SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

The search term “Yahoo” more popular than “sex” in Google? According to Google Trends, it is.

The Daily Domainer analyzes the story behind this strange phenomenon. Browser users have apparently gotten used to typing the name of the domain rather than the full domain name with the .com when trying to access popular sites such as Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon and Ebay. Besides the typing of names into the address bar, people use their installed toolbars like Google/Yahoo toolbar in the same manner. This is attributed, no doubt, to Google’s search relevancy based on inbound links to a site helps authority sites like these rank at the top saving the time needed to sort through listings. Only branded domain names will generate any significant amount of traffic from a domain name.

The other spectrum of valuable domain names are from generic domain names. People have a tendency to entire generic names plus the .com extension, examples being candy.com and cellphones.com.

Domainer concludes:

In summary, we can observe two opposite trends: People who “should” type domains into their address bar end up typing them into their search bar or search engine. And people who “should” use search engines to find what they’re looking for, make up domains on the fly and type them into their address bar. You could call it the Battle of the Clueless. And the battle has only just begun.

The value of type-in traffic is strong as indicated by the rising sale prices of premium domain names. You can find a nice list of weekly domain sales and yearly domain sale summaries at DNJournal.com.

Via Nielsen//NetRatings press release:

Top 10 Search Providers for December 2006 (US)

1. Google Search – 3 billion searches – 50.8% share of searches
2. Yahoo! Search – 1.4 billion searches – 23.6% share of searches
3. MSN/Windows Live Search – 499 million searches – 8.4% share of searches
4. AOL Search – 362 million searches – 6.1% share of searches
5. My Way Search – 141 million searches – 2.4% share of searches
6. Ask.com Search – 128 million searches – 2.1% share of searches
7. EarthLink Search – 31 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
8. Dogpile.com Search – 30 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
9. Comcast Search – 26.9 million searches – 0.5% share of searches
10. NexTag Search – 26.8 million searches – 0.4% share of searches

Wikipedia is a great repository of information for a net user. It exemplified the wonderful aspects of the web by being a collaborative, self-enforced online encyclopedia. SEOs know the value of an authoritative link from an authoritative site. Being a high traffic, authoritative site which allows anyone to edit its pages, Wikipedia became prone to spam links.

Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has gone the way of putting the NOFOLLOW tag on ALL of its outbound links with no exception. While this may curb some of the spamming, I don’t believe that it’ll ever put a stop to all of it. The nofollow tag is supported by Google but Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask treat it differently. As long as links give significant weight to rankings, spammers will continue to spam.

Personally, I believe the self-policing nature of the Wikipedia should take care of most of the spam and this move isn’t really necessary. Spam aside, there are some great external links within the Wikipedia and it’s a shame that the links won’t count for much in Google.