Tired of having to pay for web hosting and don’t want to park your domain name with a domain name parking company? Well, you can (temporarily) host your domain name with Bing.com for free. Yes, that’s right, all you have to do is set your domain’s name servers to Microsoft’s name servers and your domain name, when typed into a web browser, will automatically redirect to a keyword search at Bing.com. [Read more…]

Did Microsoft just register a domain name that is a typo (a typo domain) of Verizon? I know this might be a stretch, but I am really curious about one of the domain names that was just registered, and was set up on Microsoft’s name servers:

vericen.com

Well, most likely it was NOT Microsoft that registered this domain name. Here’s why. [Read more…]

Microsoft failed to renew the domain name Engyro.com recently when it came up for renewal. Engyro was a company that Microsoft acquired in 2007, was based in Cincinnati, and made the Product Connector Suite which helped enterprises with event sharing and synchronization between Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and other management tools. [Read more…]

GoDaddy, the domain name registrar, not only is a place where you can register domain names, but they also sell domain names on the aftermarket. So, that means that when someone doesn’t renew their domain name, GoDaddy will frequently sell it at auction and add an additional year on the renewal for the top bidder. GoDaddy’s domain name auctions are pretty popular, and apparently the site is down. [Read more…]

Google soon will revoke access to all websites’ Not Provided keyword data normally viewed via Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords, and offer 100 percent of the keyword data exclusively to site owners who move their websites to the new .Google gTLD and make their websites secure. According to an unnamed Google source, this is one of the marketing tactics that Google is using to encourage website owners to move their websites from a .COM, .NET, or .Org TLD to the new .Google Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD).

According to my sources at Google, the company’s overall goal is to get as many website owners to move their website to the new .Google gTLD. Google intends to woo site owners into making the change by using incentives such as providing unprecedented access to keyword referral data, as well as advanced access to Google Analytics and Google AdWords features and free secure server certificates for the first year of domain registration. [Read more…]

When it comes to search engine marketing, one issue that many people struggle with is the domain name. There’s some confusion out there regarding domain names and how they effect a site’s ability (or inability) to rank well in the search engines. I thought I’d talk a little bit about domains in general, mention some issues involved when it comes to domains and rankings in the search engines, and how one might go about searching for and evaluating domain names. [Read more…]