Miscellany

How’s This for a Domain-name Fail by Yahoo and MSFT?

March 30, 2012

Discovered this while writing my latest Search Engine Land article:

Back in 2009, when Yahoo and Microsoft announced their big search deal — where Bing results would power Yahoo search — both companies created a special website just for the occasion: www.choicevalueinnovation.com. Both Bing’s blog post and Yahoo’s blog post linked to it. Here’s the link at the end of ex-Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s post:

bartz-post

Get this: That domain now belongs to Press Control Services, an electrical manufacturing company in Lewisville, Texas!

I don’t know how or when they managed to score that domain, but can you imagine how many inbound links it has due to the Yahoo/MSFT history?? Wow. Talk about some good old-fashioned SEO. Well played, folks. Well played.

pcs-home

5 Comments

  • Reply Alan Bleiweiss March 30, 2012 at 1:05 pm

    Matt,

    Until today, I’ve always, without fail, found your insights and observations to be hugely valuable for our industry. This one however, is not in that class.

    Without having full access to such data, I checked OSE and Google’s link: – OSE shows 497 inbound links, and Google 18. There could very well be many more, however it’s doubtful there’d be exponentially more given how long ago that announcement came out.

    Then there’s the reality that any original links would now point to a small (18 page) site that has zero relevance to the content linking to it, thus negating the overwhelming perceived benefit that inbound links provide to an acquired aged site.

    Finally, given that the site is now entirely rewritten, on a completely different topical focus than its original form, any remaining perceived value from buying an aged domain is thus gone forever.

    So exactly how is this such a big win for a small Texas company?

    • Reply Matt March 30, 2012 at 1:08 pm

      OMG, Alan, am I not allowed to have fun on my personal blog? There’s a reason I didn’t post this on my SEO blog, okay? Jeez. Relax a bit and enjoy things.

  • Reply Alan Bleiweiss March 30, 2012 at 1:28 pm

    sorry – didn’t know it was in fun. the title implied otherwise, at least to my limited perspective

  • Reply Dan March 30, 2012 at 2:03 pm

    Alan, OSE shows 492 linking domains to this domain. They rank #2 for press control, a term that gets 1,900 exact searches in Google each month. They are highly ranked for a variety of related searches. The Whois shows the last update occurred last May, so 10 months after the ownership apparently changed (and the site’s content) it is still doing just fine. Toolbar PageRank is 4 as well. How is this a big win for a small Texas company? Well, they got this write up, didn’t they? And you can’t ignore that juicy link with the great anchor text in the blog post there. Add to that the fact they have great rankings and I would say in spite of intuition saying this domain should have lost some value, it apparently hasn’t.

  • Reply Justin March 31, 2012 at 11:10 am

    Matt, I got a kick out of this =) Interesting little read I definitely wouldn’t have found otherwise.

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