Friday, October 13, 2006

Gobbling up URLS

A thing of the past or a useful strategy?

I remember hearing about 10 years ago folks used to grab every URL they could find in attempt to deter would be competitors or in the hope of riches. And I do know that search engines like web addresses, but is this really a useful strategy in today’s market?

We have around 20+ URLs floating around the organization, all of which were bought several years ago by a former staff member(s). The cost is nominal, but it’s the headache that comes with managing them that bothers me. And I seem to be learning of new ones that we own every other week, so the list is growing.

Many of the URLs do in fact pertain to our work, but many of them are pretty random and though once relative, there is no direct connection today. I’m not fearful of our competitors buying a competing URL (more power to them) and I know we can point the cname records to our servers, but are we really creating added attention to ourselves for the crawlers?

When I remember hearing folks gobbling up URLs, static content was pretty much the norm, but these days (blogs, wikis, etc.) content changes pretty frequently—or should—and my thought is that search engines prefer these types of changes over the once mighty web address. But then GoDaddy.com spent $2.4 million for a 30 second spot during the 2005 Superbowl, so there’s got to be more to it.

Our growing list of URLs were bought with good intentions, but today's market of multitudes—a filter induced market—appears to give greater meaning to content, not URLs.

No comments: