I confess to having given little thought to ICANN’s upcoming liberalisation of top-level TLD’s since I wrote a post for econsultancy on the subject in July 2008.  However, an interesting concept caught my eye recently:  a specialist registrar proposing to offer second-level domains under themed top-level domains.

Adrenaline TLD Inc. intends to be at the forefront of this new era by introducing five new Top Level Domains spaces dedicated to the 1 billion global action sports participants, professionals, organizations and corporations. Skiers, surfers, bicyclists, boarders and skaters will find unique navigation opportunities, safe and dedicated content for their passions through the provision of domain names using the .ski, .surf, .bike, .board and .skate extensions.

Whilst the initial costs of registering a top-level domain can appear to be prohibitive for many, Adrenaline TLD have hit on a novel approach.  By combining these related interest-themed domain extensions, a perceived need to register all five versions for a brand operating in this space arises.

It also opens up a scenario whereby webmasters may chose to spread an ecommerce site over 5 domains - with the surf section under brand-name.surf, ski section under brand-name.ski and so on - rather than the more traditional brand-name.com/surf etc.

I’m sure there will be other companies with similar plans to Adrenaline TLD, and I’m looking forward to hearing about other innovative business models for the new TLD’s as applications go in to ICANN early 2010.

Photo credit: VancityAllie

This story in itself is well worth a wry chuckle, though what difference a PageRank penalty is going to make to the worlds biggest search engine, I don’t know. In my old age I can sympathise with Google; it must be difficult though keeping everyone on message in a company that must employ tens of thousands worldwide.

But the fact that they’re massive - and the unofficial author of “What Is and Isn’t Acceptable in SEO” available now at all good bookshops - means every now and then its acceptable to point and laugh. Which brings me onto the reason I’ve decided to post again after several months in the wilderness.

You see, this isn’t the first time that Google have had to take action against themselves for black-hat SEO…

Back in 2005 I stumbled upon some fishy looking (read: keyword-stuffed) Google <title> tags that were only showing the SERP’s and not the browser.

A quick post to Threadwatch (R.I.P.) later, which Nick W expertly re-positioned resulting in a Slashdotting and all kinds of attention. Before long GoogleGuy - the name used by Matt Cutts at the time and possibly some other Google reps - posted an explanation on WebmasterWorld.

Hey everyone, I’m sorry that it took me a while to post about this. I wanted to make sure I completely understood what was going on first.

Those pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for the user agent of “Googlebot” (the Google Search Appliance uses “Googlebot” as a user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user support database into the title.

The issue is that in addition to being accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the user support system thinks that it’s the Google Search Appliance (the code only checks for “Googlebot”) and adds these additional keywords.

That’s the background, so let me talk about what we’re doing. To be consistent with our guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers–a search like [site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion request” to explain the situation).

Maybe the cast iron truth. Irrelevant really. We all had fun for a couple of weeks - as was the way at Threadwatch - whilst Google did the honourable thing and banned themselves.

Hubert Chang claims to be that man. Watch his YouTube video and make your own mind up. Interesting stuff.

According to Charles Golvin, a principal analyst at the company [Forrester], a major strength of the report is that it includes a broad swath of so called Gen Y members. They are youngsters in the 18-28 age bracket, a group of 38 million American citizens that “sets the pace for technology adoption.”

(By that definition I’m just a tad too old to call myself a Gen Y-er! X it is for me…just.)

Golvin goes on to say:

“Gen Xers use technology when is supports a lifestyle need, while technology is so deeply embedded into everything Gen Yers do that they are truly the first native online population. They are heavy users of new media. It is their default.”

Craig Hanna of e-consultacy last week reflected on the innate understanding of social media amongst recent graduates taking part in E-consultancy’s graduate accademy:

My biggest surprise was the level of insight and questioning that we experienced. Not only was the understanding of digital innate (being in their early 20’s, I guess they are some of the first ‘digital natives’ to graduate from university), but their understanding of it as a communication and marketing tool was also very high. I can honestly say that it was at least the match for the feedback and input we get from many of our MSc students.

Richard Bailey, lecturer in PR at Leeds Metropolitan University, summarizes nicely on his post teaching social media inspired by a topic raised by Natalie Smith, one of his students and intern at online PR agency Wolfstar (found via Stuart Bruce’s blog):

I’m confused. There’s always more we can and should be teaching students, but social media? What does a digital native, born close to 1990, need to learn from a digital immigrant who graduated before the IBM PC was launched in the UK, and who wrote magazine articles back in the 1980s about how businesses were adopting a new communications device, the fax machine? The telephone has been the most important communications device for PR practitioners for the last century - but we don’t teach students how to communicate by phone.

Lyndon’s case study caused uproar in the community. “Lying for links is unethical” was the cry from many SEO’s, not to mention the ungrateful client (at it again?), and implied by Matt Cutts.

My take? Well, mainstream media have been doing this for years. I doubt seriously that the Sun were at all bothered whether the story was real or fake… it would be interesting to their readers, and therefore worth publishing. They’ve been doing that for years.

And so have Google…

It reminded me also of a prank a friend of mine ran back in 2000 or there abouts. Jack put up a couple of posters in the South London suburb in which we lived at the time claiming there to be a crocodile living in a local pond, advising residents to keep an eye out.

The prank was backed up on Jack’s satirical blog used by his circle of friends, and with a couple of phone calls to local journalists, brought about coverage in all the local papers, and a handful of links to boot. At the time, blogs were few and far between, and the concept of linkbait largely unknown. Lets call this pressbait, though I’m sure there’s a better term.

Moving on a year or two, hoaxbait started rearing its head. Dare I say it, Google were one of the first proponents to gain significant links with their annual April Fools gags (pigeon rank, job swaps with Yahoo employees, etc.). I jumped on the bandwagon with a colleague at the time, with a cooked up yarn about Microsoft buying Google. A touch of forum spamming posting later and our industry bloggers started reposting our link (thanks Barry and Aaron - hard to believe you could probably have counted the number of SEO bloggers at the time on the fingers on one hand).

So, back up to date and there is uproar about a phony story gaining coverage and links. So what? Let Google work out what to do with it. They started it.

I’ll not go into why it failed. I’d imagine that’s bleedingly obvious to anyone who has ever looked at the site. More of a purple turd and a purple cow.

You can find me occasionally on Twitter and never on Plurk.

The obvious repost to this is a philosophical one: beyond the nuts and bolts truly successful websites run on people power, conversations. However there is always an underlying technological consideration that can influence, if not make or break a websites search performance. It’s not about “SEO tricks” so much as understanding the limitations of the technology and working through them.

I see every week businesses struggling with these challenges, and am more than happy to help out. Long may it continue.

Welcome to my blog by the way. I’m loving the fact that the first post is about SEO and sci-fi movies. Very techie.