Toys “R” Us Redirects Toys.com to Toysrus.com

Toys "R" Us Store Front (circa 1970)

The other day I saw a DomainNameWire post about Toys “R” Us redirecting its newly acquired domain, toys.com, and that toys.com had been “de-indexed” by Google. For those of you who have not heard the story, Toys “R” Us bought the Parent Company (eToys.com, BabyUniverse.com, ePregnancy.com) for ~$2 million. Then a couple of weeks later, Toys “R” Us paid $5.1 million for the toys.com domain, and now they are redirecting the entire toys.com domain and all of its URLs to the toysrus.com homepage. That’s right. Every toys.com URL is now pointing to the toysrus.com homepage. Was this a good move? Why did Toys “R” Us take this path with the toys.com domain? What are the SEO impacts of redirecting an entire site? Depending on your perspective, the answers to those questions can vary significantly. Let’s investigate some of the possible reasons behind this move (and maybe even some of the opportunities they missed by taking that route).

Obviously, the main goal was brand association.
Toys “R” Us wants to be the brand most associated with toys. For many of us, they have always been the top dog in the toys industry. Toys “R” Us has always been the first company I think of when I think of toys. FAO Schwarz is also up there, but let’s be honest: they are no Toys “R” Us. I mean, Toys “R” Us has like 600 stores in the US and 97,000 employees (thanks Wikipedia). Also making my unofficial best toy stores list is KB Toys. Oops. I have to remove them from the list because they got bought and liquidated in December 2008. With the demise of KB Toys, a giant void opened up in the brick-and-mortar store vertical. In terms of massive stores that have nothing but toys, Toys “R” Us and FAO Schwarz are the only big toy retailers left (well at least on my toy store list). In the end, Toys “R” Us rules the brick-and-mortar toy store roost. [Note: My apologies if I'm leaving out any other toy stores.]

Another goal of the domain acquisition: “free” direct navigation traffic.
Now that brick-and-mortar toy stores are going the way of the buffalo (not the dodo), toy companies must focus a lot of attention to the interwebs and intranets advertising. I imagine that the Toys “R” Us execs were drooling at the possibility of getting the highly-coveted, 4-letter domain toys.com. This would enable them to capitalize on all the direct traffic navigation to toys.com. I don’t know how many people are directly navigating to toys.com every day, but obviously Toys “R” Us wanted to route that traffic to toysrus.com. For those of you who may not know, the direct navigation industry is nothing to sneeze at. I applaud Toys “R” Us for outbidding everyone else for the toys.com domain. It’s a very aggressive move from an industry leader. Toys “R” Us is the  most identifiable toy store brand and they own the generic keyword domain that is most associated with their brand. There are tons of companies who wish they could say the same. Now, what should they do with the toys.com domain? [Note: I'm still waiting to see who buys toy.com. It's just being parked right now. What a shame.]

Toys “R” Us is obviously not a newcomer to the e-commerce game. The toysrus.com domain was registered in 1995, and they have had an online store since at least 1998. Furthermore, they have been running successful search marketing campaigns for years. As with any other company that’s been around for more than 50 years, Toys “R” Us has found out that the online world is full of aggressive, online-only e-commerce stores that know everything about utilizing all available channels and surviving online. Toys “R” Us is one of the few industry leaders that started early in the race to e-commerce websites, and they are a company that has succeeded in maintaining an online reputation that equals their top reputation in the brick-and-mortar world.

Awesome. But what about the redirects?
For the search term toys, Toys “R” Us is battling several well-knows toy brands and sites for the top spots in the organic rankings. Here are some of the other top 10 toy brands in the Google SERPs:

• toysrus.com
• etoys.com (owned by Toys “R” Us)
• toys.com (owned by Toys “R” Us, no longer ranking)
• lego.com
• walmart.com
• fisher-price.com
• amazon.com
• hasbro.com

There are certain times when the acquisition of a highly-coveted domain names like toys.com could really come in handy from the standpoint of expanding your exposure in the Google SERPs. Before the sale of toys.com to Toys “R” Us, toys.com was ranking #3 for the term toys in Google. Apparently, Toys “R” Us was not really concerned with (or maybe aware of) toys.com’s natural search rankings. After the purchase of eToys.com and Toys.com, Toys “R” Us owned 3 of the top 5 sites in the Google SERPs for the search term toys. For a generic search term like toys, having 3 of the top 5 sites is miraculous. But this scenario would not last long. At some point Toys “R” Us decided that it only needed to have 2 of the top 5 results.

Why did they redirect toys.com to toysrus.com?
Obviously I wasn’t in the room when Toys “R” Us decided to redirect the toys.com site to toysrus.com, but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that boardroom. I’m sure that a major point in the discussion was the increase in traffic and revenue to toysrus.com. If you redirect and entire site to toysrus.com, traffic and revenue will increase, and that will make everyone happy in the short run. The investment in a $5.1 million domain will have immediate returns. No questions about it. It’s a move that quickly impacts the bottom line. In today’s economy, who would argue against quick returns on a major investment?

On the other hand, I sincerely hope that someone brought up the nature of redirects to the upper management. I hope an SEO told them that Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major search engines would follow the redirects, and then toys.com would no longer rank in the SERPs. Major search engines would begin to drop the pages that have been redirected via a 310 permanent redirect. The toys.com URLs would not be de-listed/de-indexed because of some sort of unethical SEO practices. Rather, the URLs would be dropped because of the standard definition of a 301 permanent redirect: 301 redirects tell the search engines that the page no longer exists and has been moved. Knowing that the URL has permanently moved to another active URL, the search engines will only keep the destination URL in their respective indices. The search engines are just following the directions that the webmaster set up with the 301 redirects. I hope someone told them all of that because it seems important to know that the 301 redirect solution would cause your brand to lose an awesome piece of real estate in the Google SERPs. That is a lot of free traffic to turn down.

Maybe one of the most influential arguments for redirecting the toys.com domain centered around the increase in domain authority that comes from redirecting one domain to another with the use of 301 redirects. We all know that link juice is the most important factor for today’s search engine algorithms. Imagine if we could take a domain like toys.com and redirect all of its URLs (and all of their inbound links) to toysrus.com. That would definitely have a major impact on the link authority of toysrus.com. That would be awesome. It would be a great move that would reinforce and solidify the toysrus.com domain to insure top rankings in the future. In a world where links are only getting more expensive, another major benefit of buying a domain is that you can capitalize on its link juice.

A linkdomain: check on Yahoo reveals that the toys.com domain only has 713 inbound links. Uh oh. That’s not very many links. Consider that toysrus.com has 357,260 inbound links. Yeah. The link juice from toys.com is measured in drops rather than in gallons. Anyways, given the nature of this new information, I’m not necessarily on board with the decision to redirect toys.com to toysrus.com.

Did they have to choose that option?
I am not completely disagreeing with the decision because I do know that there are other factors involved. Because the toys.com/etoys.com acquisition was very public knowledge, Google knows that Toys “R” Us owns all three websites. How likely is it that Google would list 3 sites from the same company in the top 5 results for a highly competitive search term? It’s not very likely at all. Well, unless you have a badass SEO. And unless the 3 sites are unique and have relatively-unique content. Toysrus.com and eToys.com have managed to maintain a unique focus. How could they then build out toys.com to be another toy-based site that can distinguish itself from the other 2 sites? Sounds impossible. Not really.

Maybe money became an issue. It’s a rough economy. Site development, marketing, advertising, hiring people, building a new site, asking for bailout money – all of these things cost money. With so much focus on the bottom line and with so many companies cutting budgets in 2009, perhaps this entire decision came down to money. At least I hope that’s what happened because I know of several SEOs that could have come up with a solid idea that could turn toys.com a site that drives a ton of traffic and money while offering a unique focus and maintaining a top 5 result in the Google SERPs. I mean, seriously. A shopping engine. A blog. A review site. Something. Anything is better than redirecting an entire site to one URL! I’m glad they mainly used 301 redirects (I have seen a lot of pages with 302 redirects still in Google’s index), but at least they could have matched up related product and category URLs from toys.com to toysrus.com. There are likely several achievable business models for the toys.com domain that could provide more visibility and profit for Toys “R” Us, but it’s obviously not in the cards right now.

