Some time ago I posted derogative comments about domainers and how by them simply sitting on their derriers and doing nothing with their properties, the likes of Google et al were busy reclaiming the traffic and putting the squeeze on the domain channel. Recent reports just surfacing seem to suggest that my brief premonition wasnt far off the mark.
Ive always believed that owning the traffic and having a “brand” was more important than having one off visitors clicking your PPC ads. Even if this meant that in the short term building process you were worse off financially. The reason Ive always believed this is based upon mine and my peers web trends and behaviours and how theyve matured over the years. Im sure you’ll agree with this theory but let me explain first of all what i mean. In the days of netscape and Yahoo search I spent countless hours searching, clicking, reviewing, downloading viruses by accident etc etc and bookmarking sites when there was actually a better alternative (albeit I wasnt aware of it yet). Fast forward my online behaviour 10 years and I now know where I want to go, I have a specific site I know I want when I want something and bar any new and/or better additions as yet unknown, I already know the best place to get what i need. I call this kind of web maturity “web apathy”. Or webathy if you want a cool buzzword. A user becomes apathetic to search because they know the site they need. Backtrack a few years to stage one of this webathy and what you saw, as users became more confident on the internet, was an increase in users typing URLs into their address bar – thus lining our pockets with their lovely typo mistakes and them directly navigating to our contextually parked domains. Thanks very much we all said and born over night was this industry called “domaining”.
Now, Im a veteran web surfer and therefore am confident I know what i want. I only have so many online hours in me per day and, with so many places I know I want to go to, search has become secondary to me, almost negligible you might say. If im therefore representative of things to come and search has/will become obsolete, so to it seems will direct navigation.
Back to the title of this post. How is Google killing the domain channel? Direct navigation is the one straw that keeps a revenue stream flowing into the hands of domainers and to parked domains in general. Without the address bar (for, as is being discovered right now, natural search is dead for as soon as your domain’s nameservers are found by the google bot to be pointing at a parking companies nameservers your domains are immediately dropped from the index) we have nothing. Reports surfacing from Hitwise UK show that in 2007 Google became more of a navigational aid than search engine. As discussed previously, with more and more users knowing exactly where they want to go to, Google now provides this link, superseding the need to use the address bar and having to use the somewhat cumbersome “http://” or “www” or “.com” keystroke tags. Whats ironic about this Google navigation (as opposed to search) is that more often than not a generic search term brings up the page of a URL or brand that is pseudo or unrelated to the term and for which Google has decided is the site you need. Worrying, and more often than not, their suggested links are also the suggested links you actually want. And if users do search together with search term plus extension? Well, no problem there because Google has that covered also and 9 times out 10 gives you the link you want at position 1 in their listings.
Of the top ten US based search terms [in 2007], seven would have taken users directly to the page they were looking for if typed into the address bar as a .com. Only one would have actually taken a user to the wrong site (http://www.heroes.com). Of the UK brands, five of the top six are brands whose only portal is online. Those Google entries aren’t really “searches” in terms of seeking information, they’re just a quick and easy way of bringing up a link to the homepage the user already knows they want.
Hitwise UK just published its most searched for brands 2007 statistics, and the fastest rising US search terms are also widely available. Both suggest that Google users know exactly where they want to browse to and just use the search box to give them the link to click. All Google have done it seems is give people what they want (and quietly continue to kill off the domain channel at the same time).
If, as suggested, Google really have got direct navigation through search down to a fine art then you can pretty much wave goodbye to the long tail that is currently “monetization in the domain channel”. I mean, just review the past 18months. Arbitrage, gone. MFA mini sites, gone. SEO traffic, gone. Direct navigation, going.
*Epilogue* What would I do? Sell all your domains, buy one or two good ones (or more if you have time and resources in which to develop them) and build them into unique and compelling web sites. After all, thats what Google have been telling you to do for some time now.
Correct. Your last “Epilogue” paragraph is sound advice. Many have helped to make Google THE internet. Now that is really not what we really wanted was it? We all have the ability to give “power to the people” so why are we allowing one company to dictate future trends? Google was jut supposed to be an extension of one of the original 5 tenants of the internet, that being Gopher. We need to put that tiger back in its cage.
That ‘dude’ in drag looks like a certain domainer to me and his face should be on the whippee not the whipper.
[...] Is (or more importantly “will”) Google Kill the Domain Channel – In this post, Julia discusses how she expect Google will take steps to reduce direct navigation. [...]