How Toys R Us Lost with the Toys.com 5.1 Million Dollar Purchase

Domain Names No Comments »

Global toy conglomerate TOYS R US have purchased the Toys.com domain for the reported 5.1 million dollars, making it the biggest sale of 2009 so far, as well as one of the ten biggest sales ever reported.

The only problem was that this destroyed the SEO for the existing domain, causing Toys R Us to loose a ranking for the keyword ‘toys”

Now, instead of holding position #1 and #4 they only have one.

Corporate IT simply redirected the new domain name to the
Toys’R'Us home page. Toys.com no longer had its own site so Google delisted
it. They will still receive type-in traffic, but all the extra traffic from the additional Google ranking has disappeared.

Normally I recommend focusing your energy on one website and trying to build a single site into a dominant entity. However, for a large corporation with a limitless website that has the potential to rank for multiples of competitive keywords, using multiple websites can be an effective strategy.

This is the worst however. Toys’R'Us has registered the typo
domain ToyRUs.com (missing the first ’s’) but has not
forward it to ToysRUS.com. This is a huge blunder, and is causing this mega retailer tons of sales.

Toys R Us needs to contract out their search engine optimization or they will keep loosing ground to amazon.com.

Yahoo Answers Censors SEO Over Domain Parking Question

Search Engine Optimization 1 Comment »

I posted what I thought was an innocent search engine optimization question in Yahoo Answers. I simply asked how I could get data feeds and affiliate links for Yahoo content as is displayed on this monetized domain name: http://www.massagechairdirectory.com/.

This site syndicates content from various Yahoo properties including Answers, Shopping, and tons of pay per click listings. All external links filter through http://www.massagechairdirectory.com/ ppcredir.geo?rank=3&type=Domain%20Match%20Subsequent%20Arbitrage

Very interesting, is Yahoo sponsoring in house PPC arbitrage campaigns? Is Yahoo disclosing to their advertisers and investors that they are getting into the spam content generation game? Is yahoo losing the plot over the free and open internet?
Other companies have tried to make money off their clients using cloaked content sites masquerading as simple PPC arbitrage ventures including valueclick VCLK and marchex MCHX.

yahoo answers screenshot
See my original post to http://answers.yahoo.com here.

I don’t expect a response from Yahoo, I just wonder why they are censoring their discussion boards and possibly promoting domain name parking content. I hope no one else has been blatently censored by this internet giant.