I sat down with Brian Harnish and talked about SEO, AI, link building, and domain names. In our discussion, we cover a wide-ranging discussion on the evolution of search engine optimization (SEO) over the years, from the early days of keyword density and link building to the modern focus on topical relevance and quality content.
We talked about:
- The shift from optimizing for individual keywords to creating content that comprehensively covers a topic and matches what competitors are discussing.
- The importance of conducting entity and competitor analysis to understand what content and topics need to be covered on a page.
- The diminishing role of traditional link building in favor of earning high-quality links through great content and relationships.
- Strategies for addressing new or emerging topics with limited prior search data, such as using AI assistants to generate content outlines.
- The risks of using expired domains or scraping content, and the value of protecting one’s brand by blocking domain name variations.
Here’s the transcript of our discussion:
Bill Hartzer(00:14):
So yeah, so I wanted to have a sit down conversation, talk about the industry, talk about ai, talk about a couple of different things here, and I think I had a few things that we could talk about here, but what specifically have you been, tell me a little bit about your background and let’s start with that and how you got into SEO.
Brian Harnish (00:49):
Oh my god, that was a long time ago. I’ve been in SEO basically since 1998, for probably about 26 years now. I started by teaching myself html, CSS building websites, Adobe Photoshop, and everything’s pretty much avalanche from there into everything you see today. So I have worked on large websites, small websites. I’ve got my official start in SEO in 2007, so I was working at a real estate hosting company in the support department. That company ended up getting acquired, and then that ended up in me doing a lateral move into the digital marketing slash SEO department and been doing SEO full-time ever since December, 2007. So not exactly one of the OGs, but pretty close.
Bill Hartzer(01:57):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I go back a little further. I was actually a technical writer back in the nineties. I kind of classically trained, if you will, for technical writing. And it’s interesting because technical writing was really just a table of contents and then really organizing your content. It was originally just, yeah, you got a bunch of content, but it was headings, H ones, H twos, H three tags and bulleted list and everything really that HTML, the cost of HTML came back with, and I was doing online help in the nineties, and
Brian Harnish (02:48):
Remember when classic hql you tabled for design with 50 columns and three 50 rows?
Bill Hartzer(02:57):
Yeah, I mean, it was really pretty much very basic and having an organized page and having organized content and all that, it really, yeah, I knew
Brian Harnish (03:17):
In 98, I apologize, bill, and before I knew it in 98, that’s exactly what you’re saying. I was doing SEO before it was called SE. It’s basically exactly like you said, creating an organized, well-structured webpage that users, that’s good for users and solutions.
Bill Hartzer(03:37):
Yeah, it’s interesting because now here we are, what, 20 some odd years later, and in fact, we’re kind of back to that. And even with AI content, we’re back to nowadays with my, I’ll go through my process for creating and figuring out content, but frankly, a lot of those basics. And someone will come back and I still see a post on a Facebook group that says, oh, well, I create eight articles on my site and that are 400 words, and that seems to work very well for me. And it just not, I mean, it just is. Maybe one of those might be okay, and then Google’s ignoring or just doesn’t put much weight into all these, the other ones that you’re doing. I still find it amazing how there’s just so many SEO myths out there, but
Brian Harnish (05:07):
Oh
Bill Hartzer(05:08):
Yeah, still. I mean, it’s just like, come on me, go through my process and tell me what you think. If I didn’t have all sorts of additional tools. The basic is what start with, okay, I have a brand new domain name and website, and so I would actually go to something, an AI like chat GBT and say, you know what? And ask it. Literally, I’m creating a new website about search engines on a new domain that I’ve really just got just acquired search engines.net. And so I tell it and then I’ll explain, well, what pages, if I’m writing a page about search engines, what content and what pages would someone expect to see if they go to a website about search engines? It could be about red widgets, it could be up route roofing, and it could be about Dallas Roofing, it could be about San Diego KM inspection, whatever it is.
(06:35):
And my processes is, and it’s interesting because with all the knowledge that the AI has, it comes back and says, Hey, you need to talk about this, that, and the other. And that’s a good start. I mean, you kind of start to think, okay, well, these are the different topics that I need to mention and create. Either those could, and then depending on that, those could be a section of the site where you’re talking about if it’s home inspection, you’re talking about real estate or buyer, you’re buying a house and so forth. And then you could have another, that could be a whole series of pages, or it could be just one page. You need a page about this or a page about that. And so you kind of get an idea by talking or asking the AI about what kind of topics, and that kind of starts to give you some relevancy and a little focus on that topic for the whole website.
