My love affair with domaining continued last week as I made my biggest ever (self-financed) domain purchase. I think I got a really good price, based on the fact that we will be developing it. (Valued in reference to its pay-per-click revenue, you might say we overpaid–but we didn’t.)

Anyway, I think being an experienced SEO and affiliate marketer gives me an edge as a domainer–I am able to see value where many domainers wouldn’t (for instance, I know that .org’s and .net’s get the same ‘SEO bonus’ that .com’s do, making their normal sale value–10-20% of the .com version–relatively desirable if you actually plan to develop rather than park). This kind of webmastering expertise also allows me to avoid drinking the Domainer Kool-Aid. Yes, I think domainers as a bunch often believe what they want to believe, even in defiance of the truth (the same could be said of SEOs of course!). Well here are two often-accepted lies that domainers tell themselves, which this SEO is calling bullsh*t on:

Type-in traffic numbers are higher than you think, and growing.

Now before you domainers launch your SCUD missiles at me, I do admit that with the REALLY big domains (e.g. Cars.com) certainly there’s a lot of type-in traffic. Not sure what the ratio is to search traffic, but of course for every one thousand searches for [cars] there is a certain fraction of that number typed into the URL bar as Cars.com. This fraction may also apply to 1.5-tier domains (e.g. UsedCars.com) but in my experience it does not apply to 2nd-tier domains (e.g. OhioUsedCars.com). As far as trends go, I think the facts are pretty simple. Most users stop typing something.com in the browser address bar after they’ve used the Net for 6 or 12 months. Really, there is no reason to ever type in something.com once you have used Google. Yes, there will always be incoming (dumb) Net users, but in future years many of the new Internet users are going to be in the developing world (and thus harder to monetize). In The US, nearly everybody who ever will use the Internet is already using it–and very few of us don’t know how to use Google.

Type-in traffic converts better than search.

Okay so not only is type-in volume generally over hyped, its value is lower than what’s normally stated. Richard Ball from Apogee Search covers this well topic well. The short version is that studies touted as proving type-in converts better than search are often lumping type-in, bookmarks, and other forms of traffic together (often referred to altogether as “direct navigation”). Of course bookmarks convert extremely well, and that skews the numbers upward. As far as how well the type-in traffic converts, the jury’s still out.

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