the main moral of this article is to not rely too heavily on the results Google gives you.  By all means, do an allintitle search, but if you find the figures it is returning don’t agree with some of the other metrics you have checked, then it’s quite possible it’s just one of those Google quirks to keep us internet marketers on our toes.

A much better metric to check is how many sites in the top 10 results have the exact match title you are searching for.  If there are sites ranking in the top 10 that don’t use your exact search term in the title, then that gives you a reasonable idea it’s something you can go for.

If you’ve had a similar experience of inconsistent results from Google or have an explanation, please make sure you leave a comment below.

Cheers

OK, so I tried to come up with an interesting name for a phenomenon I’ve seen quite a few times now.

The backlink bungy effect is my term when your (or your competitors) search engine rankings get a huge boost and then come bouncing right back soon after.

So what is the cause for this effect?

Well, I first have to mention that search engines can be a law unto themselves and drastically affect your rankings without you touching your website or doing any off-site SEO.

This is most commonly seen in the so called Google Dance, where your site (particularly if it is new) can dance up and down in the Google rankings until it more or less settles down.

Backlink Bungy Effect Causes

The Backlink Bungy Effect is a direct result of two factors:

1.  A particular type of blog comment.

2. The timing of search engines.

Blog Comments On Multiple Pages

One of the most common ways to get a big boost (albeit temporary) in rankings is by placing a comment on a blog that has the “recent comments” widget enabled on the sidebar.

What this effectively means is that if you make one blog comment, it will appear on every single page on the blog.  For some blogs that can run into hundreds of pages.

Even better is when the home page has a good PR, so you get a double whammy from the one comment.

Of course, the effectiveness of the blog comment depends on three factors:

1.  Infrequent comments.  Typically, the list of recent comments in the sidebar is usually limited to the last five or ten comments.  If the blog is very active and there are a lot of comments being made, then your comment will quickly fall off the list.

2.  While a nofollow link is still counted, a dofollow link is going to have a greater impact.

3.  The other critical factor is timing of when a search engine indexes the blog.  If it happens to index the site while your comment is still in the recent comments list, then you’ll get the backlink boost, otherwise there’s no real change.

Don’t Despair

It can sometimes be very perplexing and frustrating when you see your site go up and then right back down again in the rankings, or seeing a competitor shoot above you for no apparent reason.

If you find that happening, it pays to check if you have fallen victim to the Backlink Bungy Effect.

Getting Accurate Search Results

UPDATE MAY 2012 – Scroogle was shutdown in early 2012.   I’ve kept this article for historical reference.

For an updated post with an alternative solution to Scroogle, click here

You’d think that it would be pretty simple to get accurate results for a search query, wouldn’t you?  Put simply, the answer is “no”.

In reality you could be relying on very biased results and getting a false impression of how well your site, or competitors sites are ranking.  You see, every time you do a Google search, Google uses your IP address and cookies and your Google account (if you have one) to customize your search results to make them more “relevant”.  It will return you results based on your previous searches.

If you are doing casual searching, then this isn’t too bad as you’ll generally get results that are more targeted to your profile.  However, if you are trying to get an accurate view on a particular website you are promoting or checking out a competition website, then you may find you’ll be getting misleading results.

The problem is particularly apparent if you are located outside the US as Google will redirect to the Google page for your country and you will get results biased to your country of origin.

How Does Scroogle Help?

Scroogle is a site that allows you to perform unbiased Google searches.   Essentially it does this by ensuring Google can’t set any cookies and randomizes the IP address it uses.  No search terms are stored and logs are deleted within 48 hours.

What this means is that you can perform the same search query over and over and Google will be seeing that query as a unique query and therefore won’t “customize” the search results.

Additionally, Scroogle displays just the search results.  There are no ads, no suggestions etc, just the pure results.

If have privacy concerns, you can use the SSL version of Scroogle to ensure your query and results are encrypted.

If you use Firefox, then you can use the  Scroogle SSL Search plugin to add Scroogle to your Firefox search box.

Search Results

Try the following search test.  From your standard browser, use a search term that you’ve previously searched on.  Then enter the same search term into the Scroogle search box below and compare the results.