What Now?
In the end, Toys “R” Us made an aggressive move that will drive brand recognition and brand association. They made a move that will deliver a lot of direct navigation traffic. They made a decision that will result in some link juice and link authority being transferred to toysrus.com. There’s probably some other stuff that they’ll get out of it, but this blog post is already too long. I don’t think it was a terrible decision. It’s not going to bankrupt the company. However, there are some huge opportunity costs. A top organic ranking is one. Organic search traffic is another. Revenue is another. Oh well. Good luck, Toys “R” Us. I wish you the best in 2009.

Link Rules Hyrule, Links Rule Google SERPs

The Legend of Zelda was awesome! I remember opening it on Christmas Day back in 1987. It had a shiny golden box, and then the game itself was a brilliant, glowing masterpiece of golden plastic. Just take a look:

The Legend of Zelda golden cartridge

I had never seen anything like this. It was like opening up a golden ticket, but rather than a fattening journey through a chocolate empire, this golden ticket delivered instant access to the magical land of of Hyrule. For me, the greatest thing about this game was that it opened up my imagination like no other video game had ever done. I was used to games that only moved right-to-left or down-to-up, and those games made following the steps from beginning to end fairly simple. The Legend of Zelda was the first game where I remember getting involved in the story. I wasn’t riding Falcor and chasing the Nothing, but it was the first video game I ever played where I could not take things for granted. I remember wandering around forever looking for a certain level, and I ended up finding it by blowing up the side of a mountain on the other side of a stream. It’s as if the video game was teaching me to open up the boundaries of my mind. Secret passages in the mountain. Secret passages underneath tombstones. It was amazing to me. After all, Zelda was probably the 3rd or 4th Nintendo game I owned, and I never had more than 10 games. Regardless, I was still used to Atari games that placed playability and functionality over imagination and plot. [Note: Back in 1987, Nintendo games were like $60, and that was a lot of money back then. That still is a lot of money, but it seems like a crapload of money in 1987. Looking back, I'm surprised my parents even bought me 10 games through the years.]

Link battles in Level 1 of The Legend of Zelda

Another awesome facet of The Legend of Zelda was the fact that the main character was a little dude named Link. He starts off as just a regular boy, but through trials and tribulations he becomes a hero. Like any other 8-year-old boy, it was easy for me to imagine that I was Link, the hero of Hyrule. And as it was a game that considerably expanded my imagination, it quickly became a world that I could escape to. I mean, sure, homework and soccer practice were fun, but I could not wait to get home and turn on my Zelda game. I got to be a hero in a magical world where I could explore the limitless wonder that was Hyrule. Unlike other Nintendo games, I wasn’t forced to go one way. I could choose my own path. I could go left, right, up or down. I got to navigate the entire realm. And I got to defeat Ganon, the Prince of Darkness, and save Princess Zelda. For me, it was an adventure that I would not find in any other 8-bit game. [Note: I played several other RPGs, like Ultima, Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Perhaps I liked Zelda so much because for me it was the original. I guess I'm just sentimental or something.]

Ok. That’s good and all, but why am I talking about The Legend of Zelda on an SEO blog? That’s a good question. Let’s see if I can provide an answer that makes any sense.

I am an SEO to the core.  My being exudes a nerdy internet search aura. I eat, sleep and breath SEO. It’s not all I think about. There are a few hours each week when I watch Lost, 24 and House. Most of the time I’m thinking about SEO. While I’m thinking about SEO, I often notice similarities between SEO and seemingly-unrelated things in life (you might have noticed this fact from my posts about Walter Sobchak, Frogger and Grimlock). And since I’m nostalgic, I’m often thinking of events from my childhood. Today I was thinking about link building, and I pondered the future of SEO and the power of links. And then it hit me: Links are the undeniable rulers of organic search realm that is Google. And because I am a search marketer, when I think of the plural (links), I also start thinking of the singular (link).It’s like an SEO reflex or something! [Note: Link is the main character in The Legend of Zelda.]

