Domain Names & Internet Governance
Resources about domain names and their associated issues especially with regard to their effect on government. Articles and resources about internet governance.
- Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration - The Infographic
- Posted by Aleyda Solis. SEOmoz - The Daily SEO Blog, March 8, 2012. "Domain migrations are one of those activities that even if in the long-term can represent a benefit for an SEO process -- especially if the new domain is more relevant, has already a high authority or give better geolocalization signals with a ccTLD -- can represent a risk for SEO because of the multiple tasks that should be performed correctly in order to avoid potential non-trivial crawling and indexing problems and consequential lost of rankings and organic traffic..."
- Google's Matt Cutts responds to our opinion piece
- By Adrian Kinderis. ARI Services Blog, Published on March 15th, 2012. "Today, Matt Cutts, an engineer in the search quality team at Google, published a response to my article on the impact new Top-Level Domains might have on the search results produced by Google and other search engines.
- New top-level domains to trump .com in Google search results
- by Adrian Kinderis. Marketing Magazine, Posted on March 14, 2012. "The introduction of new website suffixes (known as new top-level domains) such as .ibm, .afl, .law, and .shop is set to cause a shake-up in search engine land. Websites ending in .com, which currently dominate the internet real estate market, are about to get some new competition on the block and face possible relegation down the rankings.
Applications for new top-level domains (TLDs) are currently open and they’re expected to hit the web in early 2013. They will allow brands, entrepreneurs and governments to own a branded version of .com – moving from iinet.net.au to .iinet for example – dramatically changing the way internet users around the world navigate to find content online..."
- Typosquatting - study reveals the real risks when you mistype a website's name
- by Graham Cluley. Sophos, December 14, 2011. "Admit it. You've made mistakes when typing in the name of a website.
Your fingers fumble over each other, and before you know it you're not on google.com but goole.com instead.
It's an easy mistake to make and - inevitably - there are people waiting to take advantage of it.
Security expert Paul Ducklin has taken an indepth look at the scale and the risk of the typosquatting industry: registering misspellings of popular website domain names in an attempt to profit from typing mistakes.
Watch the following video to learn more..."
- Typosquatting - what happens when you mistype a website name?
- by Paul Ducklin. Sophos, 2011. "Paul Ducklin takes an in-depth look at the scale and the risk of the typosquatting industry: registering mis-spellings of popular domains in an attempt to profit from typing mistakes.
Applying every possible one-character typo to the domain names of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Sophos, Ducklin collected HTTP data and browser screenshots from 1502 web sites and 14,495 URLs.
In this report, he analyses the data to paint a fascinating picture of the typosquatting ecosystem, finding surprisingly little malware, but nevertheless plenty of risk..."
- Domain Bias in Web Search - in pdf format (1391kb)
- (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader). by Samuel Ieong, Nina Mishra, Eldar Sadikov and Li Zhang. Stanford University. December 2011. "Abstract - This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that we call domain bias — a user's propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of systematic do in preferences, even after factoring out confounding issues such as position bias and relevance, two factors that have been used extensively in past work to explain user behavior. The existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains..."
- Domain Name Matters: Searchers Pick Brand Over Quality, Study Finds
- by Chris Sherman. Search Engine Land, December 13, 2011. "A new study from Microsoft Research confirms what most SEOs have known for years—that domain names are a crucial element for capturing clicks and conversions from search results. Unlike what’s been published in most search marketing forums, however, this research was not focused on SEO techniques or search engine ranking algorithms, but rather on observed searcher behavior, offering insights about how people actually respond to what’s presented to them in search results..."
- Expanding Domains: A Primer on the New gTLDs
- by Robert C. Scheinfeld and Parker H. Bagley. New York Law Journal, December 5, 2011. "... ICANN's rules spell out the requirements undertaken by a gTLD registrant, including obligations to protect trademark and other rights, provide monthly reports to ICANN, host Whois services, comply with hardware and other technical requirements, and provide a three-year financial and business plan which establishes that funds required to run a registry will be available. With the cost considerations, complicated application process, and the responsibilities of maintaining a registry, many companies may simply pass on attempting to register a gTLD. However, for the intrepid brand owner, owning a gTLD could provide a significant brand extension and further marketing exposure.