(07:42):
Then of course you get into, oh, then you can ask it, oh, I’m writing a section about real estate or writing a section about this. Tell me the different pages that I need. And so you start to, and then the next after that, ask the section, oh, I’m writing a page about this. And then it’ll come back and ask it to give the topics, the topics, the headings and the subheadings and sections of content that I need to mention on that page. And it’s interesting because it really comes back with a fair amount. I mean, obviously from there you could then dig in further and tell the AI to write that content, or you can take that and give it to a writer, but that’s kind of my process. There’s tools that help you do that process kind of a little bit faster or a little bit more optimized or whatever. But frankly, if you were to use that process, even if you don’t do the traditional SEO, you’re probably going to come up with a kind of halfway decent site because my opinion is that you’re not really focused on keywords. I mean, sure, yeah. Okay, I want to rank for Dallas home inspection or San Diego said Diego Roofing, but yeah, and sure, okay, put that in a title tag and put it in and make it clear that you’re a roofer in San Diego. But
(09:32):
When it comes down to it, I can’t believe I’m still hearing keyword density.
Brian Harnish (09:47):
Mentioned like that’s literally 2000 SE for the year 2000 basically, maybe even a little bit. Sometimes people get stuck in their ways and don’t get moved forward to more objective strategy. So now it’s more about the topic and the entity and what’s discussed on the page than the actual keyword being repeated over and over and over again. Search engines have evolved beyond that by a lot. So you can’t really base SEO under one keyword or two keywords or whatever. Now you can interweave it into the targeting of the page and make sure that you talk about the topic enough that is in line with what your competitors are talking. But on the whole, it’s well beyond just doing basic keyword.
Bill Hartzer(10:59):
And the reason for that is that as technology has evolved, I mean it sounds like a big high level phrase, but search engines are using AI just like we’re using ai, but they understand natural language.
Brian Harnish (11:22):
Yeah, NLP
Bill Hartzer(11:25):
A lot better. And yes, I mean, it used to be programming, and I think one of the earliest SEO type of exposure that I had was when I could probably, what we weren’t talking about, it was just rankings. It wasn’t SEO or anything like that was basically it was keyword destiny. And what was happening is that there was essentially, someone had come up with the perfect keyword, destiny was like 13.67%, and that was used at the time. And so basically, I remember specifically that people, we were hiding, hiding their code
(12:34):
On the page. It was like JavaScript either doing a JavaScript redirect or some kind of cloaking or something. But the idea was is there was a paragraph or two paragraphs of text, and I remember specifically that there was one that was something about the Washington and chopping down a cherry tree, and they had used that two or three paragraphs, and if you search and replaced rather than cherry tree, you used your keyword, you wanted to rank for, you swapped it out, it came out to the perfect 13.67% keyword density, and you would rank just about any keyword. And the search engines, they did look at title tag, keyword and the title tag, and they did look at meta description tag, and they took you to look at mentions of that on the page. And so it was the amount of processing power they had and so forth, and be able to go through all the pages that they knew about on the web. And that was it. And now we’re talking about so many different changes that then we got into 200 ranking factors. I remember it was 200 or so and it was links and anchor text and keyword and title tag and so forth, and bolded, italic and all that. And it was interesting. And so we have evolved. And so now it’s not really about keywords. I mean, as an SEO, we can start with some keywords. I mean, I think that keyword research is still a good place to start in a lot of areas. However,
Brian Harnish (14:59):
You need to know exactly what you’re targeting in terms of the competitive landscape. I mean, you can’t exactly just willy nilly glass or something and expect it to bring search volume. You have to figure out what the current search volume of the market is, what your competitors are doing, but you don’t want to do exactly what they’re doing because what if they’re doing something that’s not exactly in line with what Google’s looking for? So you kind of have to run a balance between that and what you want on your own website.