Link defeats Ganon in his Death Mountain lair

As it turns out, The Legend of Zelda is a great metaphor for search engine optimization. Don’t believe me? Well check this out. Here’s how the Zelda characters would match up with important SEO concepts:

• Hyrule = Google SERPs
  Hyrule is a magical land that requires a lot of time to navigate and explore. Much like the Google SERPs, you won’t master Hyrule on the first day. Diligence and hard work is needed to master this landscape, which is highly varied and constantly changing (like the Google SERPs).
• Ganon, the Prince of Darkness = PageRank, Google’s Natural Search Algorithm
  Ganon is a badass. The first time you set foot in his lair, trepidation sets in. It’s a feeling like the one you get when you first set foot into the world of SEO. After the first step, you realize the size and scope of the SEO world. It’s intimidating and scary, but you will eventually learn to master many aspects of the game.
• Princess Zelda = #1 ranking in Google
  Until you defeat Ganon and get some top rankings for your clients, peace will not exist in your SEO world. Or in Hyrule. When you achieve a #1 ranking in Google, it’s a lot like rescuing the Princess from the grips of Ganon. All your hard work and long hours finally paid off, and everyone is cheering for you. If only Google had a “Congratulations, you’re #1″ screen to celebrate your success. That would be cool.

Link rescues Princess Zelda

• Triforce of Power = Basic SEO Principles
  The story of Hyrule is cool. Ganon and his army steals the Triforce of Power, an artifact that bestows amazing strength. Princess Zelda takes one of the pieces, breaks it into 8 pieces and scatters throughout Hyrule’s secret dungeons. In order to defeat Ganon and rescue the Princess, Link has to find and reassemble those 8 pieces. Those 8 pieces remind me of the most basic SEO strategies. In order to win at SEO, you must have these 8 elements optimized: title tags, meta tags, keyword tags, H tags, Alt tags, Link title attributes, internal navigation, sitemaps.
• Link = Text Links
  Link was created to eventually defeat Ganon. It was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. No matter how many times the game changes, Link will find a way to rule Hyrule. The same thing goes for text links in the realm of SEO. We know that there over 200 signals that PageRank uses to determine rankings, but in the end, text links rule the world of Google SERPs.

Finally, Peace Returns to Hyrule.

Despite the message in the final screen, I never once believed that the story had ended. Now, go forth and prosper in your SEO realm. Whether it be ringtones, phentermine or gambling, I wish you luck in your endeavors.

Twitter Squatting: How to Avoid Suspended Accounts

Okay. I have a confession to make. I have taken part in Twitter Squatting. For those of you not familiar with squatting, let’s go to our friends at Wikipedia for a definition. According to Wikipedia:

Squatting is the act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use.

People have been squatting on internet domains since the beginning of the internet. There is awesome money in this industry. For example, toys.com just sold for $5.1 million. eToys.com had that domain since the late 1990s, but they were just redirecting it to etoys.com. I guess eToys.com decided that it could raise some capital by selling toys.com. And it turns out that Toys R Us and domain holding company National A-1 started a bidding war for this domain. $5.1 million later, Toys R Us now owns this awesome, 4-letter, generic keyword domain that is most associated with their brand. But wait. There are more of these domains being parked right now. Just take a look at www.kbtoys.com. It’s parked, and I’m sure those domainers are just waiting for the right time to sell. Or they are making money from direct navigation ad revenue. [That industry is a huge industry right now. Apparently, direct navigation is a popular form of internet surfing. If someone directly navigates to toys.com, they are easily a pre-qualified visitor, and I bet you can guess what they are looking for. So there has gotta be money in that industry. But I digress...]

How does all of this relate to Twitter? Well, let me tell you that right now there are a lot of major brands running to Twitter to open accounts. (Personally I believe that this trend was motivated by John Stewart’s Twitter bit on the Daily Show and politicians tweeting during Obama’s first Presidential Address to the nation.) If major brands are flocking to Twitter, you can be certain that most Twitter URLs are already snatched up. Or are they? Typically, major brands are always late to the game when it comes to internet happenings. According to some recent numbers I saw on the web, Twitter has over 6 million members. Surely there are some internet savvy domainers who have acquired some awesome brand names and generic keyword URLs on Twitter. Even though twitter launched nearly 2 years ago, there is a good chance that there are a lot of great usernames and URLs still available.

