Living off the net

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.



Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

I was just wondering about this last week, "didn't I subscribe to some domainer magazine, sight unseen a while back?"



Yes I did, and my first issue of Domainers' Magazine arrived this week. It looks quite professionally done. Looking forward to checking it out, I'll bring it home with me going into the long weekend (Happy Canada Day hosers and an early Happy 4th of July to our southern neighbours eh)

I have been toying with an adage in mind for a few months, I think I may have invented it. It's one of those "there are three kinds of people" type quips, goes something like this:

There are three types of people, libertarians, conservatives and socialists.

• Libertarians think they know how to live their own lives.
  
• Conservatives think they know how to run everybody else's lives.
  
• Socialists think they know how we all should live.
  

This morning I was forwarded a link to the Business2.0 article on domainer Kevin Ham about a half-dozen times and one sent the reddit comment thread on it (titled "This guy is a piece of s**t") and I had to chuckle and replied "I see Techno-Pinkos are out in full force".

Some of the comments are just classicly clueless:

For the last couple years the domain aftermarket has been hot again, we're seeing valuations not seen since bubble1.0, which saw valuations like 7 million dollars for business.com and 4 million for drugs.com. The TechWreck was induced by the Nasdaq crash of 2000 and the fun was over for awhile.

What differentiates this bubble in the domain aftermarket from Bubble 1.0 is domain parking and monetization. While it existed in 2000, it was a weirdism on the fringe. Yun Ye was quietly building his Ultsearch empire and cleaning up.

When he sold out to Marchex, for 60+ million cash, the masses "woke up" to parking and PPC. Now we have Internet REITs, domainer conferences and, the second last sign of an overheated market dropping in to place: VC funds are tripping over themselves to invest into PPC and the monetization game. (The last sign of an overheated aftermarket are the sales letters I get from places like domainprofiteer.com offering me courses in how to get rich buying and flipping expired domain names)

In the biological world, remora's attach themselves to larger organisms such as sharks or whales and they "benefit by using the host as transport and protection and also feeds on materials dropped by the host".

I've coined the term "remorasites" to refer to the crop of websites that spring up around any big internet whale and derive their value entirely from servicing that website. The plethora of MySpace profile builders, AOL Instant Message Icon sites, Youtube scrapers all fit this category.