Bill Hartzer(15:33):
Yeah. So yes, it comes down to Eddie Geo, San Diego Roofing. Okay, let’s start with that. San Diego roofers, San Diego Roofing. And it’s easier when I go through that process with the AI and asking it the questions. I mean, sure, that’s a great way to start. I mean, I am a San Diego roofer. I’m creating a website. What pages should I create? And then obviously once that it’s created and so forth, you can do things. You can start looking at competitors and what they’re ranking for and what content. I look lately at doing entity analysis, which is essentially kind of the same thing as kind of like, okay, if I’m creating a page that’s that I want to rank for San Diego Roofing, what do I need to mention on that page? And so those would be, you need to mention various entities. You can do some analysis on who’s ranking and what topics and subtopics and headings that they’re mentioning on their pages. Combine everything that what they’re doing and
Brian Harnish (17:18):
Exactly, and it’s like you have to look at, I apologize, bill, it’s not like you can look at just a couple of people who are ranking. You have to look at top 10 and overall organic results and see what they’re talking about on their pages, see what you can include on yours to kind of match and get an algorithmic advantage and see where you can fall in line with all of that. So you can get top 10 top and then maybe you can use some additional SEO to boost your site number one, depending on the competitiveness of that particular space.
Bill Hartzer(18:00):
So here’s a question. It’s interesting. So what are your thoughts around what if there’s no keyword research or there’s written about this before, maybe it’s news or maybe it’s you have a news website. Okay, so it’s a challenge because really there’s no
Brian Harnish (18:36):
Baseline.
There’s not a lot. You do a search and SEM rush, or even God forbid, Kor Planner or something like that, and you don’t, there’s no searches, but you’ve kind of identified that this is a breaking news topic or this is something that nobody’s really written about. That’s the challenge is that, but you want to don’t really know what of that topic. You don’t really know yet. Nobody’s created a page about that yet. So you’re the first, and I’ll tell you some stories about being, my theory about being the first on something with content, but
Brian Harnish (19:38):
Oh, that’s always,
Bill Hartzer(19:41):
Maybe even chat GBT or any of these AI don’t even know anything about the subject. So it’s, I guess you’re left to, okay, if I am writing about this, I’m writing about this new breaking news thing or this new discovery or something. I guess you have to kind of, well, the way I would do it is there’s going to be certain, you kind of have to think about what somebody or estimate or guess what somebody would try and search for if it’s a company name. Yeah, I mean you’d mentioned a company name or if it’s a concept or something or So you would start with that. And then if there’s, in my opinion, you would, in the first couple paragraphs in the content, you would explain everything. And if you can do screen captures, it’s something online, then sure, you can describe things and everything. And then any kind of related topic, you might be able to explain what doing some definitions of or explaining what something is or why it’s important just to add some additional content. And I think it’s, I started off in the early two thousands as I discovered expired domain names and
(21:24):
It had some value. And so what I was doing is I would buy an expired domain name and I would figure out that this website still had, for example, for about Us page they used slash about, and they had some page about maybe team HTML or whatever other pages they had on the site, the URLs, not the content, but the URLs. And so what I do is I realized that, okay, let’s say I would actually create 10 pages on 10 different old URLs. This was the time when if you submitted a new page, okay, this wasn’t the time when you submitted a new page to Google and 2003 to 2006, 2007, 2008, et cetera, you submitted a new page. If it was a brand new URL, Google would take about two weeks to crawl and index that page. But here you have some kind of, the traffic was from breaking news.
(22:49):
So here’s a kind of breaking something that would appear on CNN or some kind of breaking news item. The key, what I discovered is that Google needed to know about those URLs ahead of time. So for example, let’s say slash 1 2 3 html, the website still, I would establish that page. I would put some nonsense, literally Laura ip, some content, whatever, it didn’t matter what the content was, and I’ll get it crawled in index. So I did about 20 or 30 holding, I would call ’em holding pages. So it was fun because when Google wasn’t quick and at that point, but if you went to a page that they already knew about and you updated with brand new content, they would crawl it and within 30 minutes to an hour you would get it in there. So here’s a breaking news event and the news sites, they would add a page, a new page about the breaking news, et cetera. It’d take a week or two for them to get crawled an index. Well, I already had the page ready. I would change it, and then within an hour or two, I was ranking number one. Now here, that’s the key.