Valuable Twitter Account: twitter.com/apple

Here is a screenshot of the apple username on Twitter. It’s suspicious. 360 followers. Following zero. Bio: apple dot twitter @gmail dot com. That looks like someone wants some money. There are definitely some awesome URLs that are being squatted on. Perhaps these brands have great marketing experts who rushed to Twitter to grab a username, or perhaps someone beat them to the punch. While I can’t definitively say whether or not these URLs belong to the respective brands, here are some mostly-vacant Twitter accounts that appear to be owned by someone other than a brand representative. These are extremely valuable URLs:

• http://twitter.com/apple
• http://twitter.com/coke
• http://twitter.com/nike
• http://twitter.com/microsoft
• http://twitter.com/toyota

Like all SEOs out there, I have a niche on the internet. I won’t tell you what it is, but I will tell you that I recently got into Twitter squatting. I mean, c’mon. There has been more Twitter hype in the past week than anything I can remember in the past few years. Some people are even saying that Twitter will become a search engine that could rival Google. For the record, I’m still very skeptical at the future of Twitter as a search engine or even as a marketing tool because I know that a lot brands are scaling back and cutting costs in this economy. I’m not entirely certain that major brands will hire anyone to manage their Twitter account. And I’m not sure that SEM agencies know how to manage Twitter accounts. However, I do think that Twitter will become a valuable place of instant, real-time reviews. If brands don’t have Twitter accounts, they should at least pay attention to what’s being said about them and/or their products on Twitter.

Twitter Suspended Account Picture

Anyways, I went at this squatting process very haphazardly. And I paid the price for it: Suspended Accounts. In my efforts, I learned some stuff that you might be able to benefit from. Here are some tips for avoiding account suspension on Twitter:

1. Email Address Option
   • Fake Email Addresses
     Twitter doesn’t send email validations at this point. When you sign up for an account, all they do is send you a message that says something like “Welcoming you to Twitter.” This means that you could sign up for accounts with fake email addresses. For example, if signing up for twitter.com/ford, why not tell them your email address is twitter@ford.com? Perhaps this would make your account look more official. The downside to this is that you’d have no way of checking the email address. If someone wanted to purchase the URL, they would have to contact you through Twitter. And that’s probably how they’d get reach of you anyway. Or you could post your real email addy on the page (like the twitter.com/apple person does). Either way, this option may look more valid if a Twitter employee started digging into your account, but this method could get hairy if Twitter started sending out email validation messages.
   • Using a + in your actual email address.
     My recommendation is to use a unique email address if you can. However, if you are squatting on 100 Twitter URLs, it can be real hassle creating all those email addresses and then checking them. Another awesome alternative is to use 1 email address for every account. How do you do that? It sounds too good to be true. It’s actually simple. Let’s say you sign up with your main email address. For this example, let’s say your email address is cavemangrorg@gmail.com, and you already have a Twitter account at that email address. For your next Twitter account (let’s say it’s going to be twitter.com/apple), sign up for this account with this email address: cavemangrorg+apple@gmail.com. You will get a Twitter email sent to your cavemangrorg@gmail.com account. It’s awesome. It may not last too much longer, but it works now. If you can keep track of all your squatted Twitter accounts, this method will allow you to keep all your Twitter emails consolidated in one mailbox. I recommend gmail.
2. Immediately update your profile and post a tweet.
   I have a Twitter account (twitter.com/yourseosucks). I signed up for it one day. The next day I came back to update it with a new icon picture, and my account was suspended. I had no intention of doing anything unethical with my account. I’m not spamming. I’m not trying to game the system. I’m not trying to make money with this account in any way. I have zero followers. I’m not following anyone yet. I don’t even have an outbound link on my profile. I’ve even seen other accounts with the word sucks in the URL, and they haven’t been suspended (proof). But something triggered a red flag in the Twitter algorithm for my account. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It wasn’t like I was posing as the Dalia Lama. At any rate, maybe this post is my revenge. After this post I’m not counting on regaining access to my Twitter account. Regardless, I believe that there are a lot of people out there who are starting to squat on Twitter URLs. And these people are being suspended rather quickly. From some simple research, conducted by direct navigation, it’s easy to find suspended accounts. For example, these accounts have all been suspended:
   • http://twitter.com/nikeshoes
   • http://twitter.com/newyorkcity
   • http://twitter.com/videogames
   • http://twitter.com/airlines
   • http://twitter.com/viagra

