We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Should you use keyword stuffed domains or hyphenated domains? Is this the magic elixir that has eluded you in cracking a top 10 Google ranking? Did you already purchase a 10 keyword domain name based on the advice of a domain name representative who wanted to sell you more names?

Here’s the bad news: It’s a bad idea

If your business is selling office furniture you want a unique name, not  www.office-chairs-desks-lamps-pencils-staples-tables.com  This will not make your business better and will not provide an easy name for customes to remember. Further, it could possibly hurt your ranking because the majority of keyword stuffed domain names are quasi spam or made for adsense sites with no real business purpose.

Even if some search engines *cough* MSN *cough* may rank some spammy sites better today, there is no guarantee this will be the case for the future. If you spend $10,000 developing and promoting www.baby-clothes-pacifiers-beds-dolls-shoes-bassinets.com  and then the algorithm changes and leavs you on page 359, you’re in big trouble. And even worse, you can never tell this name to a potential customer for they will never remember it.

For proof, do a search for Computers.  You will not find super keyword stuffed domains and even computers.com.

Instead, focus your creative energy on a unique business name that will represent who you are and grow with you for the next 50 years. I love names that are dissociated with the product and have a unique brand of their own: Nike, Skype, Apple, Sony.  You know exactly what products they sell just by a short, unforgetable 1 word name.

As reported by Danny and Barry, Volkswagen was busted for using hidden text on their homepage. Instead of creating a search friendly alternative to their unindexable flash homepage, they tried to use a hidden div tag:

<div class=”invisibleContent”>Volkswagen of America presents U.S. vehicle information, pricing, incentives, deals, comparisons on Eos, GTI, Jetta, New Beetle, New Beetle Convertible, Passat, Passat Wagon, Touareg, Rabbit, R32 and the GLI with links to VW dealers, owner information, Volkswagen merchandise, and VW accessories. homepage, volkswagen, volkswagon, vw.com, home, landing, top, volkswagen.com, home page, home, top, back, VWofAmerica, Volkswagen of America, Volkswagon of America, VWoA, VWofA, volkswagon.com</div>

What’s funny is they didn’t even try to hide it, as they named the div “invisibleContent”. It didn’t take Google long to spot this and lay down the law. VW admitted they were in the wrong and quickly remedied the problem by moving the invisible text to the meta description.

The current page <i>disallows caching</i>. This is an interesting development: VW doesn’t want search engines to cache its pages? They go from spamming for dollars to blocking indexing spiders?

their homepage code:
<meta http-equiv=”Pragma” content=”no-cache” />

Check back in 1 week to see if VW is still disallowing cached pages.

Tech stock day traders rejoice – the web 2.0 bubble is getting enormous, and everyone with a forex software program and a home computer is trying to get in on this deal. Microsoft is serious about buying Yahoo to compete with the mighty Google. Many news junkets with Bloomberg TV, Techmeme, Mashable, & Techcrunch puts the deal at$50 billion. If Yahoo is swallowed up by the Beast of Redmond it will be the largest tech acquisition in history.

Reaction is mixed, but this seems to be Microsoft’s reaction after getting humiliated in the failed Doubleclick bid. Hear strategic benefits of Yahoo capitulating to Microsoft money on Bloomberg video.

Microsoft really has no other option to battle Google than by the purchase of Yahoo, but even this massive deal would not guarantee the success of MSN.

I hope this deal does not happen, but it probably will eventually. I like many parts of Yahoo search such as their excellent AJAX tools, Flickr and Yahoo Answers. Under the ownership of Microsoft these cool free tools will likely disappear or be seriously neglected.

Update 1:20pm PST: The WSJ says the deal isn’t happening. and it was just a well placed piece of linkbait by the NY Post. Interesting twist as Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Post recently made a 5 billion offer on the Dow Jones. Murdoch wants to remind you all he is the most powerful man in publishing, and won’t be intimidated by the likes of Microsoft.

Sara Smith does a great interview of Rand Fishkin on Search This. I really respect rand for offering so much information about SEO, and he is great at explaining search engines in a very user friendly manner that has wide appeal. He also doesn’t pretend that there are dark secrets to search engine optimization, and it is harder than rocket science.

This is a down to earth 21 minute discussion of basic SEO trends and tactics.

My complaint is with the flash based ipod mimicking player. Like a Ferarri Enzo, it looks cool but us totally non functional. It took me about 5 minutes to get the mp3 stream to start, and the forward and reverse buttons don’t work for me. Search This, I would love to listen to more interviews if they are high quality like this one, but i can’t deal with your player. At least let me listen to your feed in itunes or some other mp3 player that is usable. More on I’m not a Doctor, Adseok and the SEO Moz post.

Forbes has an article about the Google supplemental index, and as usual for a major publication, gets many facts about Google wrong, despite Andy Greenberg interviewing Aaron Wall, Jim Boykin and Michael Gray.

To summarize the article, Andy interviews several e-commerce website owners who hired shady SEO firms and now find traffic to their site has plummeted. These site owners place the blame on a myriad of things, including Google’s supplemental index.

Don’t anger the Google gods. He sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.

In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet’s Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site’s pages, making them look like duplicate–that is, spam–content. But even after he reversed the consultant’s changes, he couldn’t get Skyfacet’s pages out of Google Hell, where they remain today.

35 grand on SEO – first that is a fair chunk of change for an SEO, and it’s hard to tell what was done.

• All pages have titles that are unique and fairly well written. the diamonds page
• www.skyfacet .com/diamonds.php has a gray PR bar – definitely a bad sign
• Google backlink search reveals 4 links, ouch this hurts
• 279 cached pages and quite a few of them are supplemental
• 184 backlinks in Yahoo site explorer. Some of the links are on unrelated sites but nothing too spectacularly bad.
• diamondengagementringnews.info – fairly sketchy and definitely not a site I would want to be linked with. It’s a .info, registered in Malang, has regurgitated keyword stuffed content, and sends off more link farm signals than Charlottes Web
• www.skyscent.com – ah ha! Now we’re getting somewhere. This was likely a mirrored domain name that carried duplicate or unwanted content.

The Forbes article says this site has removed potentially offending content, and this seems to be the case. However, suppmental results, or “supplemental hell” as Andy calls them are not necessarily bad.

Google’s original stated purpose for their Supplemental Index is to augment the results for obscure queries. So if you are searching for a very particular thing, you may see supplemental results. For a page (URL) that goes 404 or the domain expires, Google keeps a copy of the very last version of the page that they saw, as a Supplemental Result and show it in the index when the number of other pages returned is low. The cached copy can be quite old. More on WMW.

From Matt Cutts:

As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

So in laymans terms, here is a possible scenerio: You hire a shady linkbuilder to beg/borrow/steal thousands of links of questionable character. These inlinks are evenly distributed to all your site pages. The first few months, everything is hunky dory, and it looks like 35k well spent. Then Google realizes these links are a sham, so all your previously high ranking internal pages now have no links pointing to them. With no backlinks, all your internal site pages go supplental. Not a wise long term investment of 35k.

Matt Cutts also directly responded to this post here, reiterating the fact that the supplental index really isn’t a hell, at least not as Dante would describe it. WebProNews, Derek, Geary, Selaplana, Internet Marketing de, & Andy Beal have their own outtakes.