(24:13):
Now let’s take it further. The reason why that worked is yes, I would get the traffic because people were searching and I was the only one with the content about that breaking news item. I have you
Brian Harnish (24:29):
Though. I have something, I have something interesting for you though in that regard. Very
Bill Hartzer(24:34):
Interesting. So what I’m saying is when you were the first to be out there, then other sites would then actually blogs and bloggers and all that time, they would then link to you because you’re ranking number one for that subject in that topic. And you’re the first,
Brian Harnish (24:56):
I was in a past life, I was able to get rankings for ranking news, not just ranking news, but maybe standard topically focused articles by writing a page. But the reason why it would be in the top 10 within 24 hours is because I would be writing five to 10 posts per day on this particular website if we get updated with that kind of quantity of posts. And then most of those posts would be in the top 10, their respective topics and keywords. So sometimes multiple keywords depending on how it was written for the particular topic. And the key is that nowadays, if you want to have something that is mobile and nimble in terms of being updated in that fashion, keep things, you want to be literally the news authority in that niche
Bill Hartzer (26:03):
And the way
Brian Harnish (26:04):
To do that, being like that industry own very sport.
Bill Hartzer(26:10):
Yes. So definitely be the, yeah, and you get away. Now, I had several hundred sites. I mean a lot of sites that were, a lot of them were Aspire domains. A lot of them ended up being new domains. I had a business to business sort news network. So what I would do is I never could outrank the company name because that was their website, but I always wanted to be second, third, and fourth. So if I covered the news about that company, there’s a lot of searches for the company and people would click through to the second or third listing. They weren’t really looking for the website in particular. They knew the company website, but they wanted to look at the news about that company or s different source. So I had that worked well, and then that came to that, an interesting link building technique is that what you would do is say your topic is your roofing and you have a news website about roofing companies and the roofing industry.
(27:43):
Well do a search in the news and a roofing. And what you would find is a lot of major companies will, their marketing departments will create a section on their website where they’ve mentioned the news and they would then link back to, even if you’re not a news source, if you wrote an article or you’re a blogger or something like that, if you find companies in your industry that typically will link to where they’ve been mentioned, okay, they’ll link to my news or my blog or my news site or so forth. There’s companies that still do that. I mean the traditional media companies, traditional marketing departments, and they will have a press release section on their site. They’ll have for their press releases, they will have in the news and et cetera. And so if they don’t find you that you’ve written about an article, then sure, tell them, send them email saying, Hey, we wrote an article about your latest product or something like that.
(29:08):
And so you know that they already have an in the news page or in the news section, and so you can get some really, really high quality links. Like that kind of brings the question, my question to you is we even need to spend time getting doing link building anymore. Sure, we need to do maybe digital pr, but the traditional deal style link building, frankly, if I have a site and I’ve gotten to a certain point where I have some good links and so forth, and I’m doing all right, it comes down to there’s an emphasis on content where I can just, I don’t have to do a lot of link building that I did have to do maybe five or 10 years ago. So what’s your thoughts about links and link building and so forth? Do we need to do it as SEOs anymore? And how much time percentage, do you think it’s 75% link building or 75% content, or what’s your thoughts around that?
Brian Harnish (30:31):
I would say that it’s more like 80% grade content, 20% link building, because the links that you get are going to come from the great content that you write. So you want to have the content that gives your site the authority enough to impress people in your industry enough that they’ll want to link to you. You want to build those relationships, and that’s what the important part is about links. It’s not like say 10 years ago where everybody was doing link exchanges and exchanging with everybody else in the industry and then Google finally ended up penalizing that one with shows like in the attorney industry, they all still do it and some sites get walloped as a result of doing that. And so it takes a lot of cleanup just to really actually get the site back to getting any traction at all just because of that specific link building technique.
(31:41):
Now, there are also, as well, I had probably worked on at least one site in that niche that was literally part of a massive toxic link negative SEO campaign, and that probably required, it was much easier 10 years ago to do that kind of thing. But now Google mostly ignores toxic links, especially when it appears that a competitor is actually working to do some manipulative toxic link building. So it’s not as prevalent as it was 10 years ago, but can still happen if somebody knows what they’re doing. But it’s less of an issue now than it was concerned though I believe it’s really 80% dependent on your content and 20 then 20% would be your link building. But it depends on the actual niche and competitors and your marketplace as far as the link building that’s required. So if you are in a big market like Los Angeles, you might have something that’s more towards 65% grade content than 40 and 35% good length, for example. The ratio might adjust, but it all depends on whether or not your informational needs e-comm or whatever, because different types of issues require different adjustments to your strategy.
(33:39):
You can’t really to conclude that you can’t really do a cut and paste or copy paste strategy and expect it to apply to every single website. SE doesnt work out unfortunately.