   Now, I don’t know if those accounts were ever being used as legitimate Twitter profiles. It could be that those accounts were being updated on a regular basis, and they were flagged by mistake. However, given their respective popularity in terms of keywords, I suspect that at least a few of them were being squatted on. I have signed up for several Twitter accounts with valuable keywords, and over half of them have been suspended. One thing that I noticed was: accounts where I updated all the profile information and posted a tweet were not suspended. None. I can’t say that it happens that way all the time, but I do recommend updating your profile, adding a picture and posting a tweet when you first sign up for the account.

3. Tweet Frequency
   The truth is that I have no idea how often you’re supposed to tweet in order to avoid suspension. If you are tweeting simply to avoid a suspended account, you’re probably not using Twitter as it was intended to be used. (BTW, we’d probably be friends.) But here’s the deal: If you are squatting on several accounts, it can be a real hassle to sign in and out to multiple accounts every day. But it’s all good because of an app called Twhirl. This desktop app enables you to sign in to multiple accounts and keep them active on your desktop. If you have the privilege of sitting at a computer all day long, it’s very easy to just open the window once a day and type something. Twhirl is kinda like an instant messenger interface for Twitter. I totally recommend it. You should definitely be updating your profile once a day. But you if you want to take your chances and not update your account very often, I won’t argue with you, as there are several accounts that have not been suspended despite zero updates (proof, proof, proof).
   
4. Follow and Be Followed, but watch your Followers-to-Following Ratio
   Have you ever seen Rand’s Twitter account? He has 5,000+ followers, but he only follows 11 people. (It’s very well documented by the Oilman.) Rand’s followers:following ratio is very imbalanced (like Fox news). I’m sure Rand gets tons of love from the Twitter founders, so his account is not in any danger of being suspended. But if you are squatting on an account and happen to get some followers, you may consider following some people in order to keep that ratio looking natural. In the end, a legitimate Twitter account will have >0 following and >0 followers. Just keep it looking natural.
5. Don’t get too big too quickly
   That’s what she said? Twitter is not a race to see who can have the most followers. Just like myspace friend bots, there are bots running all through Twitter, helping people build their follower numbers. Just like anything else in SEO, I prefer organic growth. Make it look natural. If you set up and account and then you get 300 followers in the first day, you’ll probably be flagged for something. Keep it natural. Keep it organic. [Note: If you do happen to start getting a lot of followers because you just happen to grab a highly-coveted username for a major brand, you may consider making some legitimate, brand-relevant posts. You're not necessarily trying to pose as the brand, but the last thing you need is followers starting to block you. Don't do anything that will look like actual spam. Users will block you, and enough blocks can cause flags to go up.]
6. Creating Hundreds of Accounts? Use a Proxy.
   Remember: the guys who started Twitter also started Blogger. If they know anything about spam, they know how to recognize massive account creation from the same IP address. Get a reliable proxy. And don’t ask me for proxy lists. I don’t know anything about that. ;)
7. Don’t Even Try to Impersonate People. It’s probably not very profitable.
   At one point, I got a great idea: I’ll snap up some usernames of famous dead people. And then I didn’t follow any of the recommendations mentioned in this post, so all my accounts got suspended. I thought it would be really fun to have a twitter account for a famous, polarizing athlete, musician or public figure. However, after thinking about it further, there’s probably nothing that will get you suspended quicker than trying to impersonate someone. Granted, a dead guy/girl is probably not going to contact twitter, but his/her estate might. In the end, if you’re trying to impersonate someone, just be prepared to lose everything without warning. Which is more likely to happen: a person pays you for the account or a person contacts twitter about your account and your account gets suspended? Also, I don’t believe impersonation is worth the effort in terms of money. I mean, I guess the guy who got gandhi could make some money if he ever updated it. Maybe he could sell some links to fasting websites. Or the jimihendrix account could have some links to Fender guitars. I dunno. In the end, if you can create a good following, I guess anything is profitable. But in terms of squatting, you’re better off grabbing brand names and generic keywords that will attract money from brands, ecommerce sites or companies who just want more web exposure with an easy-to-remember URL.
8. Don’t link to or follow spam accounts
   Just like SEO in the good ol’ days, you don’t want to be following accounts that are part of a “bad neighborhood.” It’s pretty easy to tell whether or not an account is a legitimate account. Just do some checking before you follow someone. Also, check on some of the people who are following you. The last thing you need is to be classified as a member of a ring of suspicious or suspended accounts.
9. Familiarize Yourself with the Twitter Suspended Accounts Criteria
   This page is very informative. Read it. I had to learn a lot of these lessons before I found this page. If you can’t follow link, here are the main bullet points from that page at Twitter. Here are several reasons why your account might be suspended:
   • unauthorized scripting of the site
   • unauthorized serial account creation
   • unauthorized mass account creation
   • user name squatting
   • account contains links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
   • an account is identified as belonging to a group of spam accounts
   • a large number of people block the profile in question
   • a large number of people write in with spam complaints for a specific profile
   • aggressive following (a large number of people are followed in a short amount of time)
   • extremely imbalanced follower/following ratio
   • updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text
   • updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
   • links in updates disguise the real content of a link given in a misleading or deceptive way.
   • unauthorized “re-tweets” (poaching and posting other users’ updates) passed off as original content*
   • Copyright Infringement (To file a complaint, see our copyright infringement procedure here.)
   • Impersonation
   • Violence and/or specific threats
   • Unlawful use
   • Privacy infringement
   • Trademark Infringement