Brand owners and their IP lawyers will need to pay close attention to the gTLD application process, even if they choose not to register. This is because if you opt out, others may opt in and attempt to register your brand as a gTLD, or something confusingly similar to or dilutive of your brand. This will create a new spin on the old problems of cybersquatting and cyberpiracy..."
- Australian registry on track to manage .tokyo gTLD
- By Stephen Withers. ITWire, Tuesday, 6 December 2011. "Australian registry Cloud Registry is set to operate at least one of the new top level domains, and hopes to get more of the action. Sydney-based Cloud Registry and its Japanese partner GMO has won the tender let by the Tokyo metropolitan government to host and operate the planned .tokyo global top level domain (gTLD)..."
- Website usage trends among top-level domains
- (This document requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader). EURid, in collaboration with Leuven Statistics Research Centre, analyses 11 of the world's top-level domains. EURid illustrates how different domains have different purposes by classifying websites into eight usage categories. EURid, November 2011. "... This report shows that the most common use of a domain name is to link to a business website, since 26.5% of the categorised websites were used for business purposes. Other categories with a large percentage of websites were: error (23.5%), holding page (20.6%) and pay-per-click (17.3%). Relatively few sites (10.0%) were used by communities and the percentages for the password-protected, institutional and pornography categories were almost negligible.
Comparing different TLDs, the report concludes that the older generic top-level domains (gTLDs) still have distinct profiles. The main example is .org, which has a very high percentage of community websites. In this, the gTLDs differ from the national country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), which are all used for very similar purposes. .eu has a lot in common with both the ccTLDs and with certain gTLDs (mainly .net but also .biz and .com)..."
- Universities buying .xxx domains to keep their brands clean
- By Andrew Couts. Fox 6 WBRC, November 15, 2011. "In an attempt to protect their brands from enterprising pornographers and cybersquatters, a number of universities have begun purchasing .xxx top level domains, reports the St. Louis Dispatch. The move will hopefully prevent the school from being associated in any way with sex-laden content.
- Google goes g.co
- By Stephen Withers. IT Wire, Tuesday, 19 July 2011. "Get ready for another URL shortener. g.co will be used exclusively by Google for its own pages. The publicly available goo.gl URL shortener isn't going away, but Google has announced it will start using g.co for short URLs pointing to its own web pages..."
- bitly Pro is now… bitly!
- by Matt Lemay. Bitly Blog, June 15, 2011. "Since launching in December of 2009, our bitly Pro whitelabel service has grown to power over 10,000 custom short domains, including but by no means limited to gat.es (The Gates Foundation), diddy.it, (Diddy), dalaila.ma (His Holiness the Dalai Lama), and cart.mn (South Park Studios).
To make our whitelabel service available to as many of our users as possible, we are not only bringing bitly Pro out of beta — we are building it right into the core functionality of bitly itself. As of today, every bitly user can set up a custom short domain from within their bitly account settings, free of charge and with no waiting period..."
- 11 Best Practices for URLs
- by Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz - The Daily SEO Blog, September 27, 2006. Rand provides eleven guidelines to successful URLs including: Describe Your Content; Keep it Short; Static is the Way & the Light; Descriptives are Better than Numbers; Keywords Never Hurt; Subdomains Aren't the Answer; Fewer Folders; Hyphens Separate Best; Stick with Conventions; Don't be Case Sensitive ; and Don't Append Extraneous Data.
- How to Choose a Domain Name
- By Nicholas Ramirez. SEO Theory – SEO Theory and Analysis Blog, April 27, 2011. Looks at: Does the domain have parasitical value? Does the domain have brand value? Things to avoid when choosing a domain name. What about cases where there is a company name but it is excessively long?
This category last updated: 29 March 2012