Well, I mean I feel like though definitely with a new site or maybe a domain that’s changed topics or something like that, that you need a certain amount of links. I wouldn’t say amount. You don’t need to say you need a certain, need certain links to be able to send some trust over enough so that you’re in Google’s graces or if you have some kind of, I hate to use the word authority because so many people throw the word authority out there in all sorts of different meanings, and there’s two dozen different meanings of the word authority.
(34:54):
However you need some kind of to get to a certain point where they say, okay, this is not just a spam site anymore and not just a low quality site, it’s legit. And then when you start to really pick up and do the right content, then it’s going to do well. I mean, I can tell you it could be one link. I mean literally, unfortunately, I have an example would be a B2B, very niche industrial B2B company that does services, industrial equipment and so forth. And frankly, it was one directory listing, I hate to say directory, but it was a very large site that’s an industry relay about around industries and B2B and so forth. And my client has been with me probably 10 years and maybe three or four years ago we just came across that and he paid for the listing, which is like $700 a year, but frankly, it is not a great looking site. It’s probably from early two thousands.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Oh, I see. It has no
Bill Hartzer(36:37):
Still allowed, has really good content. And that one link has made a massive, maybe it’s trust, maybe it’s, I mean, massive detail, massive change, and now I don’t really do many links. They have some links, but it’s nothing that I’ve done really link building. I concentrate now on content for that site. And so it’s at the point where after that getting that directory listing, now I can create a new page on the site and literally in 45 minutes, it’ll rank within the top three in a lot of cases, number one in 45 minutes, brand new page, brand new content on that site. So there’s something to do with authority being passed in trust and so forth. It’s one link. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s literally one link.
Brian Harnish (37:44):
It’s literally been around, it’s been around for decades. So much so that it’s become an authority for that particular business, basically.
Bill Hartzer(37:59):
Yes. Yeah. I have a couple sites like that that are old news websites that I’ve established. I started in 2003 and they’ve been around, and I did a few with things with industry conferences. So for example, my news website, which was only me, and I had 27 other news websites, but I was one of the official media partners for that conference.
Brian Harnish (38:46):
Oh, wow.
Bill Hartzer(38:52):
And once you get into being in one industry, there’s probably 20 different conferences, and once you get to be a media partner for one, then they all will message you or get in touch and say, would you like to media partner for our conference? And
(39:16):
Then you get the links from the conference and obviously the companies themselves links to the conference. They’re going to be at Booth 27 at whatever conference and the conference plus, so it’s kind of a whole link exchange thing kind of, but it happens. It happens. And there are still conferences out there and a lot of industries where that’s a possibility. I mean, you need a logo and you ask for media passes or something, and that’s why blogs, I mean, blogs still work if you’re a blogger. I’ve seen that question. Is it worth it in 2025 to start a blog or to have keep having a blog? And yeah, I really do think that it definitely is. On the other hand, if you’re looking for expired domains, what I have found is that, so somewhere I was doing some white building or something or some research, and I found something interesting is there was a hole for many years. There were a lot of mommy bloggers and now was the thing, and now it’s all those mommy bloggers are on TikTok and doing YouTube shorts and all that and Instagram reels and all that.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Oh, yeah.
Bill Hartzer(40:55):
But what it was, it used to be they’re still, so you can still find the mommy bloggers if you’re in that industry or if you’re in something that they may have talked about or something. It was interesting because I came across some posts and some news them articles and so forth about the top 100 mommy bloggers. They had a top and the top 10 list and so forth at various es. I started to go through and was a list that was just put out two years ago, so not very long, maybe a year or two ago, top mind bombing bloggers of 2023 or 2024, and they listed the top 20, the top 10, the top 100. I started to go through those, and to be honest with you, about 80 to 90% of those mommy blogs didn’t even exist, and the domain names were not even registered anymore. My God mean, you can literally, and so what I discovered is that looking back, I discovered that someone would start a blog and mommy blog and they would, you start to look at the posts and they would blog every day, and they were really going well and doing great content and taking photos, doing reviews of strollers and doing reviews of
(42:43):
All sorts of stuff. And then it kind of maybe three to six months that the posts slowed down to once a week and then it slowed down a little bit to once a month and then maybe every couple of weeks. And then by the time the first year ended, they weren’t making what they thought they could make by being a mommy blogger and getting
Brian Harnish (43:11):
All these, they probably thought they would be making a hundred thousand a month or something like that. Right. It’s a wild figure.