   Some of this stuff frightens me. Copyright Infringement? Does that mean I can’t hold a brandname hostage on Twitter. If I scored a major brand name, can that brand bully me into giving it up? That would suck. User name squatting? That’s the whole purpose of this post. I can’t believe it’s frowned upon. Damn.

There you have it. I pretty much listed the Twitter guidelines. Oh well. If I was awesome at lists, I’d have to round this list out at 10. But I think 9 is a good number. Last week was 3/3/09. So maybe this is my tribute to Square Root Day. Or maybe not. Either way, happy twitter squatting.

And just because I’ve been hearing about someone buying Twitter, I thought I’d post this picture of the Twitter Whale (aka the Fail Whale). Maybe if someone bought Twitter, they could afford some better servers. Just saying is all.

Twitter is Over Capacity: The Twitter Fail Whale

Twitter Co-Founder, Evan Williams, Goes to the White House

Apparently, the White House has invited a bunch of young business leaders. Twitter’s co-founder, Evan Williams, was one of those people invited to discuss the current economic crisis. Evan Williams has tons of money. He worked at Google before the PPO, and he sold Blogger to Google. I don’t even think that Twitter is making any money right now in the US. This article says that they make some money on ads in Japan. But who would turn down a trip to the White House? Not the Twitter guys. From’s Evan’s Twitter account: “must mean they’re *really* out of ideas.” More here.

Did You Know: Search Edition

Did you know that YouTube gets more searches than Yahoo? proof

Did you know that Twitter rejected a $500 million dollar offer from Facebook? proof

Did you know that Greg Boser is credited with coining the term ‘link juice’? proof

And remember if it’s on the internet, it’s must be true.

Firefox 3 > Internet Explorer 6

Just in from Statcounter:

Statcounter Stats: Firefox 3 soars past Internet Explorer 6

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Netbook vs. Notebook: Is There a New Sheriff in Keywordville?

We all know that a laptop is a laptop. However, in the wide world of search, you can’t just focus on ranking for laptop. Why? For one, good luck ranking for laptop. The competition is superduper competitive for that term. Next, you’ll probably want to rank for laptops. Again, good luck. Don’t get me wrong. You should definitely optimize your site for those terms. I just don’t want you getting your hopes up. Even in a time of hope and change, I wouldn’t get caught up in hoping that your rankings change so much that you’ll be swimming in $100 bills. It’s just not likely you’ll be able to rank in the top 10 for laptop. But imagine if you could. There are a lot of searches for that term.