Bill Hartzer(43:20):
I mean, they would do that and they were create these site great, these sites, and by the time a year came around, maybe they would renew the domain name, maybe they wouldn’t, and they gave it up. That was two years ago. I mean, now they’re on TikTok and making that, or they have an OnlyFans page and they’ve gone that route. But yeah, so it’s interesting. I, so I wanted to mention there’s expired domains. I did want to mention though, about content, there’s still SEOs out there that really think that they, oh, they can buy expired domain. Go to the wayback machine archive.org, literally take, steal the content, steal the content from the old site and put that back up. There’s
Brian Harnish (44:31):
Nothing that stops anybody from doing that. Just be prepared to face the penalty when the owner of the site comes back and sus you for stealing their content.
Bill Hartzer(44:43):
Definitely. Yeah. So definitely. Yeah, and I’ve gotten,
Brian Harnish (44:51):
Hey, I shut this site down. They’re not supposed to be running this site now. That’s my content. Knock it off.
Bill Hartzer(44:59):
Yeah, I’ve had some extreme cases that I know of that. So anyway,
Brian Harnish (45:06):
I definitely don’t do that in my recommendation. Don’t ever do that.
Bill Hartzer(45:12):
Yeah, unfortunately there is software that will go and will scrape and if originally I have had, there are situations where maybe you propane your web designer and whatever, and somehow the website went down with your business and so forth, and you don’t have access to the website anymore and website and domain name went down. Sure. You may be able to go back and recover that. But yeah, buying and domain, there are some extreme examples out there where, I mean, I know of one in particular where a research hospital, nonprofit research hospital literally closed and it closed, but some SEO somewhere, some blackhead, SEO, and went and bought the expired.org domain and literally put the hospital’s website back up and because they wanted some links. And so there’s still so much confusion out there of whether the hospital still exists and so forth, and it’s been closed for several years.
Brian Harnish (46:46):
I was being intentionally dramatic because I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen some of those same kinds of issues over the years though. It’s like nothing surprises me anymore. It’s just like, why did you shoot yourself in the foot? I mean, you can shoot yourself in the foot. Just don’t blame us when Google decides to penalize you for it. Right.
Bill Hartzer(47:17):
Well, and the other thing is, for example, I’ve had a lot of people come to me, I recover stolen domain names. I recover because I’m so embedded in the domain name industry, I can usually get back a domain name. I know a lot of people at registrars and I know the process
And
Bill Hartzer(47:38):
The legal aspects and so forth, and I’ve had so many people just come to me and say, I didn’t read. I had my name.com and it’s unique and I didn’t renew it. But now you go in and it’s an adult site, or now you go to that domain. I didn’t renew the name and now it’s a casino site, and I’m really concerned that my public image is around showing a casino site and so forth. I mean, I know it is 10 to $11 a year at the lowest, literally for a hundred dollars you can register it for 10 years and in advance and just do that. And I mean $50, renew it for five years and just even though you’re not going to, you don’t have plans to even have a website on it anymore, just do that. You’re going to save so much hassle. Otherwise you probably would. Probably, if it expires and someone from China puts up a, gets a domain name and puts up a casino site on it, you’re probably looking at eight to 10,000. Yeah, probably looking at eight to $10,000 to purchase that domain name for them. I mean, it is got to be a real hassle
(49:14):
Anyway. Yeah, I mean the same thing. Yeah, I mean the same thing with, so at this point, unless it’s such a domain name that you don’t think that you’re never going to be connected with it anymore. What I would do is just when in doubt, renew it and you can probably sell listed for sale. You may be able to get the renewal fees back for it, and there’s still some really good domain names out there. And that expired. I picked up Search engines.net fairly recently expired that one, and somebody had that domain for, gosh, since 1998, and it was a live website. Wow. They paid from 1998 till today.
Brian Harnish (50:24):
Wow.
Bill Hartzer(50:26):
So many. And then it expired and it is a generic, so it expired. There’s not very good chance of them getting it back. Obviously, unless it’s your company name or unless it’s your name, go for generic names. I am not a big fan of buying a domain name and using it if it’s somebody else’s brand or somebody else’s name.
Brian Harnish (51:00):
Yeah, definitely
Bill Hartzer(51:01):
Not company name, et cetera.
Brian Harnish (51:03):
It could be a trademark. It could open you up to liabilities that you don’t want to deal with.