Google Keyword Data: Laptop, Notebook, Netbook

Where does that leave us? We must focus on some other generic keywords that also drive a lot of laptop-related traffic. Let’s check out synonyms for laptop. Notebook! Many people refer to their laptop as a notebook, so we definitely need to target the term notebook. Up until a few years ago, that was the main choice as an alternative to laptop. Well guess what. There’s a new keyword on the move: netbook. Just take a look at these historical trends, courtesy of Google Trends:

Google Trends Stats (US) for laptop, notebook, netbook

While the United States search volume has seen a tremendous increase for the term netbook, the News reference volume has been even more dramatic. In the news realm, the term netbook has already passed the volume for notebook, and it looks like netbook and laptop are currently in a dead heat. Where did all of this come from? In Q4 2007 the term netbook appears out of nowhere, and then a year later it’s off to the races. Perhaps a look into the history of netbooks is needed. Or perhaps not. Or perhaps we can borrow a summary from our friends at Wikipedia:

A netbook (a portmanteau of Internet and notebook) is a class of laptop computer designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet.

Primarily designed for web browsing and e-mailing, netbooks rely heavily on the Internet for remote access to web-based applications and are targeted increasingly at cloud computing users who require a less powerful client computer. Netbooks typically run either Linux or Windows XP operating systems rather than more resource-intensive operating systems like Windows Vista or Mac OS X. The devices range in size from below 5 inches to over 13, typically weigh 2 to 3 pounds (~1 kg) and are often significantly cheaper than general purpose laptops.

Netbooks represent a greener alternative to larger laptops due to lower power demands, fewer toxic components, and a resource-efficient approach to computing and some models have achieved EPEAT gold and silver ratings.

The Wikipedia entry goes on about the history of the netbook, from Psion’s line of Netbooks to the One Laptop Per Child project to the Palm Foleo. But the real change in netbook-related search volume came in 2007 when Asus released the ASUS Eee PC. And it wasn’t only ASUS. Everybody had to play catch up and copycat. Following the ASUS EeePC, Everex came out with the CloudBook, MSI developed the Wind, Dell released the Inspiron Mini, HP put out the HP Mini, and many other similar models were on the assembly line for production.

In early 2008, Intel announced that it would be quitting the One Laptop Per Child program, but that didn’t impact search. In fact, in early 2008 the search volume trend for netbook really started to rise. Why might this be? There’s probably many more verifiable and accurate reasons than this one I’m about to throw out there, but I’m going to start with the US economy in 2008. Netbooks are inexpensive, small, underpowered laptops. The key word (no pun intended) in that list is inexpensive. Netbooks average about $350. And just in case you think this post is too long and off base, just check out this link. Today on Amazon, the top 3 bestsellers in Computers & PC Hardware are netbook computers. And there are all under $375. Don’t believe me? Here’s the screenshot:

Amazon Bestsellers: Computers & PC Hardware

There you have it. Netbooks are cheap. They are lightweight. They don’t have a lot of the unnecessary bells and whistles that 99% of people will never use. Netbooks are perfect for people who just want to surf the web and check email. In the next few years, netbooks will make it easier for more and more people to get online, and it’s only natural that many of the major companies get involved in the netbook market. Already there are several models from brands such as Acer, Lenovo, Samsung, MSI, Sylvania, Toshiba, ASUS, HP and Dell.

Google Trends: netbook and netbooks

Lastly, here is a look at the terms netbook and notebook vs. the plurals. For those of you wondering, the term netbook has already passed notebooks in terms of search volume. This is another sign that netbook term is only going to become increasingly competitive. If you are running an SEO campaign for a company selling laptops, notebooks and netbooks, I hope you consider placing a lot of focus on netbook-related terms. You are not on the ground floor of ranking for netbooks, but the good news is that you still have a good shot at setting up your site for great netbook-related rankings in the future.