Bill Hartzer(51:11):
Yeah, exactly. And then if anybody’s listening or watching this, if you don’t have your name.com, then you do need to go register it. And if you, hundred
Brian Harnish (51:27):
Percent you
Bill Hartzer(51:28):
Cannot, I’ll make this offer if it’s your exact name, and if you cannot afford the $10 and 89 cents to register the name, don’t
Brian Harnish (51:38):
Forget to register that your name sucks. Variation two, just to protect against, actually, you don’t
Bill Hartzer(51:46):
Have to do that. You don’t. Yes. So you don’t have to do that. Now, I’d like to mention there are two services now called one called Global Block. It’s Global block.co, and there’s another one called Name Block, N-A-M-E-B-L-O-C-K, name, block. And you can block, so let’s say you have brian harnish.com. Okay. You can block your, you would just be able, you need to show that you have rights to Brian Harnish and you can pay a certain amount per year, just one decent one fee, and you’ll be able to block, if someone goes to register, Brian Harness one two three.com or brian harness stinks.com or something like that, any domain that includes your brand, whether it’s Brian Harness, maybe they want it BR one A N for Brian.
Hey,
Bill Hartzer(53:11):
Don’t give anybody a, it’s a pitching version or a version of your name. They changed the eyes to the one and they try to register brian harness.com. Those will be blocked. Those domains up to 500 different versions of your name in the common phishing like PayPal, PAYP a1.com. Those will be blocked and no one will be able to, it will show as unavailable to register. So all those versions up to 500 different versions plus all the 1600 tbs, brian harness.net, brian harness.org, those will be blocked and no one will be able to
Register. Why don’t you repeat that? Service for viewers,
Bill Hartzer(54:07):
There’s one service is called Global block.co, and the other one is name Block, N-A-M-E-B-L-O-C-K. So these service, those services, it’s very good for brands. And I know a company who has franchisees and franchises and they have an attorney on staff who is just Job is to police and take down websites that are being put up by people. Could be a franchisee or it could be a competitor putting up using their brand. So Global Block and Name Block are great services because like I said, you can pay one price and block and nobody will be able to register that name.
Brian Harnish (55:04):
Then you don’t have to buy all those different variations.
Bill Hartzer(55:07):
Yes, exactly. And then you wouldn’t if somebody puts up a site or takes your brand or your name. And so you do not have to be a trademark owner. You don’t have to own the trademark. So it is my understanding from talking with trademark attorneys, it’s very difficult to trademark a personal name. So now there’s a guy who was able to circumvent that process, and I might consider it, but generally speaking, in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U-S-P-T-O, they don’t really allow you to get a trademark on a personal name. That’s kind of their policy. You just can’t. However, there’s someone named William Joel who has able to get, and he has a trademark on Billy Joel.
Brian Harnish (56:16):
Oh, no.
Bill Hartzer(56:19):
So it is possible, and I have considered doing that route with my name because Bill Hartzer, which I have been gone by for years, that is not my, that’s not my legal name. And so it is at this point kind of a trademark or a common law trademark.
(56:48):
So basically, but with name block and global Block, you just have to kind of show that you have the rights to the name or the brand and they will block. And they block those. I have a tool that allows me to put in your name or the company name, and it’s a free tool, and it will tell me how many potential names and versions will be blocked. If you pay for Global Block, it will show how many, it’s a report. It basically says how many versions and how many domains. Registrations will be blocked per year typically for that project.
Brian Harnish (57:48):
Answers go. Good stuff.
Bill Hartzer(57:52):
So yeah. So we’re running about 30 seconds to be having been on here an hour.
Brian Harnish (57:59):
Really? It’s already been an hour. Wow.
Bill Hartzer(58:03):
Yeah. So I know that we need to schedule another time to do version two of this. Definitely. Absolutely. Episode, episode two and episode, maybe we’ll have this a series. It’s the Brian and Bill SEO show.
Brian Harnish (58:27):
Yeah, why not?
Bill Hartzer(58:29):
And let’s make this episode one. So this has been the, let’s wrap it up. I’ll say this has been the episode one of the premier episode of the Brian and Bill chat, SEO advice chat series, and I guess we’ll talk to everybody next time.
Brian Harnish (58:57):
Yeah, I have a great one, everybody.
Listen to “Bill Hartzer & Brian Harnish Talk SEO, AI, Link Building & Domain Names” on Spreaker.
